“Today’s announcement is the result of a series of conversations I’ve had for a few months with Modi about the direction at THR,” Mr. Belloni said in an email to the staff. “Some may want to read into that, but I’ll just say that well-meaning, diligent, ambitious people can disagree about fundamental priorities and strategies.”

Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu are the founders of Media Rights Capital, a film and TV studio known as MRC whose properties include the 2019 film “Knives Out” and the Netflix drama “Ozark.” They started overseeing The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 as part of a reorganization of Valence Media, which also owns Dick Clark Productions.

Since Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu took charge, the people said, Valence Media has put pressure on Mr. Belloni to report favorably on people and projects with ties to MRC. That pressure started to increase last year, the people added, when Valence Media installed Ms. Brown as president of the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group.

Valence Media executives asked Mr. Belloni if they could give him a “sensitivity list” filled with names of people and companies in business with Mr. Wiczyk and Mr. Satchu, two people with knowledge of the matter said. If The Hollywood Reporter was planning to cover them, Mr. Belloni was supposed to alert his bosses, the people said. Mr. Belloni, who declined to comment for this article, refused to act on the list and also pushed back against efforts to kill certain articles.

Tensions mounted last month during conference calls held by Valence Media to explain its priorities to the editorial staff. The sessions were led by Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism center, whom Valence Media hired as an ethics consultant 18 months ago.