Things have been looking pretty grim for the newspapers and magazines over the past few years, with advertising revenue dropping off and subscribers flocking to online media where they can get much of the same content for free. This shift has affected virtually every print publication in existence, and now it looks like it is going to force big changes for the two major trade papers for the entertainment industry as well.

According to Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood, Variety is planning to start charging a subscription fee for their website in 2010, while The Hollywood Reporter is on the verge of completely scrapping their print edition. Two different solutions to the same financial problem, but will it be enough to keep both of them afloat?

I don’t know how many average movie fans read Variety and THR on a regular basis, but we bloggers clearly rely on them for a lot of our content. The problem for Variety is that if one blogger has a paid subscription, we all have a paid subscription. What’s more, if THR duplicates a lot of the same content as Variety and gives it away for free, that’s going to be hard to compete with. Not to mention the fact that a lot of bloggers actually break news stories before Variety and THR nowadays, so they almost seem unnecessary. Still, in some weird way, they are looked at as the official word, and most stories are considered rumour until verified by one of these two papers. Is this the beginning of the end for Variety and THR? Are they a necessary part of the equation or should we just rely on blogs for all our movie news from now on?