Vanity Fair Zeros In on Hollywood News With Latest Vertical

The Condé Nast title has set its sights on Hollywood, expanding its coverage of industry news, the awards season, industry intel and campaigns with its latest vertical, Awards Insider. The site subsection has three dedicated staffers. The vertical, aimed at Hollywood’s inner circle and awards voters, is a fertile topic to mine from as the industry undergoes "transformational change," especially since new audience behavior post-pandemic is upending box-office releases, forcing people to figure out new measures of success. Awards Insider will feature gossip, news and trends, including the need for more diversity in the industry, the growing shifts in power, pandemic rebounds, casting, finance and the controversial simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases. Vanity Fair will publish roughly 12 Awards Insider stories per week, that number will fluctuate during awards season. Pieces include this essay on the state of this year’s Emmy race and an interview with Brooke Smith about her self-financed Emmy campaign. Hungry for Hollywood Along with a dedicated weekly newsletter, Awards Insider will also publish across digital, on social platforms, audio and print. Vanity Fair has hired former The Hollywood Reporter awards editor Rebecca Ford as senior awards correspondent, and Entertainment Weekly’s David Canfield as staff writer. Vanity Fair’s Katey Rich has been appointed awards and audio editor. All three report to executive Hollywood editor, Jeff Giles. The wider editorial team will also contribute content. The title has some evidence readers are hungry for more on these topics. Awards Insider will live within Vanity Fair's HWD section, which covers celebrities, film and TV, with pieces like how queer identity is depicted in Loki and a close-up on the costumes for In the Heights. HWD had its highest-ever time spent in March 2021, the publisher said. "Hollywood is core to Vanity Fair," said editor-in-chief Radhika Jones in a statement. Surge in podcast downloading Outside of digital content, TV-focused podcast Still Watching, started in 2019, where hosts dissect the latest shows like Loki and WandaVision, has had a more-than 80% increase in downloads year-over-year, the publisher said. At this year’s Upfronts, the publisher stressed the importance of its live programming around tentpole events like the Oscars. Condé Nast’s first Vanity Fair Cocktail Hour Live ticketed event in April–featuring celebrity guests like Michael B. Jordan, Julianne Moore and Gal Gadot (involving more than standard talking-head interviews)—had an average watch time of over 94 minutes per night, the company said. Like a lot of publishers seeing traffic booms, Vanity Fair’s monthly site traffic was up 20% in the first quarter of 2021, according to the publisher's internal analytics. It attributes this to an unprecedented awards season. Industry-specific coverage saw 38% higher time-spent than the site-wide average, the publisher wouldn’t share specifics. In January, Vanity Fair has 34.1 million global monthly uniques. according to Comscore. For April, it’s dipped to 30.3 million.

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Vanity Fair Zeros In on Hollywood News With Latest Vertical

The new site subsection has three dedicated staffers

Lucinda Southern

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