Gray wrote: “It’s a new world in the media, and it’s a new world at Variety. Our content will remain basically the same, but the financial structure will change. We’ve already started making money from the paywall, events and conferences, licensing, etc etc. While these are new areas, the primary concern is this: What can we give Variety readers that they need, and what can we do better than anyone else? Believe me, these new areas are not done lightly or arbitrarily.”

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Gray assured his remaining staff that “today’s changes won’t be noticed by readers ... “it doesn’t make economic sense to have full-time reviewers.” That may be so but it’s hard to imagine the critics’ departure will go unnoticed—unless they take him up on the offer to become freelance reviewers.

His advice: “Ignore the bloggers (who obviously are trying in vain to steal our readers and our advertisers), ignore the obits for Old Media, ignore the negatives and the craziness that this economy has created. The people in the Depression bounced back, and so will all of us who are going through this crisis. I cannot repeat this often enough: Variety is in profit, which means we’re here to stay.”

Trade vet Anne Thomson’s take is far less optimistic. Thomson, ex-Hollywood Reporter and Variety, writes of watching Variety staffers struggle with cost-saving tech during the Oscars and laments the loss of the staff critics that to her made “the paper a global industry must-read.” As if to answer that Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert tweeted that he was canceling his subscription: “Variety fires Todd McCarthy and I cancel my subscription. He was my reason to read the paper. RIP, schmucks.”

But Gray and the others at Variety are after a different kind of reader, the one who subscribes for its business coverage, not its reviews. What will that reader notice?