The Golden Globes Will Stop Paying Voters $75,000 Salaries

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Just when we thought all eyes were on the Academy! Heading into Oscars weekend, news broke that the Golden Globes will no longer pay its legacy voting members base salaries of $75,000 a year. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Golden Globes president Helen Hoehne informed the impacted voters — said to be around 50 former members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — of the decision in a Zoom meeting on February 28. Per Deadline, a spokesperson for the Golden Globes said that this move is a way of acknowledging that the practice of paying members “could add to the perception of bias in voting.”

There are currently 300 members in the Globes voting body. The $75,000 salaries were laid out in a five-year deal specific to ex-HFPA members who were carried over when a 2023 corporate purchase turned the Golden Globes into a for-profit venture owned by Todd Boehly and Jay Penske’s Penske Media Eldridge, which itself is under Penske Media Corporation. (PMC owns multiple entertainment news outlets and has a 20% stake in Vox Media, Vulture and New York Magazine’s parent company). Affected voters are being offered severance pay of $102,500, which a Golden Globes rep said is in accordance with the contract negotiated in 2023.

Boehly has previously said that his goal was to change the scandal-plagued Globes from “a not-for-profit with no accountability and bad governance to an organization where there is employee-based accountability.” He told the Los Angeles Times in 2023 that he felt that paying the voting members would eliminate “conflicts of interest” tied to the HFPA’s access to talent for journalism assignments, and keep them from being swayed by “things other than just being authentic and having real integrity.” Hopefully the Golden Globes can still find a way to get there without the salaries?