Daily Hollywood Reporter Puts on a ‘Fresh Coat of Paint’

In the second recent make-over of an entertainment trade newspaper, the Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday published the first edition of a redesigned paper that it says reflects its evolution during the past three years.

The daily Reporter has modified its type styles, layout and graphic design to include more photography and graphics and has expanded its international news coverage, said Robert J. Dowling, publisher and editor-in-chief.

“There comes a point in time when it’s important to give it a fresh coat of paint,” Dowling said. “We didn’t want to give up the aspects of the paper that we liked. We don’t see it as going from yesterday to today. It’s like the comedian who becomes famous over 20 years”--not overnight.

The Reporter’s redesign comes a little more than two months after Daily Variety, its arch competitor, adopted its own new look. But Dowling said the Reporter’s decision to modernize itself was not prompted by Variety’s face lift in November.

“The reality is that we’ve been redesigning over the last three years,” he said. “We evaluated all of the departments with an eye toward expanding what we thought could be expanded. This is the culmination of a lot of time and effort,” Dowling said.

Stephen Randall, West Coast editor of Playboy, said that the Reporter’s new look was long overdue and that the paper, published by a unit of BPI Communications, was probably not “aping” Daily Variety.

“Up until yesterday, the Hollywood Reporter looked ragged,” Randall said. “It had an old look and feel about it, while Variety looked crisper and was doing what USA Today has wrought. And today, the Reporter has bold headlines, more charts and a more clever way of presenting the news.”