{"id":195729,"date":"2026-06-25T18:32:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T02:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195729"},"modified":"2026-06-25T20:37:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T04:37:05","slug":"from-jerusalem-to-the-backlot-the-two-careers-of-sharon-waxman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195729","title":{"rendered":"From Jerusalem to the Backlot: The Two Careers of Sharon Waxman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sharon Waxman<\/a> (b. 1963) is an American journalist, author, and media entrepreneur. She founded TheWrap<\/a> in 2009 and serves as its chief executive and editor in chief. The site covers the business of entertainment and media, and it remains the only independently owned Hollywood trade competing with the legacy press of Variety<\/a> and The Hollywood Reporter<\/a>. She arrived at that work through two earlier careers, first as a foreign correspondent in Europe and the Middle East, then as a Hollywood reporter for two of the most prominent American newspapers. The thread that runs through all three phases is a preference for institutions and incentives over personality.<\/p>\n

Waxman grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio. She took a bachelor of arts in English literature from Barnard College<\/a> in 1985, then a master of philosophy in modern Middle Eastern studies from St. Antony’s College, Oxford<\/a>, in 1987. The graduate work turned her toward the politics and history of the region, and she gained working fluency in French, Hebrew, and Arabic. Those languages shaped the first decade of her career.<\/p>\n

She started as a foreign correspondent. After an internship on the foreign desk of the Washington Post<\/a>, she reported from Jerusalem for Reuters<\/a> and filed for several American papers, including dispatches from Israel during the Gulf War. From 1989 to 1995 she covered Europe and the Middle East, reporting on war, diplomacy, and political upheaval. The assignments built her name as an international reporter at ease with hard political stories rather than with entertainment.<\/p>\n

In November 1995 she moved to Los Angeles on a full-time contract to cover the entertainment industry for the Washington Post Style section, the first such position at the paper. She treated Hollywood as a business and a seat of power, and she paired investigative reporting with profiles and analysis of studio strategy. In 1998 the University of Missouri gave her its feature writing award for arts and entertainment. After September 2001 the paper sent her back to the Middle East more than once, including a posting in postwar Iraq, and she reported on the Second Intifada.<\/p>\n

In 2003 The New York Times<\/a> hired her as its Hollywood correspondent, a post she held until 2008. The features editor Adam Moss (b. 1957) made the offer in October of that year, the cultural news editor Steven Erlanger had named her his first choice, and the executive editor Bill Keller (b. 1949) led the paper. She covered an industry in transition. She paid close attention to the specialty divisions, Fox Searchlight<\/a> and Focus Features<\/a>, whose mix of independent filmmaking and studio money reshaped the economics of prestige cinema. She wrote about the meeting point of creative ambition, corporate strategy, awards campaigns, and the early pressure of digital change.<\/p>\n

One episode from her Times years later moved to the center of her public standing. In 2004 she reported on Harvey Weinstein<\/a> (b. 1952) and Miramax<\/a>. Her draft pointed to sexual harassment, aggressive behavior toward female employees, and a financial settlement with a London assistant; the published version dropped those claims and ran as a short item about the reassignment of an Italian executive, Fabrizio Lombardo. After the Weinstein revelations of 2017, Waxman wrote in TheWrap that Weinstein, his lawyer David Boies, and a spokesman had come to the newsroom to meet Keller before publication. Keller, Jill Abramson<\/a>, and Dean Baquet<\/a> disputed the charge that anyone had killed the story, and Keller told her he recalled the Weinstein visit but not pressure over the piece. The exchange placed Waxman inside a defining press controversy and lent force to her later argument that legacy newsrooms can bend toward powerful subjects and major advertisers.<\/p>\n

She left the Times in January 2008 rather than accept a transfer to the New York headquarters. She had concluded that newspapers could no longer compete in a faster digital market for entertainment news. Rather than join another legacy title, she built her own. She launched TheWrap on January 26, 2009, on seed money, and in 2010 raised a two-million-dollar venture round led by Maveron<\/a>, the firm co-founded by Howard Schultz<\/a> and Dan Levitan. The financing let the company grow as it competed with Deadline Hollywood<\/a> and pressed against the older trades.<\/p>\n

TheWrap broke from those trades in method. It favored fast publication, investigative exclusives, and reporting on the business itself: studio leadership, streaming competition, mergers, labor talks, and the changing economics of film and television. Waxman held that entertainment journalism should track corporate decisions and media economics rather than celebrity gossip. As the company matured it added conferences, professional services, and subscription products for industry readers, among them WrapPRO and the annual TheGrill leadership conference. She also created WrapWomen and its Power Women Summit, a forum for women in media and entertainment leadership.<\/p>\n

Her two books extend the same interest in structure. Rebels on the Backlot (2005) weaves together the careers of six directors, Quentin Tarantino<\/a> (b. 1963), Steven Soderbergh<\/a> (b. 1963), David Fincher<\/a> (b. 1962), Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a> (b. 1970), David O. Russell<\/a> (b. 1958), and Spike Jonze<\/a> (b. 1969), through the making of their signature 1990s films, Pulp Fiction<\/a>, Traffic<\/a>, Fight Club<\/a>, Boogie Nights<\/a>, Three Kings<\/a>, and Being John Malkovich<\/a>. The book argues that a self-taught generation bent a risk-averse studio system toward its own ends before corporate consolidation closed the opening. It became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and remains a standard account of the period.<\/p>\n

Her second book, Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World (2008), returned to the international reporting that launched her. Drawing on interviews with museum directors, among them Philippe de Montebello<\/a> (b. 1936) of the Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/a> and James Cuno (b. 1951) of the Art Institute of Chicago<\/a>, she examined the legal and ethical fights over the ownership of antiquities. She set the resistance of Western museums to repatriation against the recovery campaigns of source countries such as Italy and Greece, and she anticipated debates that grew louder across the following decade.<\/p>\n

Waxman’s journalism has held a consistent shape. She reports on the structures that move modern entertainment, corporate ownership, executive power, financial incentives, technological change, and shifting patterns of consumption, and she treats Hollywood as a global business whose decisions reach culture and commerce far beyond Los Angeles<\/a>. In recent years she has widened her commentary through her WaxWord column to questions of public trust, political polarization, artificial intelligence, and the economics of digital publishing, arguing that news organizations must rebuild credibility through reporting and enterprise rather than inherited advantage. She now also contributes to the opinion page of the New York Times. In 2021 the Los Angeles Press Club named her Online Journalist of the Year and honored WaxWord as best blog.<\/p>\n

Her success has drawn scrutiny as well. In October 2021 The Daily Beast<\/a> published an account in which twenty former employees described a harsh workplace and high turnover under her leadership. <\/p>\n

She remains founder, chief executive, and editor in chief of TheWrap.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a reinterpretation of Sharon Waxman.
\nWhile mainstream media commentary views Waxman through a liberal, professional frame — celebrating her as a champion of independent reporting, institutional transparency, and female leadership initiatives — Mearsheimer’s realism strips away this idealism. It frames her legacy as a highly rational adaptation to structural disruption and a masterclass in coalition-building within an anarchic professional ecosystem.
\nHis realism alters the understanding of her work across several areas.
\nBefore Waxman founded TheWrap in 2009, legacy Hollywood trades like Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter operated as an information oligopoly. They managed industry communication in close cooperation with the major studios and talent agencies, pacing information to preserve institutional stability.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, Waxman did not launch TheWrap simply out of an abstract commitment to “independent journalism.” Her platform emerged as a rapid optimization tool during a period of massive structural disruption including the rise of digital media and the initial fracturing of legacy studio dominance. By breaking stories in real time and aggressively pursuing investigative pieces, TheWrap denied the traditional studio establishment its monopoly over timing and narrative control. Waxman proved that in an anarchic professional landscape undergoing rapid change, a fast, digital intelligence asset can force entrenched corporate giants to adapt their public strategies to survive.
\nWaxman has spent significant organizational capital building the Power Women series and the annual Power Women Summit, framing these initiatives as an ideological crusade to elevate underrepresented voices and advance structural reform in entertainment.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips the sentimentality from this framing. Human language, moral framing, and collective assemblies do not exist as disinterested pursuits of universal equity. They are the tools groups use to coordinate behavior, manage reputations, and capture status. The Power Women network functions structurally as a highly cohesive, elite domestic coalition. By uniting around a shared moral creed and institutionalizing a clear ideological standard, Waxman and her partners successfully claimed cultural authority, managed collective reputations, and built an alternative power center to compete against the legacy male-dominated studio hierarchy. Her summits are not post-political spaces; they are highly effective instruments of group alignment and status optimization.
\nIn her recent commentary, Waxman tracks the severe economic contraction of Hollywood, noting massive job losses, studio mergers, and the looming challenge of artificial intelligence. She frequently frames this “doom loop” as a crisis of creativity or a challenge to democratic storytelling that can be overcome if “creators” seize new opportunities.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s ranking of human faculties reveals that independent creative reason and artistic willpower rank last among the forces driving institutional behavior. Hollywood states such as the massive streaming platforms and consolidated media conglomerates are structured survival vehicles. Faced with rising material costs and technological shifts, these corporate actors act exactly as structural realism predicts: they ruthlessly maximize efficiency, cut human capital, and leverage automated tools to preserve their relative power and market dominance. Waxman\u2019s appeal to the independent spirit of individual creators overestimates the power of autonomous agency. The structural logic of the corporate vehicle always outlasts the individual actor, and the consolidation she chronicles is the standard behavior of a dominant tribe optimizing its defenses against systemic instability.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If David Pinsof is right, Waxman\u2019s career is a masterclass in how an intellectual pivots from old-guard institutions to build her own independent engine for status, moral authority, and coalitional power.
\nWaxman frequently highlights that TheWrap is the last truly independent digital news organization covering Hollywood, drawing a sharp contrast between her site and the massive media monopoly owned by Penske Media Corporation (Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline). She frames this independence as a noble, public-service defense of objective journalism, arguing that an industry as powerful as Hollywood needs an independent watchdog to hold it accountable.
\nPinsof might say that Waxman\u2019s fierce defense of independence is not a selfless crusade for truth; it is a premium branding strategy. In a highly consolidated media landscape, an intellectual cannot compete on raw capital against a multi-brand conglomerate like Penske. By weaponizing the concept of independence, Waxman turns a business disadvantage into a supreme moral signal. She tells her readers and sources: “The corporate trades are compromised, but I possess the pure, uncorrupted lens.”
\nThis framing allows her to carve out a highly profitable market share and secure her personal status as an indispensable powerhouse in the industry’s attention economy.
\nWaxman is the creator of WrapWomen and events like the Power Women Summit, which are explicitly designed to promote women’s leadership and achieve equity in entertainment and media. These initiatives are framed through the classic misunderstanding myth: that industry inequality is a legacy of outdated biases and structural blindness that can be cured by raising consciousness, hosting panels, and fostering cross-industry dialogue.
\nPinsof might say that the Power Women Summit is an elite alliance engine. Human primates do not gather at high-end virtual and physical summits because they need to learn that women are capable leaders; they gather to exchange social capital, form protective coalitions, and lock down opportunities.
\nBy positioning herself as the master of ceremonies for this network, Waxman extracts immense personal status. She becomes the gatekeeper of a high-value progressive space, allowing her to cultivate relationships with top-tier talent and executives under a highly moralistic pretext. The summit does not alter the zero-sum Darwinian competition for jobs and greenlight authority in Hollywood; it simply ensures that Waxman’s coalition holds the moral high ground and a dominant seat at the table.
\nFollowing major political shifts, including populist election victories, Waxman has written columns arguing that the media needs a complete reinvention because it has failed to bridge the gap between coastal narratives and the rest of the electorate. She frames polarization as a failure of communication\u2014a dangerous misunderstanding where news organizations got trapped in their own bubbles and lost public trust.
\nPinsof might say this call for reinvention is a standard defensive maneuver to protect the professional utility of her class. When populist movements bypass the mainstream press, it signals that the public no longer values elite intellectual curation.
\nWaxman frames this as a communication breakdown because it implies that the solution is better journalism, which means society still desperately needs her and her peers to fix the problem.
\nPinsof’s essay shows that the public does not reject mainstream narratives out of a misunderstanding. They reject them because they are locked in a zero-sum fight against the very coastal establishment the media represents. Waxman diagnoses this as a structural error in the press to avoid admitting a brutal reality: the world is operating exactly as natural selection designed it to, and the masses have simply stopped buying what the gatekeepers are selling.<\/p>\n

Alliance Theory<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Applying the Alliance Theory of political belief systems to Sharon Waxman’s career since she launched TheWrap in 2009 offers a strategic, network-based framework for understanding the operations of an independent Hollywood media outlet. According to Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton in “Strange Bedfellows”, belief systems and public narratives do not derive from abstract moral principles. Instead, they are generated by shifting alliance structures to advance the strategic interests of allies and oppose rivals.
\nWhen applied to Waxman’s tenure running TheWrap, Alliance Theory clarifies several key aspects of her journalism and business trajectory.
\nAlliance Theory emphasizes that individuals and organizations position themselves within networks of supportive or antagonistic relationships. Waxman explicitly positions TheWrap as the only remaining independent media company covering Hollywood, frequently contrasting it with competitors like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline, which all share a single corporate owner.
\nFrom an alliance perspective, this independent branding is a structural maneuver. By remaining outside of the dominant media conglomerate, TheWrap forces a distinct competitive boundary. Waxman can mobilize support from industry players who are wary of a single corporate monopoly by framing her outlet as the necessary independent balance in Hollywood media.
\nA core assumption of Alliance Theory is that humans possess a common cognitive toolkit of “propagandistic biases” — including victim, perpetrator, and attributional biases\u2014which they strategically apply depending on their proximity to a target.
\nIn the high-stakes ecosystem of Hollywood trade journalism, coverage of executive shakeups, corporate scandals, and box office failures rarely tracks abstract objectivity. Alliance Theory suggests that an editor’s reporting will naturally deploy:
\nPerpetrator biases (minimizing harm or highlighting mitigating circumstances) to protect crucial industry sources and informational allies.
\nVictim and attributional biases (emphasizing responsibility and internal incompetence) to aggressively scrutinize or break negative scoops about industrial rivals.
\nThe theory shows that these shifting evaluative standards are not random cognitive failures, but predictable tools used to protect interdependence with key sources.
\nThe theory notes that humans choose allies based on interdependence such as favoring those who reliably provide mutual benefits and advance shared goals. Following the launch of TheWrap, Waxman expanded her brand’s footprint by creating industry events like TheGrill business conference and the WrapWomen platform (including the Power Women Summit).
\nRather than viewing these summits purely through the lens of abstract values like industry convergence or leadership, Alliance Theory interprets them as coordination devices. These platforms allow TheWrap to institutionalize its alliances with powerful networks of executives, creators, and underrepresented groups. By providing these figures with social capital and visibility, Waxman secures structural loyalty, creating common knowledge of who is aligned with her network.
\nPinsof et al. argue that public actors frequently use moralized rhetoric such as appeals to fairness or solidarity as a strategic instrument to draw third parties to their side and signal group allegiance. TheWrap has earned significant recognition for its investigative reporting on systemic industry misconduct, including its award-winning coverage of the aftermath of the #MeToo movement.
\nAlliance Theory suggests that while these investigations rely on a shared backdrop of tacit moral agreement, the act of aggressive public moralization serves an outward-facing strategic function. It allows an independent outlet to challenge entrenched institutional power structures, rally public and industry support, and penalize rivals who violate network norms all while strengthening the outlet’s own alignment with reformist factions in the entertainment ecosystem. <\/p>\n

The Conversion of Capital: Sharon Waxman in the Journalistic Field<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) treats social life as a set of fields, each with its own stakes, its own currencies, and its own hierarchy. Agents enter a field carrying capital in several forms, economic, cultural, social, and the prestige Bourdieu calls symbolic, and they take positions according to the volume and the composition of what they hold. Capital earned in one field can convert into capital in another. Bourdieu’s account of journalism, set out in On Television and in his essays on the literary and artistic fields, adds one more claim. The journalistic field holds little autonomy. It sits close to the economic pole, governed by audience and advertiser, and it bends under the field of power, the space where holders of money and influence contend. Read through this frame, Sharon Waxman’s career becomes a long study in capital conversion, and her firm becomes a wager on whether a reporter can hold the autonomous position while paying for it from the heteronomous one.
\nBegin with trajectory, since habitus forms along a path. Waxman accumulated institutionalized cultural capital at consecrated sites, Barnard and then St. Antony’s, Oxford, and embodied cultural capital in the languages and the bearing of the foreign correspondent. Reuters in Jerusalem, the Gulf War, the Second Intifada: these are the autonomous, high-prestige reaches of the journalistic field, where peer recognition counts for more than circulation and the work earns honor rather than ratings. She built a stock of symbolic capital in the part of the field that ranks itself highest.
\nThe move to Hollywood in 1995 was the first conversion, and the more interesting one. She carried the symbolic capital of the foreign desk into a subfield coded as low, the entertainment beat, where the heteronomous pole rules and the legitimate product has long been celebrity copy. Her stated method, cover the business and the structure rather than the gossip, reads in field terms as position-taking. She imported the standards of the autonomous pole into a heteronomous beat and staked a claim about the legitimate principle of vision: what counts as serious work here, and who gets to say. The claim was credible because of where she had come from. A reporter without the foreign-desk pedigree might make the same argument and draw less recognition. The capital she carried let her redefine the beat as she entered it.
\nThe step from the Washington Post to the New York Times in 2003 raised her position again. The Times is a consecrating institution. To hold its Hollywood chair is to gain symbolic capital the Post could not confer, and the L.A. Weekly coverage of the hire, with its talk of enemy territory and a coveted post, registers the rise as the field itself read it.
\nThe 2004 Weinstein draft is the case where the frame does the most work, and it shows the journalistic field in its subordinate place. Bourdieu’s claim is structural, not moral. The paper sat downstream of the field of power. Harvey Weinstein held economic capital as an advertiser, social capital through David Boies and through access to the building, and the standing of a mogul whose displeasure carried weight. Waxman’s draft pointed to harassment, to aggressive conduct toward women, and to a settlement with a London assistant; the published version shrank to a short item about an Italian executive’s reassignment. Field theory predicts the shrinkage without recourse to anyone’s character. The autonomous pole, the reporter’s professional standard, lost to the heteronomous pole, the paper’s position relative to money and influence. Keller later recalled Weinstein’s visit to the newsroom while disputing that anyone killed the piece. Both things can hold at once in this account. No one need give an order. A field constrained by the field of power produces the constrained outcome on its own.
\nHer exit in 2008 and her founding of TheWrap in 2009 form the central position-taking of the career, and the frame catches its ambiguity. On its face the move buys autonomy. She left a dominated position inside a large institution and took a dominant position inside a small firm she owns. She no longer answers to a Keller. Bourdieu would press the second half of the ledger. Independence of control is not independence from the economic pole. The firm she built sells investigative reporting, but it also sells access through the Grill conference, subscriptions through WrapPRO, and a women’s-leadership franchise through the Power Women Summit. Those products convert her journalistic capital into social and economic capital, and they tie her more tightly to the industry she covers, since conferences and subscriptions and advertising flow from that industry. The autonomy is real in one register and mortgaged in another. She owns the outlet and depends on the field of power to fund it. That tension is the structural problem of the independent trade, and her career states it in its sharpest form.
\nThe 2017 episode shows the reverse conversion, defeat turned back into symbolic capital. When she told the Weinstein story under her own masthead, she reclaimed the autonomous pole’s honor: the reporter who held the truth and was overruled by the institution. The account doubled as position-taking in the field. The small independent consecrated itself against the large legacy paper, and the contrast between the captured newsroom and the free one served the firm’s standing as much as the record. The Los Angeles Press Club’s 2021 honors, Online Journalist of the Year and best blog, are consecration from peers, the autonomous pole returning recognition to her. Her two books work the same way. Rebels on the Backlot and Loot are accumulations of cultural and symbolic capital through authorship, and they consecrate her as more than a beat reporter.
\nThe 2021 Daily Beast coverage belongs in this reading rather than outside it. Former employees described a harsh workplace and high turnover, and Waxman rejected the account. Whatever the merits, the structure is plain in field terms. Inside the small field she owns, she holds the dominant position, and the founder who escaped one institution’s power now exercises power within her own. The frame does not settle the dispute. It locates it.
\nStep back and the whole arc reads as a single problem worked over thirty years. Waxman has tried to occupy the autonomous pole of the journalistic field, the serious, structural, peer-honored kind of work, while operating in the part of that field most exposed to money. She used the prestige of the foreign desk to claim that ground on the Hollywood beat. She used the Times to raise her standing. She left when the field of power overrode the standard she carried, and she built a firm to do the work on her own terms. The firm then bound her to the industry’s money in a new way. Field theory does not call this a contradiction to be resolved. It calls it the structure of the position she chose, a reporter financing the autonomous pole from the heteronomous one, and living inside the strain that arrangement creates.<\/p>\n

Watergate as Democratic Ritual<\/a> & Cultural Trauma<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) builds his cultural sociology on a refusal to let events carry their own meaning. In his account of Watergate and in his theory of cultural trauma, the same claim recurs. Facts do not speak for themselves. A break-in, a buried story, a massacre: each sits inert until a teller gives it shape, and the shape comes from the binary codes of civil society, the long opposition between the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted. The discourse of the civil sphere sorts persons and institutions onto two sides. On one stand truth, law, autonomy, fair play, the open community. On the other stand secrecy, self-interest, personal loyalty above office, the closed faction. A scandal forms when a teller moves an event up from the routine level of goals and interests to the sacred level of values, and persuades an audience that the codes have been violated. Read through this frame, Sharon Waxman’s 2017 account of her spiked 2004 Weinstein story becomes the object of study, not as a record of what happened inside the New York Times, but as meaning-work, a retelling that runs on the civil codes and asks an audience to ratify it.
\nBegin where Alexander begins with Watergate, in the profane world. The 2004 episode, at the time, generated no scandal. Waxman reported on Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, her draft pointed to misconduct, and the published version shrank to a short item about an Italian executive’s reassignment. The material sat in the inside pages and stayed there. In Alexander’s terms it never rose above the level of goals. An editing decision, a personnel item, an internal newsroom matter: routine, mundane, unsacred. Watergate sat in the same place for two years, a third-rate burglary that most Americans read as ordinary politics, its facts already published and producing little outrage. The story could not, as Alexander says of Watergate, tell itself. It needed a context that did not yet exist.
\nOctober 2017 supplied the context. The Weinstein expos\u00e9s and the wave that followed transformed the situation, in the precise sense Alexander gives the word. The audience changed, not the raw facts. Waxman’s draft had been public knowledge for years. What arrived in 2017 was a public now able to read a buried Weinstein story as a wound rather than a footnote. On that ground she retold it, and the retelling moved the episode upward, from the goals level of who edited what, to the values level of truth, the free press, and the protection of the vulnerable. That upward move, generalization, is the act that turns a profane item into a sacred drama.
\nAlexander’s theory of trauma names the four representations a successful telling must furnish, and Waxman’s account furnishes each. The nature of the pain: not one shrunken article but the betrayal of journalism’s sacred duty, and women left unguarded across a decade. The nature of the victim: Waxman herself, the reporter who held the facts and was overruled, generalized outward to the women Weinstein harmed and to the reading public whose trust depends on a press that will print what it knows. The relation of victim to audience: in 2004 a reader felt no kinship with an overruled entertainment correspondent, while in 2017 the audience could take her defeat as their own, since the surrounding revelations had built the solidarity that lets strangers share an injury. And the attribution of responsibility, the perpetrator. Here the telling names not only Weinstein but the institution, the top editors, the paper that sat close to a powerful advertiser and a litigious mogul. She describes Weinstein and his lawyer coming to the newsroom before publication. The antagonist she draws is a captured institution.
\nThe coding is the heart of the performance. On the pure side she places the independent reporter, the facts she possessed, the sacred obligation to print, and the small free outlet she later built. On the polluted side she places the legacy institution, its nearness to advertiser money, the mogul who walked into the building, and the story gutted and buried. Alexander’s own checklist for the stratification of the public sphere reads like the axis of her narrative. Who owns the newspapers? How far are journalists free of political and financial control? Waxman poses that question and answers it against the Times, and she answers it for herself by pointing to a masthead she owns. The civil sphere prizes autonomy from money and power, and she claims that ground.
\nThe structure of her position completes the picture. In the Watergate drama, the purification did not come from the polluted center. It came from alienated elites, journalists and others pushed outside, who formed countercenters and pressed the ritual from there. Waxman left the Times in 2008 and built her own publication, and from that countercenter she conducts the purification, coding the institution she left as fallen and her own outlet as the cleaner alternative. The exit and the telling work together. She could not have run this drama from inside the building. She runs it from a rival masthead, and the contrast between the captured paper and the free one serves the standing of the teller as much as the standing of the truth.
\nThe accused respond as Alexander’s frame predicts. Keller, Jill Abramson, and Dean Baquet dispute that anyone killed the story, and Keller recalls the Weinstein visit while denying pressure. This is the move the administration witnesses made in the Senate hearings, the attempt to keep the event at the profane and political level, to deny it the sacred frame, to cool it back down into ordinary editorial judgment. Their counter-telling holds the episode at goals. Hers raises it to values. Whether the ritual succeeds rests with the audience, not with either party’s sincerity, and an audience primed by 2017 leaned toward the sacred reading.
\nHere the frame reaches its limit, and the limit is the point of running it. Alexander’s cultural sociology brackets the question of accuracy and the question of moral desert. Trauma, for him, is a socially mediated attribution, and the sociologist attends to how the claim is made and with what effect, not to whether it is true. So this reading certifies nothing about whether the Times killed the story. It shows how the telling is built and why it persuades. The structural account already set out beside this one cuts the other way and complicates the binary the civil drama needs. If the journalistic field sits below the field of power, a subordinate paper can produce a buried story without anyone playing villain, the outcome following from position rather than from a polluted heart. The civil-sphere narrative requires a perpetrator on the dark side of the code. The structural reading dissolves that perpetrator into a location in a hierarchy. Both cannot be fully right, and the gap between them is where a careful reader should stand.
\nOne more strain belongs in the picture. Purity, in Alexander’s account, is a place in a classification system, not a property a person owns. The codes attach to positions, and positions shift. The same figure coded as the sacred reporter in the 2017 drama is coded by former employees, in the 2021 Daily Beast account, as the polluting boss of a harsh newsroom. Inside the small center she runs, she holds the power, and the purifier becomes, in another arena, the accused. Alexander would not call this hypocrisy. He would call it the ordinary traffic of the codes, which can sacralize a person in one telling and pollute him in the next, and which never finally settle on anyone.<\/p>\n

The Energy Business: Sharon Waxman and the Interaction Ritual<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Randall Collins<\/a> (b. 1941) reduces social life to a single recurring scene and a single scarce good. The scene is the interaction ritual: bodies in the same place, a barrier that marks insiders from outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a common mood that builds as the gathering goes on. When those four ingredients lock together, the ritual throws off three products. It generates solidarity, a felt membership in the group. It charges each participant with what Collins calls emotional energy, a durable confidence and drive that outlasts the occasion. And it leaves behind symbols, the sacred objects and membership tokens that stand for the group and that fade unless fresh rituals recharge them. People move through life as chains of these encounters, and they steer, mostly below awareness, toward the situations that pay the highest emotional energy. Society, on this account, is a market in rituals, and the people who can stage the high-yield ones hold a position others need. Read through this frame, Sharon Waxman’s conferences and her women’s-leadership work stop looking like sidelines to the journalism. They become the main event. She built a firm that manufactures interaction rituals and sells access to them.
\nStart with the room, because Collins starts with the body. TheGrill gathers entertainment executives to talk through the forces remaking the industry, and the Power Women Summit gathers women in media and entertainment for the same kind of face-to-face assembly. Each supplies all four ingredients in concentrated form. The participants share a physical space for a set span of hours. A ticket, an invitation, a credential marks the boundary, so the people in the room know that others stand outside it. The stage and the panel furnish the focus, a single point that pulls every gaze the same way. And the mood compounds across the day, the low hum of recognition and ambition that anyone who has worked a good conference floor knows in the body before naming it. Collins predicts what such a gathering produces. Solidarity among an industry elite. A charge of emotional energy that each executive carries out the door and back into the work. And tokens of membership: the lanyard, the photograph, the line on a biography that one spoke at TheGrill or stood among the Power Women.
\nThe barrier is not incidental decoration. In Collins the exclusion is the engine. A ritual open to everyone yields a weak charge, since membership in a group anyone can join means little. The value of the emotional energy tracks the steepness of the wall around it. This explains the architecture of Waxman’s events without any appeal to vanity. Rationed access is what makes the room worth entering. WrapWomen runs as a standing network of influential women, and the Summit caps it each year, so the membership renews on a calendar, which is how Collins says symbols must work. A sacred object left alone goes flat. The annual gathering recharges the token, and the people who held it last year return to refresh the charge.
\nThis reading collapses a distinction most profiles keep. The conferences and the women’s-leadership franchise look like separate ventures, one about industry strategy and one about advancing women. Under interaction ritual theory they are the same product. Both stage co-presence behind a barrier around a shared focus, and both convert that staging into solidarity, energy, and membership tokens. The cause attached to one of them does not change the underlying article. She sells the same thing in both halls. She sells the room.
\nThe journalism feeds the circuit rather than standing apart from it. Reporting creates the shared symbols, the names and stories and contested judgments that an industry holds in common, and the conference then ritualizes those symbols in person, with the bodies present and the focus fixed. The subscription product, WrapPRO, sells continuous access to the circulating symbols between gatherings, the standing membership that the live ritual periodically reignites. Coverage, subscription, and conference form one chain. Each stage hands the participant to the next, and emotional energy threads through the whole of it. A reader becomes a subscriber, a subscriber buys the ticket, the ticket-holder leaves the floor charged and returns to the coverage. Collins would call the firm a well-built interaction ritual chain with a turnstile at every link.
\nHer own path reads the same way. Collins treats a career as a chain of encounters, each one paying or draining energy, each high-status ritual lifting the participant toward the next. The foreign desk, the Jerusalem dispatches, the move to a paper that consecrates, the Hollywood chair at the most watched masthead: these are not only positions but situations rich in the focused attention and recognition that charge a person. The founder who later stages rituals for an elite spent two decades inside the elite’s own high-energy encounters, learning by participation what concentrates a room. The energy star, in Collins’s phrase, is the figure who draws and holds the focus, and the move from sitting in such rooms to building them is short.
\nThe 2021 account of her newsroom belongs in this frame too, on its harsher edge. Former employees described a harsh workplace and steep turnover, and she rejected the account. A newsroom, like any workplace, runs on interaction rituals, and Collins separates two kinds. Status rituals confer membership and lift energy. Power rituals, the giving and taking of orders, tend to charge the one who commands and drain the one who complies. A setting heavy on the second kind depletes the people at the bottom of it, and depleted people leave to seek their energy elsewhere, since that is what Collins says people do. Turnover, on this reading, is emotional energy voting with its feet. The frame settles nothing about the merits of the dispute. It locates the charge against her in the same theory that explains her success. The talent for staging rituals that energize a paying elite, exercised inside a small firm she commands, can sit beside an internal order that drains the staff who produce the work. One person can hold both at once.
\nA limit deserves stating, because Collins states it himself. He doubts that mediated contact pays what co-presence pays. Screens thin the mood, scatter the focus, weaken the bond. The argument predicts that the durable premium in Waxman’s business sits in the live gathering rather than the feed, and the shape of the firm bears that out. The website distributes information, which travels well at a distance. The conference sells the room, which does not. If the theory holds, the part of the operation least exposed to substitution is the one that puts bodies behind a wall around a stage, the part that no digital edition can copy, because the energy lives in the assembly and not in the content.
\nStep back and the portrait reorganizes the standard one. The usual telling makes Waxman a reporter who added conferences and a women’s network to a news business. Interaction ritual theory inverts the order. She is a producer of emotional energy and membership who uses reporting to seed the symbols her gatherings ignite. The cause and the strategy talk are the focus; the barrier is the source of value; the live floor is the irreplaceable good; and the firm is a chain engineered so that energy raised at one link carries a paying participant to the next. She sells what assemblies have always sold, the charge of belonging to a center, and she charges admission at the door. <\/p>\n

The Two Exits: Sharon Waxman and the Economics of Leaving<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Albert O. Hirschman<\/a> (1915-2012) built a small, durable theory out of a plain question. When an organization slips, when a firm’s product decays or a state loses its way, the people attached to it have two broad responses. They can leave, which Hirschman calls exit, the quiet economic act of taking one’s custom or one’s labor elsewhere. Or they can stay and complain, which he calls voice, the noisy political act of agitating from within for repair. The two trade against each other. Easy exit drains the discontent that would otherwise fuel voice, so the most quality-conscious members depart first and leave the organization worse, deprived of the very people who might have forced a fix. A third element, loyalty, holds the balance. Loyalty raises the cost of leaving, keeps able members in their seats, and gives voice the time it needs to work. The talented insider sits at the center of Hirschman’s drama, because she is the one with the best outside options and therefore the lowest cost of exit, which makes her departure both the likeliest and the most damaging. Read through this frame, Sharon Waxman’s career turns on two decisions to leave, and the second one is the more interesting, because she did not merely exit a firm. She exited a model, and she built the alternative she left to find.
\nTake the first exit. She resigned from the New York Times in January 2008 rather than accept a transfer to the New York headquarters. Hirschman would read the years before the resignation as a long passage of voice. The 2004 Weinstein draft and its fate stand as the sharpest instance, a reporter pressing a story the institution declined to run in full, an argument made from inside about what the paper should print. Voice, in Hirschman, works only when the institution gives it a channel and a hearing, and only when exit stays costly enough that staying to argue beats leaving to escape. When a capable member concludes that the channel is closed and the cost of leaving has fallen, voice gives way to exit. The transfer order supplied the occasion. The deeper trigger, on this reading, was a judgment that further argument would change nothing, the precise condition under which Hirschman expects the able to walk. She held strong outside options, the lowest exit cost of anyone in her position, and she used them.
\nThe second exit. She had concluded that newspapers could no longer compete in a faster digital market for entertainment news. She did not move from one legacy paper to a better legacy paper, which would have been ordinary exit, custom transferred to a rival of the same kind. She left the legacy newspaper model itself and founded TheWrap in 2009, an independent digital outlet for the business of entertainment and media. In Hirschman’s terms she declined both standing options at once. She would not keep using voice inside the old institutions, and she would not merely exit to a competitor that shared their defects. She exited the category and built a new one. The act sits at the edge of Hirschman’s scheme, where exit stops being a consumer choosing another seller and becomes an entrepreneur creating the alternative that the market did not yet offer.
\nWhat she gained by owning the exit is what Hirschman’s logic predicts. Inside the Times, voice ran upward into a hierarchy that could overrule it, and the 2004 episode showed where that road ended. Inside a firm she owns, the relation inverts. She no longer petitions an editor. She sets the terms. The founder converts a position of voice, always dependent on someone above granting the hearing, into a position of control, where the decision to print is hers. Hirschman prizes voice as the political faculty, the willingness to stay and contest rather than slip away, and there is a reading in which founding an outlet is voice raised to its highest power, the discontented member building the platform from which her argument can no longer be buried. The 2017 retelling of the Weinstein story, published under her own masthead, is voice exercised from the far side of exit, the story she could not fully run inside the institution now run on her own page.
\nThe losses are equally legible. The first loss falls on the institution she left. His central worry is that exit by the quality-conscious degrades what they abandon, because the members most able to force improvement are the ones who leave. Her departure removed from the Times a reporter willing to press hard stories, and the frame would count that as a small instance of the general pattern, the able insider exiting and leaving the institution with one less source of corrective pressure. The reform she might have forced from within, she instead pursued from without, and the old institution kept whatever defects her continued voice might have addressed.
\nThe second loss falls on the founder. Exit promised independence, escape from a hierarchy that could overrule her judgment. Hirschman’s framework asks what the new arrangement depends on, and the dependence reappears in altered form. The firm she built sells access through the Grill conference and subscriptions through WrapPRO, and runs a women’s-leadership franchise in the Power Women Summit. Those products tie the outlet to the industry it covers, since conferences and subscriptions draw their revenue from that industry. She escaped editorial control and acquired commercial dependence. The exit from the institution did not deliver exit from the field, and a coverage decision that might anger the executives who fund the conferences carries a cost the salaried correspondent never had to weigh. Independence of one kind was purchased with exposure of another. Hirschman would not call this a failure of the exit. He would call it the standing condition of the independent founder, who trades a boss for a market and finds the market has demands of its own.
\nThe frame also reaches the third element. Loyalty, for Hirschman, is the force that keeps the able member in her seat long enough for voice to work, the attachment that raises the cost of leaving. Twice Waxman’s loyalty proved insufficient to hold her, first to the Times and then to the newspaper model that trained her, and in both cases the insufficiency was rational rather than fickle. Loyalty restrains exit only while the member believes the institution can be brought back to health. When that belief fails, loyalty releases its hold, and the most capable, holding the best alternatives, leave first. Her two exits mark two such moments, two judgments that the institution in question would not recover and that her energy would do more outside it than within.
\nThe 2021 account of her own newsroom closes the circuit, because the founder who twice chose exit now stands on the receiving end of it. Former employees described a harsh workplace and steep turnover, and she rejected the account. Turnover is exit, in Hirschman’s plainest sense, members taking their labor elsewhere. The reading does not settle whether the complaints were fair. It notes the symmetry the framework exposes. The person who left two institutions when voice failed her now runs an institution that others leave, and the same theory that honors her departures as the rational acts of an able insider describes her departing staff in identical terms. Exit is available to the talented wherever they sit, including below her, and a firm that loses them is, on Hirschman’s account, losing the people most able to improve it.
\nStep back and the two exits compose a single argument about leaving. Waxman is a study in the able member’s lowest-cost option exercised twice, once against a paper and once against a whole model, by someone who declined to spend her remaining voice on institutions she judged past reform. She gained the founder’s control and the platform that control affords. She lost the leverage her continued voice might have applied to the institutions she left, and she traded editorial dependence for commercial dependence on the industry she covers. To put it in Hirschman’s register, she did not choose between exit and voice. She used exit to manufacture a more durable voice, and she now lives with the bill that owning the exit sends. <\/p>\n

Drawing the Line: Sharon Waxman and the Jurisdiction of the Beat<\/strong><\/p>\n

Andrew Abbott (b. 1948) treats professions not as fixed occupations but as competitors in a system, each laying claim to a stretch of work the way a country claims territory. The unit of the contest is jurisdiction, the link between a profession and the tasks it asserts as its own. Jurisdiction must be won and held against rivals who want the same ground, and it is defended on several fronts at once, in the workplace where the work gets done, before the public that grants recognition, and in the abstract, where a profession justifies its claim by tying the work to a body of knowledge only it commands. The decisive weapon is that abstraction. A group that can define the task at a higher level, that can say what the work really consists of, can absorb neighboring tasks and expel rivals as unqualified to do them. Thomas Gieryn (b. 1950) supplies the rhetorical half of the same process. Studying how scientists mark themselves off from non-science, he names the practice boundary-work, the drawing of a line that places the speaker’s activity inside the zone of the legitimate and casts the rival’s outside it. The line is a contingent construction, drawn to serve the drawer, redrawn as the contest shifts. Read through these two frames together, Sharon Waxman’s stated method becomes an act of jurisdiction and a piece of boundary-work, a claim over the entertainment beat and a line drawn against the people who held it before her.
\nEntertainment journalism, on her account, covers the business and the structure of the industry, its corporate ownership, executive power, financial incentives, and technological change, rather than celebrity copy. Abbott would read that definition as a jurisdictional claim pitched at the level of abstraction, where the real battles are won. She did not say she covered Hollywood better than her rivals at the same task. She redefined the task. The legitimate object of the beat, she asserted, is the structure, and the gossip that long filled the trades is a lesser thing, perhaps not the work at all. Setting the definition that high lets her annex the serious material, the mergers and the leadership fights and the streaming economics, and consign the celebrity coverage to a category beneath notice. Whoever sets the abstraction sets the boundary of the profession, and she reached for the abstraction.
\nGieryn names what the move accomplishes rhetorically. The contrast between business reporting and gossip is a boundary drawn to sort insiders from outsiders. On the legitimate side she places investigative work, financial analysis, and the treatment of the industry as a major business. On the far side she places the celebrity item, the red-carpet note, the studio-fed puff. The line is not given by nature. Gossip and business reporting are both long-standing parts of entertainment coverage, and the boundary between them is a choice about where to cut, made by someone with a stake in where the cut falls. Drawn her way, the line places her work inside the zone of serious journalism and places the established trades, insofar as they trade in celebrity, partly outside it. The boundary is the argument. To accept her definition of the beat is to accept her ranking of the people who work it.
\nThe claim drew force from her trajectory. A jurisdictional bid must be credible to the audience that grants recognition, and credibility rests on a knowledge base the claimant can show. Waxman arrived at Hollywood from the foreign desk, from Reuters in Jerusalem and the coverage of war and diplomacy, the high-prestige reaches of the trade. The colleague who recruited her to the Times had himself been a foreign correspondent, and the kinship of background carried weight. She imported the standards of hard news into a soft beat, and the imported credential backed the claim that the beat should be treated as hard. A reporter without that history might draw the same line and persuade fewer people. Her path supplied the knowledge base that made the jurisdictional claim stick.
\nThe books extend the same bid by other means. Rebels on the Backlot treats six directors through the development, financing, and corporate struggle behind their films rather than through the texture of their celebrity. Loot reports the legal and institutional fight over looted antiquities. Both enact the definition she argues for, the beat as structure and business and law. Abbott would call the books a demonstration of the knowledge base, proof on the page that the elevated definition yields work the lesser definition cannot. Each book is a claim that this is what the subject looks like when a serious person takes it seriously.
\nFounding the firm carried the jurisdictional contest onto ground she controlled. Inside the Times the definition of the beat was settled by editors above her. TheWrap let her institutionalize the claim, building an outlet on business reporting and investigative exclusives and pitching it against the established trades. Abbott notes that jurisdiction settles differently in different arenas, and the workplace settlement often diverges from the public one. As founder she set the workplace settlement herself, an organization built around her definition of the work, and from it she pressed the public claim against Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the incumbents whose ground she entered. The framing of the outlet as the only independently owned Hollywood trade is itself boundary-work, a line that separates her from rivals not only by what they cover but by who owns them, independence offered as the mark of the legitimate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharon Waxman (b. 1963) is an American journalist, author, and media entrepreneur. She founded TheWrap in 2009 and serves as its chief executive and editor in chief. The site covers the business of entertainment and media, and it remains the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t