NPR News interviewed Neal Gabler, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, about the end of Daily Variety’s print edition.

Daily Variety has decided to continue producing online news, as well as a weekly magazine in print. Gabler pointed out that while the end of the print edition is in response to technological change, the beginning of Daily Variety was as well.

When the motion picture industry became more prominent in the 1930s, Variety felt they needed “a daily edition that spoke primarily to the motion picture industry.”

“Every day, virtually every executive, every author — in fact every stagehand — would get their copy of Daily Variety and thumb through it to see what films were being put into production, what the grosses were, what executive was being fired,” said Gabler. “This was the place that everyone in Hollywood went for information.”

Reading Daily Variety was a sort of ritual for many people who worked in Hollywood, and according to Gabler, now “it’s going to be part of nostalgia rather than part of routine.”

In addition to his work with the Norman Lear Center, Gabler is also an author, cultural historian and film critic.