The Business of Film (Film S-208)
Charles Lyons
News Reports
Newspapers and magazines carry current business information and journalistic research on the film industry and its "players." Yale University Library has two major online sources for current news, both of which provide full text for most entries: Lexis-Nexis Academic, and Factiva (formerly known as Dow Jones Interactive). There is plenty of overlap between the two, but each of them also has resources that aren't on the other, so it's important to search both.
To find much broader types of news, see the News Sources page in the Mass Media & Popular Culture research guide, and the general list of Yale news resources.
See also the Social Science Library's Business, Finance and Management page for additional databases.
Warning: There are no subject headings in any news source. If you search for "Bond" (as in James Bond), you may get newspaper articles on stocks and bonds, emotional bonds, chemical bonds, etc. Be sure use as many search terms and limits as possible in order to specify what you want!
Lexis-Nexis Academic
Lexis-Nexis covers many national, regional, and international news sourses (newspapers, magazines and wire feeds), including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Variety, Business Week, and Entertainment Weekly -- but not Hollywood Reporter. Note that the years covered varies for each source: for example, the New York Times has full text starting in 1980, but only the most recent two years are available for Entertainment Weekly.
The best way to access specialized news in Lexis-Nexis is through its "Guided News Search" interface. Under Step One, you have several options, the most important being:
- General News. Offers access to major papers, magazines and journals, or Time Incorporated publications (these magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, have to be searched separately).
- U.S. News. News from regions or individual states of the US.
- World News. News from large regions of the world.
- Arts & Sports News. Movie reviews and general entertainment news.
- Business News. This section offers access to part of the business resources on Lexis-Nexis. For more thorough research, see the information on the Business Reports page of this Web site.
Be careful to specify the date range that you want to search. The default is the last six months -- it's very easy to forget to change this when you want to search farther back.
Factiva
Factiva (a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters) contains nearly 8,000 sources from 118 countries and 22 languages, and 120 continuously updated newswires, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, Financial Times, Reuters, Associated Press, and the major television networks. It carries Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, some scholarly film journals -- but not Variety.
The basic news search interface is easy to use, but watch out for the date range setting, which has the default of the past year.
The default settings will usually produce an overwhelming number of results. There are several ways to narrow your results:
- restrict the date range
- increase the number of search terms (e.g., not just "pierce brosnan", but "pierce brosnan and contract")
- search only the headline (or headline and first paragraph) in order to eliminate passing references
- search only selected news sources (particular newspapers and magazines)
- search only for news on a particular industry, region or even company
Searching only selected news sources: There are no specialized news areas on, say, entertainment (unlike Lexis-Nexis). In order to focus on particular sources, go to the Select Sources section of the screen, check off the box in front of "Your Current Source List," click the "Source Browser" link next to the dropdown box, and select the publications you want to create your own temporary list.
Searching only a particular industry, region or company: Along the upper part of the blueish search box are several option links -- Company, Industry, Region and Subject. When you select one of these, you'll get a pop-up box allowing to pick or search for what you want. Note that under Industry, aspects of the movie business appear in several areas: Leisure/Arts (film/video promotion) and Media (under Motion Pictures/Sound Recording, there are options for film distribution and film production). You can select all of the areas you want by clicking on the subject heading (it will turn green). Warning: If you doubleclick the heading, and enter more than one heading, Factiva will automatically put them in the "And" column, which means any articles you search for will have to be under all of the subjects. In order to search for articles that appear in any one of the areas, first single-click each heading, and then click the column you want it in (and/or/not). When you're ready, click Done, and search as before.
