Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne delivered an unexpected announcement to voting members who zoomed in to a special meeting called on Friday. Moving forward, Globes members will no longer be paid salaries as it does away with a controversial element of how its voting body is organized.
Hoehne held a meeting with an estimated 50 voters that had been members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and had signed contracts with its new corporate owners in June 2023 that entitled them to a base salary of $75,000 annually in a five-year deal.
The executive notified members that they’d be offered a severance of $102,500 as the Globes shifts to phasing out payments to its voters. Those members — all of whom have to reapply for accreditation each year — were offered a chance to stay on as Globes voters for the next telecast in January 2026, but will not be paid for future shows.
A spokesperson for the Golden Globes describes the change in policy as an acknowledgement that continuing to pay members could add to a perception of bias in voting. The rep also said that it was fully meeting its contractual obligations to the voters by offering the severance. Those 50 paid voting members are a subset of the Globes voting body, which is currently composed of 300 members representing 85 countries.
Other major awards events in Hollywood — the Oscars, the Emmys and the Grammys — don’t pay their voters, since it’s considered an honor just to be part of the academy. Going forward, the Globes will operate under similar logic.
It marks the latest move for the company that owns the Golden Globes, a joint venture set up between moguls Todd Boehly and Jay Penske titled Penske Media Eldridge. That firm is part of a company, PMC, that owns many of the entertainment industry’s biggest news outlets, including The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, that traditionally cover the Oscars, Grammys, Emmys and Globes. The longtime producer of the Globes telecast, Dick Clark Productions, is also part of PMC. And Boehly’s Eldridge Industries has a financial stake in Cain International, which has an interest in the Beverly Hilton hotel, the venue that hosts the Globes.
Boehly had announced a deal to buy the Globes from the HFPA a year after the awards show imploded following claims of mismanagement and unethical conduct of the voting body that were detailed in a blockbuster February 2021 Los Angeles Times story. The article kick-started a domino effect among public relations firms and talent to boycott the honors (stars even returned statuettes).
NBC scuttled plans to air the event in 2022, which was another blow to the organization. During its last year as a nonprofit, the HFPA disclosed expenses of $5,196,769 in salaries, other compensation and employee benefits, per a filing with the IRS for its fiscal year ending in June 2023. Its highest paid employee that year was chief operating officer Gregory P. Goeckner, who received $326,072. (Goeckner is now CEO of the nonprofit Golden Globes Foundation.) As president, Hoehne received compensation of $215,177 and the HFPA listed 108 employees at the time.
In June of 2022, Boehly’s Eldridge Industries had unveiled its plan to buy Globes assets and turn the company into a for-profit venture. Three months later, the new-look HFPA added 103 international non-member voters to its ranks. Unlike the 50 members who carried over from the nonprofit to the for-profit company, these voters were not paid.
During this time, Boehly had framed these payments to voters as part of the process of professionalizing the Golden Globes and adding accountability. “I wouldn’t call them paid voters,” Boehly told the Los Angeles Times in 2022 for an article detailing the changes being made. “I don’t know why a paid journalist can’t also vote on something. Where’s the rule that says that?”
After implementing a series of organizational changes, the Globes returned to the air on NBC for one year in 2023, with 6.25 million viewers tuning in for what turned out to be the second-lowest rated Globes during its nearly three-decade run on the network. Yet that relaunch for the Globes spurred a new, five-year deal with CBS to air the honors, which jumped to 9.47 million viewers in 2024 and 9.27 million viewers for the Nikki Glaser-hosted telecast on Jan. 5 of this year.