On September 23, 2020, Penske Media Corporation, the company behind Variety, announced it would take over day-to-day operations of The Hollywood Reporter through a joint venture with MRC called PMRC. That is a strange sentence if you know the history. Billy Wilkerson launched THR on September 3, 1930, as Hollywood’s first daily entertainment trade paper, and by 1932 Variety was suing it for lifting reporting from Variety’s New York coverage. Ninety years of rivalry ended up under one corporate roof. The two mastheads stayed separate, and each one still wants the story first.
That detail tells you most of what you need to know about how to get featured in The Hollywood Reporter. The trades are not short on content. They are short on things nobody else has yet. A press release that went out on the wire at 6 a.m. is worth almost nothing to a THR reporter, because by 6:05 every competitor has it too. The same facts, offered first and offered to one person, can turn into a headline.
Below is the playbook for how to get featured in the Hollywood Reporter: how the outlet is built, what its reporters actually write about, a scoring system for deciding whether your story belongs there, and the honest paid options when it does not.
How The Hollywood Reporter Is Organized Today
THR’s masthead lists Penske Media Corporation as its company, and Maer Roshan runs the newsroom as editor-in-chief. Roshan joined as co-editor-in-chief in 2023 and became sole editor-in-chief in July 2025, when Shirley Halperin moved to Rolling Stone, another Penske title. Below him sit an editorial director, David Katz, and a set of section leads who decide most of what gets assigned.
Those sections are where you should focus. The current masthead names Aaron Couch as film editor, Tony Maglio as television editor, Rick Porter as television business editor, Erik Hayden as executive editor for business, and Scott Feinberg as executive editor for awards. Each of those desks runs on a different clock and wants a different kind of story. Film cares about packages, casting and release dates. TV cares about orders, renewals, cancellations and ratings. Business cares about money: financing, acquisitions, layoffs, executive moves, lawsuits. Awards cares about campaigns, contenders and the voters who pick them.
Then there are the franchises inside the brand. Heat Vision covers comic books, science fiction and horror, and it has its own tone and its own readers. Close Up and Off Script put actors and executives around a table for long group interviews during awards season. The Brutally Honest Oscar Ballot, running since 2013, gets anonymous Academy members to explain their votes. And the Power lists, from Power Lawyers to the Women in Entertainment Power 100, function as an annual census of who holds power in the business.
Knowing this structure matters because “THR” is not a single target. It is a dozen small editorial operations sharing a logo. Your pitch has to land on one of them.
What Earns Coverage at a Hollywood Trade?
THR’s core reader works in the industry. Agents, producers, studio executives, lawyers, financiers. Those readers open the site to learn something that affects their job before their rivals do. If your story does not change what one of those people knows or decides, it probably does not belong in THR, no matter how proud you are of it.
That rules out a lot. A product launch with a celebrity spokesperson is a consumer story, and the trades will skip it unless the deal itself is unusual. A company milestone like a funding round or a new office reads as a press release unless the numbers show something new about the entertainment business. Thought leadership essays from executives almost never run as editorial.
What does work is news with industry consequence. A new financing model for independent film. A streaming deal that sets a precedent. A lawsuit that could change how talent contracts are written. Hard data about box office, audiences or labor that nobody has published. A hire or departure that shifts power at a company people care about. A first look at a project with bankable names attached.
Profile coverage exists too, but it follows news rather than replacing it. Reporters write features about people who have just done something the industry is talking about. If nobody is talking yet, the feature is premature.
Run Your Story Through the SCENE Test
Before anyone on your team writes a pitch, score the story. I call this the SCENE test, and it has five parts, each worth zero, one or two points, for a maximum of ten.
S is for Scoop. Is the information new, and can you give it to one reporter first? Zero means it has already been announced or is about to hit the wire. One means it is new but you plan to send it to several outlets at once. Two means you can offer a true exclusive with a clear window.
C is for Consequence. Does the story change something for people who work in entertainment? Zero means it matters mostly to your company. One means it affects a niche, like one guild or one genre. Two means it touches money, jobs, deals or rules across a meaningful part of the business.
E is for Evidence. Can the reporter verify it without taking your word? Zero means you have claims and adjectives. One means you have documents or on-record sources for part of it. Two means you can hand over numbers, contracts, filings or executives willing to talk on the record.
N is for Names. Are recognizable people or companies involved? Zero means none. One means names the industry knows but readers might not. Two means talent, studios or executives whose involvement alone makes the item newsworthy.
E is for Era. Does the timing fit the calendar the desk is working? Zero means you are pitching awards contenders in May or a horror slate during the Oscars crunch. One means the timing is neutral. Two means the story connects to a festival, market, earnings report, guild negotiation or campaign moment happening right now.
A score of eight or above is a real THR pitch. Offer it as an exclusive to one named reporter. Between five and seven, the story needs work: find more evidence, attach a name, or move the date. Under five, stop pushing THR and look at outlets that cover your industry niche, local business press or consumer media, where the same news may score far higher.
The value of scoring is that it forces honest conversations early. Founders tend to grade their own news on effort. Reporters grade it on consequence and novelty. The SCENE test makes you grade it the way the reporter will.
Find the Reporter Who Already Covers You
Mass pitching is the fastest way to get ignored. Muck Rack’s State of Journalism 2025 report found that 86 percent of journalists named irrelevance as a top reason they delete pitches, 71 percent cited an overly promotional tone, and half said a pitch that reads like a mass email gets cut. At a trade where reporters receive pitches all day, those odds get worse.
Start with the masthead to identify the right desk, then read backward through bylines. Search the site for companies like yours, competitors, the deal type you are announcing, or the guild or union your story involves. The reporter who covered something similar in the past three to six months is your target. That person already understands the context and has editors who expect them to own the beat.
Then build the pitch around what they have already written. Reference the prior story in one line and explain what your news adds to it. Keep it short. The same Muck Rack report found that 69 percent of journalists prefer pitches under 200 words and 78 percent want them before noon. Half said one follow-up is acceptable, ideally three to seven days later. Respect that rhythm.
If you are learning how to get featured in The Hollywood Reporter from scratch, resist the urge to email Roshan or Katz. Senior editors forward pitches down to the beat reporter anyway, and you lose a day plus some goodwill in the process. Go straight to the person who writes the stories.
One more thing: answer fast. Trade reporters often have hours, not days, to close a story. If they reply with three questions at 4 p.m., the publicist who answers by 4:30 gets the piece. The one who answers tomorrow reads it on a competitor’s site.
Timing Is a Calendar Problem
The trades run on a predictable cycle, and smart pitching follows it. Late August through September brings Venice, Telluride and Toronto, which means acquisitions, premieres and first reviews. From fall into winter, awards season takes over the awards desk and seeps into everything else, with contender coverage, campaign stories and the roundtable interviews. January brings Sundance and its sales market. Spring means upfronts for television, CinemaCon for theatrical distribution, and Cannes in May. Earnings reports from the big media companies arrive every quarter and drive business coverage for days.
Each of those moments creates appetite and congestion at the same time. During a festival, reporters want deal news and festival-adjacent stories, but they are also buried. A financing company announcing a slate during Toronto has a natural hook. A software company announcing a product during Toronto will vanish.
The trick is to pitch into the theme but slightly ahead of the rush. Offer your festival story the week before, with an embargo that lifts on day one. Offer your awards-season data story in October, before campaigns peak. Offer the business story on a quiet Tuesday rather than the day a major merger lands.
Power lists follow their own schedules too. THR’s Power Lawyers list has run for 20 years, and the Women in Entertainment Power 100 is tied to an annual breakfast event. Those lists reward a long record of deals and influence rather than a single pitch. If a list is your goal, the work starts a year earlier with the deals and the visibility that put a name in front of editors.
Should You Pay for Visibility Instead?
Sometimes the SCENE score is honest and low, and you still need the THR audience. That is what the commercial side exists for. THR sells advertising, sponsorship of its events and branded content, and back in 2015 THR and Billboard launched a native advertising studio called Adapt Studios to build sponsored campaigns. Under Penske, ad sales and custom content run through the company’s commercial teams, and the masthead lists a dedicated events and custom content group.
Paid placement is a legitimate tool when you use it for what it is. Branded content is labeled, it lives apart from news coverage, and industry readers know the difference. It works for awareness among buyers, recruiting, and putting a brand next to a prestige audience during a key season. It does not work as social proof the way an editorial story does, and anyone who sells you a “feature” that is secretly sponsored is selling you a credibility problem.
There is also a middle path many companies ignore. Event sponsorship gets your executives into rooms with THR editors and the people they cover. Over time those relationships produce context, and context produces better pitches. It is slower than buying a post, and it compounds.
For founders and executives who want editorial coverage across the entertainment press without spending a year learning every desk, a placement partner like Instant Press can map stories to the right outlets and reporters. The scoring still applies. No agency can make a story with no consequence look like news.
Look at how Gibson Dunn handled THR’s Power Lawyers 2025 list. On April 7, 2025, the firm published an announcement that partners Benyamin Ross, Ilissa Samplin and Orin Snyder had made the 20th annual edition, and noted it was Snyder’s eighth consecutive year on it. Nobody pitched their way onto that list in March. Eight straight years points to a long record of work the industry noticed, year after year. The list placement was the payoff for that record, the kind of work that scores high on consequence, evidence and names every time it makes news. Then the firm turned that placement into its own content within days. That is the full cycle: earn the coverage with real news, then put the recognition to work.