Welcome to the new THN: A look back and a look forward…

by
Paul Heath
Aug 25, 2011

The Hollywood News was born in a very dark bedroom on November 29th, 2003. Its creator was frustrated at working a really shitty job 9-5pm everyday, then coming home to just literally sit down, eat dinner, watch a movie, and then go to bed. That person had a passion for film and really wanted a piece of the pie, and more than anything wanted to be involved in some way in this business we call show. That person was/ is me. I started THN after writing for a few other websites (they weren’t blogs back – in fact I don’t even think that the phrase was coined yet). For nearly seven years I ran the site on my own; penning news, writing reviews, adding trailers, messing with the design, emailing PR companies and responding to the many emails that I started to get on a daily basis. Over the years, the site has been very US targeted (hence the title), it has been a celebrity blog covering everything from whose arm Jennifer Aniston is hanging off through to Big Brother gossip to music and TV. We have had the pleasure of working with a number of other sites that provided film reviews and dvd reviews from time to time, all of which were duplicated on this site, with permission of course.

It has been safe to say that we have indeed lost our way over the years. The Hollywood News is, and from now on always be primarily a film website, and largely focusses at the UK market, because that, for the moment, is where we all are. Although yes, I did indeed start posting on these hallowed pages in 2003, I believe the real birth of the website to be last year when things ‘got serious.’ In October 2010 I met Mr Tom Fordy, a Bristolian with a passion for film that even seemed to surpass my own and in the ten months since that drunken meeting in a pub in Holborn, Tom has become more and more involved and is now our new editor-in-chief. The boss, a partner, the man. Around the same time we welcomed Paul Koren and Katie McCabe on board, two London based film enthusiasts and writers whose passion equals our own. In fact, there are now 14 people working across the site. Hello to Martin McDonagh, Nush Davies, Ben McCann, Joe Upton, Laura Stackhouse, John Sharp, Coralie Rose, Georgina Wahed, and new recruits Dan Bullock and Craig Hunter. Everyone has their own talents that they bring to the site every single day.

So, today THN 2.0 is released. I say 2.0, but I suppose it’s really 10.0, or site design number 50 over the course of nine years. What we are trying to do is make the site easier to navigate, access all of our content more easily, and more quickly. We are still ironing out the creases this morning after a very late night last night. I sit here with a very empty bottle of wine next to me and a thumping headache.

You will notice that we will be adding more categories and exciting new areas to the site, more of which will be announced at a later date.

Lastly, before I share some embarassing THN site designs of yesteryear, I would like to thank all of the studios, production houses, filmmakers, actors and actresses and PR companies that have helped us over the years. We look forward to many more of them to come. We cannot do this without all of you, but the most important people are you guys, the readers. Without you, we would do all of this for nothing… or to put it another way, be wanking into a mirror.

Speaking of that, here’s some quality THN designs from the past (apologies for the missing images as these have all been source from The Wayback Machine).