Backstage (the company) was founded by Allen Zwerdling and Ira Eaker in New York City in December 1960 as a weekly tabloid-sized newspaper called Back Stage.

[1] Zwerdling and Eaker had worked together for years as editor and advertising director, respectively, of the Show Business casting newspaper, which was founded by Leo Shull as Actor's Cues in 1941.

After Zwerdling and Eaker left Show Business they looked into creating a casting section within The Village Voice newspaper; but, having been turned down, they decided to launch Backstage on their own.

[2] At the time of its founding, Backstage (the newsmagazine) was primarily a casting paper for New York actors intended to compete with Show Business Weekly.

It gradually broadened its scope to include coverage of New York's television commercial production industry and a variety of performing arts, the former of which proved to be so lucrative advertising-wise that the commercial-production beat came to dominate the publication.

[3] Owing to the disparity between its main areas of coverage—a focus on casting and entertainment-industry job opportunities, general coverage of the performing arts (acting, legitimate theatre, cabaret, etc.

Sherry Eaker also fostered a relationship between Backstage and its historical antecedent, the British-based newspaper The Stage, which shared a similar look, printing schedule, and market-focus.

[8] VNU eventually came to own a variety of trade publications—including all of the BPI magazines as well as Mediaweek, Adweek, Film Journal International, The Hollywood Creative Directory, and many others—along with measurement company Nielsen Media Research, and events such as ShoWest and the Clio Awards.

Its early products included a paid member's area, which charged $9.95 per month for unlimited access to articles and casting calls across New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida, Las Vegas, and other key entertainment-industry hubs.

[citation needed] Starting in 2000, writer-editor-filmmaker and web-developer Luke Crowe joined the company, and began working on the development of online casting tools for Backstage.

The number of new casting notices listed on Backstage.com each week expanded from the hundreds to the thousands over the next few years, while monthly site traffic increased from the hundreds-of-thousands to the millions.

[citation needed] In addition to encompassing all of the content from Backstage's print publications, the website's scope continued to expand to include more online-exclusive casting notices and original online-only news stories, feature articles, entertainment-industry listings, and reviews.

In early 2009, Ross Reports was renamed Call Sheet by Backstage, working with The Hollywood Creative Directory to expand its listings to include a wider variety of entertainment-industry contacts.

However, Backstage also carved out its own industry niche by focusing on the needs of actors, models, performers, and casting directors; publishing directories (such as Call Sheet, a bimonthly listing of talent agents, casting directors, and film productions), books (actor handbooks and biographies published under the Watson-Guptill imprint Backstage Books),[14] casting-director mailing labels,[15] and special "insert" magazines (such as award-season nomination guides, theatre-school guides, and the ACTION magazine for actors interested in making their own movies); producing live events; and continuing the development of Internet casting technology.

Film and theatre were the main topics reviewed and reported upon, but the television, radio, dance, music, cabaret, voice-over, modeling, commercial advertising, and stand-up comedy industries were also included in Backstage's coverage.

Amato stated readers had requested that the print edition have a smaller form factor to make it easier to take to casting calls, while the redesigned website was meant to "[lead] the user into the products and content that we’ve seen historically be the most helpful for our audience".

By monitoring the notices, Backstage is able to quickly work to protect actors from scams,[28] while facilitating the distribution of hundreds of thousands of performance opportunities via a suite of online casting tools.

Previous cover subjects have included Academy Award winners Kevin Spacey, Benicio Del Toro, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o, and Eddie Redmayne.