Variety CEO Michelle Sobrino-Stearns on running Hollywood’s venerable trade brand

It’s been an unruly period in the world of Hollywood’s trade press.

Back in the pre-digital world, well-stocked newsstands from Santa Monica to Pasadena served as magnets for the industry to scoop up daily print publications that functioned as dishy vessels for industry news.?

Variety was a massive brand in this ecosphere. For insiders, the weekday publication was a lively industry bible teeming with key news nuggets for the town that informed and stroked the egos of key players. For outsiders, once you embraced the bespoke writing style — boffo box office be damned! — Variety was an entertaining portal inside of Tinsel Town. Then came the internet. And, well, you know the rest of the story. Or maybe you don’t.

Variety still has a print magazine. It’s not daily, natch, but the weekly edition remains relatively robust in comparison to other print publications. The company’s burgeoning events business has also grown voraciously of late, and its website logs very solid numbers.

But when you’re examining Variety, it’s impossible not to discuss its parent company, Penske Media Corporation. The group, helmed by entrepreneur Jay Penske, purchased Variety in 2012 and has inexplicably acquired a cluster of its competitors (think The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard) — along with the companies that run many of the industry events that it covers (the Golden Globes and South by Southwest).???

Penske also instituted an unorthodox management infrastructure on Variety’s editorial side upon acquiring the publication, installing an editor-in-chief triumvirate, with three managers (Claudia Eller, Cynthia Littleton and Andrew Wallenstein) running the title at the same time.

Navigating all of this was Michelle Sobrino-Stearns. The industry veteran has been at Variety for a startling 28 years. She joined in its halcyon days where the publication had arguably its most clout. It was the time of seminal figures such as Peter Bart, but also a time when female leaders were treated as curios.

As publisher, Sobrino-Stearns managed the business side, not the editorial. But in 2021, she was promoted to CEO, which meant that the editorial did indeed report to her.

In her time at Variety, she has been a key player in attempting to usher in a modern, diverse workforce and workplace. Today, two editors-in-chief report to her, Littleton and Ramin Setoodeh. Littleton and Eller were the first two women to hold that title.?

“When I joined Variety, it was mainly run by men,” she says. “There were some strong women there that I'm still very close to…But I think women had to be very tough and very strong back then. We still do. Cynthia and Claudia are incredible leaders, journalists and editors. All the success in terms of growth I credit to them. But the entire newsroom has diversified. We have a lot of strong women working here and a very young team now. We're turning 120, but we're looking for another 120 successful years. That’s really about the future of the brand.”

The story of her own climb to the top at Variety is a fascinating one. Here in her own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Sobrino-Stearns takes us through her career journey and her rise to the top at the entertainment media brand.?

I was obsessed with magazines growing up and my dream was to work at one. I didn't know what that meant. My parents are from South America and I’m a first generation American. I had no connections whatsoever to anyone in the media. But I was fluent in Spanish — it's my first language. I landed a job at an ad agency working in the US Hispanic market. You had to be bilingual to get the job.

At the agency, we bought television and media space. But we also received magazines, including all the beautiful glossy magazines I was obsessed with growing up. But there was this one strange magazine that would come… It looked like a newspaper. It was called Variety. I didn't understand why everyone would always take it and read it because I thought, well, it's not so attractive. I asked the head of our department at the time, ‘what is it about this magazine?’ And she said Variety is the Bible of the Entertainment Industry. I became obsessed with it.

The next ad agency job I took happened to be, ironically, located in the same building as Variety’s offices. A sales rep from Variety would always greet me in the elevator. I was a cinephile and so I made a joke to him. I said, ‘hey, you know, if there's ever an opening up Variety, I would love to work there.’ Three months later, they called: There was a very junior position available on the sales side. I got the job. It was less money, but this was (my) opportunity to just go for it.

When I started, I worked seven days a week. I didn’t know the industry like the rest of these folks, but I wanted to learn it inside and out. My first day at Variety I noticed a journalist who sat on the same floor as us. He didn't get a breaking news story, and he was screaming at somebody for not getting it. Somebody else was screaming about earnings and, I know it sounds crazy, but there was this chaotic magic to the place that I fell in love with. I'd been looking for this energy in a career path. And I'm not kidding, since the day I arrived, I have thought I have the greatest job on earth. I still feel that way.

Not long after starting at Variety, I realized the potential of the Latin marketplace in Miami. Nobody was selling it at Variety. So, I built a business plan and eventually took a role in Miami and it became my marketplace. All my meetings were conducted in Spanish. I had the time of my life. As I slowly started exceeding forecasts, my bosses started handing me more responsibility and I rose through the ranks. I eventually became the Associate Publisher.??

I was part of the team that led the Variety sale in 2012 to Jay Penske. Jay liked my vision for Variety and invested heavily in it and promoted me to publisher. I was the first woman — and Latina — in the history of Variety to become publisher, which I was very proud of. But I was also nervous. I had been handed the keys to the kingdom I adored so much. Jay was saying, let's invest in journalism, let's invest in great content. And he taught me how to kind of re-invent Variety and make it what it is today.?

When Penske took over Variety, we published Daily Variety in print, Monday through Friday. We also published a weekly Variety. Our website had very low traffic. We had some events and a few summits. Part of my proposal was to stop publishing Daily Variety and continue publishing Variety as a weekly, which we’re celebrating 120 years of our magazine next year. It was first published in 1905. We invested heavily in the weekly. We now also publish awards magazines during the season, and on the ground at film festivals. And we've been able to really grow digital without having to post salacious content. We also have a series called ‘Actors on Actors,’ and our television series on PBS. It’s a huge print, digital and social execution.

The key for me in this role is to stay out of the newsroom. Once you cross the line, your business will plummet, and I think the industry will know. It's a dangerous line to cross. Our team knows it's church and state. I see myself on the editorial side as nothing more than an operational manager — fighting for resources and helping our two EICs with anything they need. At the end of the day, there is no involvement whatsoever from the business side in editorial or editorial on the business side.?

We were the first to publish stories about the timing of standing ovations at film festivals and, as silly as it may seem, it's not. This is about the love of cinema, this is about a communal experience, this is film festivals, right? So, this is the celebration of the arts, and an appreciation. It's a beautiful experience to watch a film with hundreds, if not thousands of people, especially at a film festival. We want to let people feel like they're in the room, you know, and experiencing it themselves and we want people to then go see those films.

Events have been a big focus for Variety. This year, we will produce nearly 90 around the world. We have a very large events marketing team. We try to host industry events that bring awareness to the audience or work as a platform. So we have the ‘Power Of’ series, for example, The Power of Women and Power of Young Hollywood. That's based on people in the industry using their influence to do good in the world, and using your influence to have an impact. It's really a philanthropic focus. And then there's the more B2B focus: entertainment attorneys, business managers, the below-the-line community. And then we do events for filmmakers, helping them get their stories out — whether they're independent filmmakers or in a larger studio — talking about the craft of the film so that you see it from a different lens. We also do events with screenwriters.?

We were one of the first entertainment trade brands to be very active on TikTok. We have a very young marketing and editorial team who said, ‘we want to do this.’ The content is phenomenal. ‘Actors on Actors’ does incredibly well for us on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but it also airs on PBS. And the reason why we partner with PBS is because we also know that Oscar voters watch PBS. It's an important platform for them. So we're appealing to everyone.

How does the Penske portfolio — the Golden Globes, South by Southwest, The Hollywood Reporter or Billboard — compete against us from inside the same umbrella of businesses? It's a great question and I get asked this a lot. We are completely, 100% independent of all the brands in the portfolio. So, for example, South by Southwest, we've been doing business with South by Southwest. We obviously don't do any business or any collaborations with any of our competitors within the portfolio. In fact, we're incredibly competitive with those brands. And you know, the Golden Globes, we've been doing coverage on the Golden Globes since the day the Golden Globes were launched.

What about the competing trade pubs under the Penske umbrella? Yeah, they're competitors anyway. We have many competitors outside of our portfolio. Our team is constantly competing. The beauty of being Variety though, is we offer a platform that others don't have — many just have a digital platform. We have a very rich live media business, very strong video and print. We can compete at a level that others can't. And I can say, we are deeply competitive with everyone in and outside these walls.

There are two things I love: to win and to be number one. And to do that, as a company, I think it is critical to constantly diversify the business. You know, take risks. Invest in new kinds of coverage, whether it's AI or, say, music events, which stemmed from us building a very strong music team a few years back. We're a legacy brand, but it only means something if it still means something to the industry. And that’s what keeps me excited.

What sort of manager am I? I'm not a micromanager. We hire great people who love what they do. The advantage of being in a position for as long as I have, especially with people who have worked here a very long time, is you get to know what's critical to understanding and knowing them. You must know what moves them, what excites them, what makes them want to work harder and smarter and how to get the best out of people. So, for me, at least, it's critical to get to know and understand my team. I want to make sure everyone here doesn't have 100 direct reports because I want managers to really get to know their staff and meet them where they need to be met. At the end of the day, I want everyone to work here for over 20 years.?

It's a tough time in Hollywood at the moment. There was a lot of panic over the election. And there’s also been a lot of geopolitical issues going on… I think there's a lot of anxiety. The studios are laying people off in droves. It's a very, very challenging time in our business. I can talk about that for forever in terms of how the business has changed. And we're a reflection of the industry. But this environment is also precisely why it's critical for us to diversify our business and invest in things like gaming and music journalism and look at the B2B business.?

What's the mood of the town now? If we get very specific and very local, the mood of the town in California is that we're suffering in terms of lack of production. So much production is moving out of our state. But looking at production as a whole, we lost production to other states with better tax incentives, but then those states are now losing production to other countries offering incentives, and selling the studios and streamers on avoiding using union labor. So now this gets a little murkier and a little more concerning. California is trying to pass a tax incentive law. We need it. We need to do a lot more. The US in general needs to do a lot more to keep production here.

I am relatively more positive about the next year and especially 2026. I do think things are going to get better. Content in general will be better… We're dealing with post-pandemic and post-strikes so we're in this game of catch-up. This is a fun business. We get to report on the industry, we get to produce events at film festivals and in Los Angeles and New York. It's a dream job, right? So, we must make sure we understand our staff and what moves them. The other part is we're very creative. I just sat in a two-hour brainstorming meeting where everyone on staff came with ideas for the business. Like, what do they think we should be doing? What would they like to see launched next year? We want to make sure that everything is on brand for us. But we also give anyone in the room an opportunity to come up with an idea and have us execute.