The Golden Globes has announced that it’ll no longer be paying $75,000 a year salaries to a subset of its voting members, per The Hollywood Reporter. Globes president Helen Hoehne broke the news to the affected…employees?…on Friday evening, informing roughly 50 of the award program’s 300 voting members that they, like the rest of their colleagues, would now no longer be compensated for their participation.
And you may ask yourself: Why were roughly 1/6th of the Golden Globes’ voters getting paid 75 grand a year for their ballots, while the rest were getting zilch? The answer to which, if you squint a little, is “Because a mere $75,000 is way less corrupt than things allegedly used to be.” The paid arrangement, see, dates back to the purchase of the brand from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association a few years ago, amidst a massive scandal that saw the former group get lambasted by the press, former award recipients, and even NBC, which refused to air the ceremony in 2022. When the HFPA sold the Globes—to Penske Media Eldridge, a complicated little bolus of Hollywood properties that includes Dick Clark Productions, which actually produced the Globes show, as well as (through its sister companies) Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Billboard, and Rolling Stone—new owner Todd Boehly announced a plan to start paying a salary to those members of the HFPA who stayed on.
As laid out in an L.A. Times article from the time, Boehly claimed turning those existing voters—but not, notably, the new voters who had just been added to the voting rolls to combat the HFPA’s horrific lapses in representation—into paid employees of Penske Media Eldridge (whose duties just happened to include voting in the Globes each year) would allow the company added oversight over their conduct. (Boehly made some noises about these members also producing written work for the organization, although it’s not clear how much of that ever actually surfaced.) Given that a lot of HFPA members had gotten accused, at various times, of leveraging the exclusive access their Globes voting status got them to screenings and press conferences into easy paychecks, the hope was presumably that $75k with bennies (and a boss) would quiet things down. Or, to put it in Boehly’s words: “You transition the organization from a not-for-profit with no accountability and bad governance to an organization where there is employee-based accountability.”
Anyway, that’s all over now, as PME is ending the five-year contract it signed with these members in 2023 several years early, with the stated goal of moving the Globes away from paying voters at all—something that sets it apart from the Oscars, the Emmys, and basically every other major award show that people actually pay attention to. The 50-ish paid voting members won’t be abruptly left out in the cold, though: They’re reportedly being offered $102,500 in severance, and will stay on as voters for the 2026 show before having to apply for re-accreditation.
