New Screen Editor Wendy Mitchell Talks Future Challenges for the Venerable Brit Trade

What are the advantages of being a European trade? Being headquartered in London really works for us editorially. The UK is a hotbed of talent and production right now (in a wide-reaching way, not an insular British way), and obviously those close ties to Europe help us to stand out from the Hollywood trades.

Also our European film database ScreenBase continues to grow and our readers tap into that a lot.

One other thing I hope to do is to keep our key coverage of those major arthouse films that will be the top international titles of the year, but also try to do more coverage of industry-relevant genre films and documentaries (especially new funding models) and even short films (as relating to new talent). We've started to cover event TV more in the past few years, and with so much overlap in TV and film (especially in the UK) we're keen to keep that up and even expand coverage of those major miniseries and films for TV.

How would you compare your approach with Variety and THR? I think our approach contrasts with Variety in that international comes first for us, and the THR obviously has a more consumer-friendly slant now. That's not what we're aiming for.

How do you juggle the needs of the monthly with breaking daily news?  It's quite easy. That's what's great about our network of correspondents: they can be on top of that daily news, but they also know the right contacts for, say, an eight-page territory focus in print talking to the major players on the ground. And we do weekly print editions in awards season. But since we switched from weekly to monthly about three years ago, we've gotten great feedback from subscribers — they say that the monthly is a more in-depth and analytical resource and is something they save on their desk for the rest of the year, not something you recycle at the end of the week.

That also differentiates us from the other trades, that meatiness that comes with a monthly publication. And that is a nice complement to ScreenDaily's daily news and reviews (reviews are always free). With news we're not really concerned with this game of having a story up five minutes before everyone else — we are timely of course, but it's more important for us to have analysis/context as well.

How do you handle what is in front of and behind the pay wall?  You are not chasing traffic, right? Sometimes we do open up more of the content on the site in front of the paywall — usually around Cannes and awards season, for instance, in order to meet advertisers' needs, but it's also good for the brand editorially to ensure that more people are turning to Screen at those key times of year and our content is reaching the right people in the industry. That's good for our sources, too, when they are giving us exclusives.