New ‘Traffic Cop’ to Direct Daily, Weekly Variety

Peter Bart, the controversial editor of Cahners Publishing Co.’s New York-based weekly Variety, was named to an additional post giving him editorial control of Daily Variety in Los Angeles.

The surprise move follows years of intense rivalry between the two entertainment publications, which, despite their common ownership, have often bickered over story assignments and advertising accounts.

Bart, 58, was named editorial director of Variety Inc., Cahners officials confirmed when asked about the move Monday.

Peter Pryor, Daily Variety’s editor, and Michael Silverman, its publisher, will remain in their current posts, according to John Beni, general manager of Cahners’ consumer/entertainment publications division.

Neither Pryor, Silverman nor Bart returned calls seeking comment about the move. Bart will remain editor of the weekly and will be based in New York.

Beni said he expects Bart to improve coordination between the two entertainment trade papers, which share some common staff. “This gives us . . . a person in a pivotal spot to be the traffic cop in channeling news to either place,” he said.

Asked about reports that Cahners had become impatient with rivalry between the two publications, Beni said: “As far as I’m concerned, the only enemy I know out there is called the Hollywood Reporter. . . . But I wear trousers with pockets on two sides, and I like to have money in both of them.”

Cahners, a Newton, Mass.-based unit of London’s Reed International PLC, bought Variety Inc. from family owners for an estimated $60 million in 1987. The British company has about $2.8 billion in annual sales and does not report separate revenue and profit figures for its entertainment papers.

Beni and others nonetheless say that Daily Variety, whose 30,000 circulation is concentrated almost entirely in the Los Angeles area, has remained richly profitable, even while the recession has hurt many media properties.

J. Kendrick Noble Jr., a publishing analyst with Paine Webber, said Daily Variety appears to be “fat with advertising.” He did not have specific numbers.

Yet the company’s New York-based weekly--which has roughly the same circulation, with readers scattered around the globe--has garnered far more attention since Bart began a radical remake of the paper immediately after his arrival in 1989.

A former reporter for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, Bart worked as a film executive and producer before joining Variety. Under his direction, the paper was redesigned and began home delivery on Sundays to Los Angeles neighborhoods with high concentrations of entertainment industry executives.

At the same time, the weekly--which was founded in 1905 by show business reporter Sime Silverman--also began twitting the entertainment business with acerbic commentary, long investigative pieces and sometimes cutting reviews of high-priced screenplays long before they were produced as films.

Beni declined to say whether the weekly, where some highly paid staff positions were eliminated even as Bart hired a number of new employees, was now profitable. But he said Bart’s tactics had improved financial performance at the paper, where circulation had previously slipped from a high of 45,000 in the 1960s.

Michael Silverman is a great-grandson of Variety’s founder, and Peter Pryor is the son of longtime Daily Variety editor Tom Pryor. Since the Cahners’ purchase, the two Daily Variety managers have generally hewed to a time-honored formula that stressed fierce competition for breaking news rather than imaginative features.

A key point of contention between the two papers has been competition for international advertising. At the same time, reporters in Los Angeles have been frustrated by the newly aggressive weekly paper’s penchant for trespassing on what they regard as their territory in Hollywood.

“It’s a disappointment. . . . It’s true that there’s been friction between east and west, but no one saw this coming,” said one Daily Variety reporter on hearing of the news. An executive on the daily paper’s business side called news of the appointment “heartbreaking.”

Beni declined to predict whether Bart would make major changes in Daily Variety, though he said the new editorial director was likely to conduct a thorough review of the paper. “It’s not that anything is bad. But we’re going to start at square one and look at what we should be doing, not where we’ve been,” Beni said.