Sharon Waxman is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Wrap, the Hollywood and media business news site. She had been a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East, including for Reuters, a writer for The Washington Post and Hollywood correspondent of The New York Times.
In a 2014 interview with Politico, she explained the seemingly strange leap from being a foreign correspondent to covering Hollywood: “It was a question of employment. At the time, I couldn’t get a full-time job as a foreign correspondent. I’d been living in Paris as a freelancer, then a stringer, and then a contract writer at The Washington Post. It was at a time in the mid 1990s that newspapers were already starting to cut back on their foreign bureaux. I’d been trying to get a full-time position and then, finally, TheWashington Post offered me a job in California where I never intended to go. I looked at my husband and said, ‘What do you think? California?’ They didn’t actually hire me to cover Hollywood. They hired me as a style writer. It was really premium feature writing that was in a really voice-y, atittude-y, sassy section.”
Waxman launched The Wrap in 2009 after reportedly raising $500k. A second round funding of $2mn was reportedly closed in 2010. Now, with some 65 employees, it includes a subscription service WrapPRO, podcasts and also print magazines published to coincide with major awards events and festivals. Its own annual events include: the Power Women Summit, its annual conference The Grill. She is also the creator of WrapWomen, dedicated to promoting women’s leadership.
The Wrap claims over 10mn monthly uniques and 20k+ paying subscribers to WrapPro.
Waxman has been outspoken about the ownership concentration of Hollywood media: Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline and also the Golden Globe Awards are all owned by Penske Media Corporation (PMC). In 2017, she made the headlines by disclosing that, in 2004, the New York Times had spiked her then ground-breaking expose of Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment.
Her 2005 book “Rebels on the Backlot”, chronicling the rise of new film directors in the 1990s (including Tarantino, Fincher and Sonderbergh), is often reckoned to be one of the best books about movie making. She has a degree in English Literature from Barnard College, in New York, and an MA in Middle East Studies from the University of Oxford.
How did you start?
My earliest ambition was to write. First – to read. Then to write. My first real job was probably a summer (paid!) internship at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the daily paper in my home town. It was my first taste of a real, live newsroom and I was totally hooked. My first assignment was a weather story and – to the annoyance of many – it was turned into a splash front page feature. It was definitely love at first sight. And I’d gotten my first taste of writing for a byline when I spent a year after high school in Israel and wrote some freelance stories for the Cleveland Jewish News, my community paper.
When, in April of that year abroad, Israel gave the Sinai peninsula back to Egypt, I stowed myself away with Israeli activists who opposed the return of the territory as the Israeli army poured in to evacuate. It was also my first glimpse of foreign journalists who stupidly dressed up as right-wing activists to sneak in to Yamit, the development town that the Israeli army was about to blow-up before handing it back to Egypt. Again, I was hooked. Thus was born my desire to be on the front lines of conflict as an observer rather than activist.
Why did you launch The Wrap?
While I was rounding four years at the New York Times as their Hollywood correspondent, it was time to think of something else. My idea was to go back to foreign reporting and layer in the media and cultural experience I’d amassed, in the wake of 9/11. But the Times wasn’t that interested in my idea and, in the meantime, I watched layoff after layoff happening at newspapers across the country. And I saw bloggers taking the place of professional journalists. I thought we journalists had to be the agents of change – or risk the demise of journalism.
That’s why I started The Wrap in January 2009, quitting my job at The New York Times and dumping my kids’ college money into a high-risk start-up. It was because I recognized that the internet was changing everything. That media was at a crossroads: we had to adapt or die. I wanted to adapt, because I believed that it was critical that independent journalism survive. At the time, The Hollywood Reporter was a shell of its current, glitzy incarnation. And Variety was a daily trade rag that was full of “ankling” and “helming” and “inking.” (I banned all those non-verbs at TheWrap.) Hollywood needed a smart, muscular and knowledgeable independent voice, one that was adapted to the digital age.
That meant reporting news in real time, not waiting for some sleepy print deadline. That meant reporting the truth, no matter who was upset by it – and some people are always upset when you report the truth. That meant reporting all sides of every story, not just rushing out a blog post from one juicy source, but giving the subjects of our coverage the opportunity to respond.
With blogs at one end of media and dusty print editions at the other, there was a crying need for professional journalism adapted to the digital age: Independent and fearless. Because, as a video that I put together at the time from producers, writers, executives and others observed, “entertainment matters.” Since then – and with no small thanks to us – Variety and The Hollywood Reporter learned how to cover breaking news in real time; something they certainly did not do in 2009 when we launched.
Both outlets evolved substantially under new ownership, growing digital chops, shifting their print editions to weekly. But The Wrap has thrived too, growing into a healthy, multi-platform news organization, complete with its own glossy awards-season magazines, live screenings, festival video studios, business conferences, non-profit initiatives and industry thought leadership. I am glad that I resisted an early bid to sell The Wrap to the investor group that had then just acquired the Hollywood Reporter. (I told them I did not believe in their business model, and it took a full decade for the flaws in banking so heavily on print to play themselves out.)
What’s special about The Wrap?
It’s the only independent media company covering Hollywood. We are enormously proud of that fact. It is truly independent. But what I’m proudest of is the large number of young journalists we have trained to be the very best in the industry.
What is your own primary role?
I’m both the CEO and Editor in Chief. I spend more time running the business side. But I most enjoy the journalism, when I get to do it.
What’s your vision for the business?
The Wrap will be vastly bigger in the next five years, at least three times the company’s size of today. It has an enormous opportunity to grow and it’s our intention to realize that potential.
How has the Hollywood media environment changed in The Wrap’s first 14 years?
It has changed vastly. The changes in Hollywood are too vast and far-reaching to detail in a sentence, but let’s just go with: the rise of streaming. Meanwhile, the two traditional (and sleepy) Hollywood trades have been transformed. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter now have the same owner, along with the one digital native in the space, Deadline. So all the other news publications have one owner, who also has many other business interests in the industry, which many find to be problematic (such as owning the Golden Globe awards). In 14 years, consolidation in media has become reality and a near-monopoly by PMC. We remain the sole independent.
