Beckman at a THR Oscars party in 2010.

There's nothing like a pre-holiday Friday afternoon news dump. While just about everyone is off drinking on a patio somewhere, we imagine, toasting to Katie Holmes's freedom and Adele's spawn, Adweek confirms WWD's report that Prometheus Media CEO Richard Beckman is stepping down.

Adweek says it was by "mutual consent," but Mr. Beckman's exit has been rumored in the New York Post for just about forever. A former Conde Nast and Fairchild executive, he was hired to breathe some life into trade publications The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek and Billboard. For example, brought in Us Weekly's Janice Min, who turned THR into a glossy magazine and must-read website for breaking news. But about a year ago, Mr. Beckman abdicated some of the daily oversight of the company to spearhead international brand development, prompting reports that he'd been demoted after clashing with Prometheus Global Media chairman Jimmy Finkelstein. (Mr. Beckman denied this.) Speculation escalated after Michael Wolff, Mr. Beckman's hire for the top of Adweek, was pushed out in October.

Click through to Adweek for quotes in which Mr. Beckman and Mr. Finkelstein wish each other the best.

Illustration by Fred Harper.

One weeknight late last month, TheWrap.com editor in chief Sharon Waxman sent an email to The Hollywood Reporter’s editorial director, Janice Min, shortly before 1 in the morning. Ms. Waxman asked Ms. Min if they could speak in person, privately, about how to improve the relationship between their publications. During the previous two days, Ms. Waxman had feuded with Ms. Min’s web editor, Joseph Kapsch, over a story on TheWrap that said Mr. Kapsch was considering leaving THR as part of an “editorial exodus” that saw three employees depart. Mr. Kapsch, who, as of this writing, remains employed at THR, blasted TheWrap, or, as he called it, “The Crap,” on Twitter and in a 600-word response he sent to the media blog FishbowlLA.

Prior to emailing Ms. Min, Ms. Waxman forwarded copies of Mr. Kapsch’s statements to two executives at THR’s parent company, Prometheus Global Media. She urged one to see how badly his employee was treating her. She told the other to watch his back.

“It’s kind of amusing, these blogger characters out here,” Ms. Min said, ever eager to remain above the fray. “They really enjoy ruminating and obsessing over what we do. It’s just part of the kooky Net landscape out here.”

Hollywood has always felt like a small town, but it may never have felt smaller than it does right now among the members of the city’s Hollywood press. For decades Daily Variety was the sector’s indisputed leader, the prime organ not only for scoops but for wild speculation, backroom smoke signals, trial balloons and brazen displays of wishful thinking as well. The Hollywood Reporter seemed content to take the number-two spot.

Then came Nikki. And Sharon. And Janice. And, never one to miss a party, Bonnie.

Never mind that the ad market is struggling and print is on the slab. Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily, which launched online in March 2006, has gradually become a full-scale news operation. In 2009, former New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman launched a competing website, TheWrap. Later that year, Bonnie Fuller stepped into the mix with the gossip and lifestyle site Hollywood Life for Deadline’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation.

Ms. Min.

The digital threat led the legacy publications to adopt new strategies. At the end of 2009, Variety erected an online paywall. Last October, THR imported  Janice Min to revamp its website and relaunch the print publication as a weekly with a broader focus.

The result has been an increasingly brutal, fiercely personal competition replete with rampant poaching, vituperative blog posts and threats of legal action.

No one who knows anything worth telling comes without a complex history and connections. Therefore, like all good Tinseltown tales, this story must include a disclosure. For six months last year, this reporter was employed at TheWrap, where we were overworked, underpaid and regularly subjected to Ms. Waxman’s mood swings. The last straw was when Ms. Waxman consistently berated us over the phone on our first day off in ages—Yom Kippur. Ms. Waxman declined to comment on this story.

Ms. Fuller.

There’s more: During our time on the Left Coast, we also extensively reported on the work of Nikki Finke. Ms. Finke does not like this reporter, to the point where she insisted on relaying her comments for this article through an Observer editor. Also: We also had lunch with a THR editor and discussed a hypothetical job that never panned out. That editor is not quoted in this piece. We have friends and former colleagues at all four trades.

Between Ms. Fuller, the famously mercurial, famously successful editor, who displayed a magic touch at Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, before almost singlehandedly reviving the celebrity weekly with US, and the even-tempered Ms. Min, her former No. 2, who took over after Ms. Fuller left the magazine, there’s a natural competition.

More ferocious is the rivalry between Ms. Finke and Ms. Waxman, who were once such good friends, Ms. Finke used to go to Shabbes dinner at Ms. Waxman’s house and still praises the Moroccan tagine. However she told the Observer, “I won’t talk to her anymore.”

Deadline began as a column in LA Weekly penned by Ms. Finke, a former debutante who worked in the Associated Press’s Moscow bureau before covering the Hollywood beat for several publications, including Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and, yes, The New York Observer. Deadline launched online in March of 2006. Since then, Ms. Finke has developed a larger-than-life reputation due to her formidable influence, her highly placed sources, her catch-phrase “Toldja!” and her various eccentricities.

For example, Ms. Finke is never seen in public and has rarely been photographed. The one known image of her is a black-and-white glamour shot taken for a book jacket. “I don’t know why people make such a fuss about this,” she said. “In 2006 I needed a professional photo. I haven’t needed a photo taken of me since then.” Last February, this reporter was involved in an effort to capture a picture of the elusive Ms. Finke for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily. We published a photo of a woman leaving the gated underground garage at Ms. Finke’s apartment building that we felt confident was she. “The photo purporting to be me posted by The Daily was not me,” she said. We were unable to definitively prove otherwise.

Ms. Finke edits Deadline by working the phones from her home in Westwood. She is notoriously combative, particularly with certain reporters who write about her. When The Observer reached out to Ms. Finke to get her take on the trade landscape, she responded with a strongly worded email accusing this correspondent of “reckless disregard for the truth.”

Then another email came in purporting to back her claim. And another, copied up and down the masthead. A flurry of phone calls followed. Claiming that this reporter once declared an intent to “destroy” her, she demanded that the story be reassigned.

With an approach some call bullying but Ms. Finke prefers to call “being honest,” she managed to earn a reputation as both a crusading journalist and a bona fide Hollywood power broker. “If someone acts like a moron, I’m going to call them on it,” she said. “If someone lies to me, I’m going to call them on it. But I also take responsibility for my own behavior. Sometimes my passion gets the best of me.” In 2009, she made the leap from mysterious blogger to establishment player with the help of a deep-pocketed backer, a young heir named Jay Penske who purchased Deadline through a deal that gave Ms. Finke what is said to be an eight-figure contract and eight-year term. With Mr. Penske’s backing, in 2010 Ms. Finke was able to poach a pair of marquee talents: 20-year Variety veteran Mike Fleming and THR’s TV editor, Nellie Andreeva.

Ms. Waxman. (Getty)

Ms. Finke and her team have since been able to amass a monthly audience of approximately 1.6 million readers, according to Quantcast, and during Oscar and Emmy seasons even put out a print publication “that made a shitload of money,” she said.

In January 2009, Deadline found itself with a new competitor when Ms. Waxman launched a digital trade of her own, TheWrap. Their relationship quickly soured as Ms. Waxman encroached on what Ms. Finke considered Deadline’s turf. (TheWrap’s traffic was 1.1 million last month, according to Quantcast.)

Still, the THR writer we spoke with said TheWrap isn’t as important to keep up with as Deadline. “I just don’t think they’re breaking stories as much as they used to,” the writer said.

TheWrap’s work has also drawn endless criticism from Deadline. In February, Deadline’s parent company sent a cease and desist letter to Ms. Waxman and members of TheWrap’s board accusing the site of stealing scoops. “It has become apparent that TheWrap.com and its employees have engaged in a continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com [and] passing off that information as its own,” the letter said.

Ms. Finke gleefully announced the legal salvo on her site. “I will not, and can not, allow anyone to rip off Team Deadline’s exclusive coverage,” she wrote. “TheWrap.com has had many wholesale staff turnovers...and at present is operating with just a handful of reporters.”

Ms. Finke was correct. From April 2010 until the end of last year, Ms. Waxman lost at least six employees, including two reporters who went to Variety and this reporter, who joined The Daily.

Bert Fields, an entertainment attorney who represented TheWrap, responded with a letter to Deadline’s parent company, PMC (then called MMC). “TheWrap has not engaged in the conduct you claim and has done nothing that violates MMC’s rights,” Mr. Fields wrote. “By contrast, MMC has demonstrably and repeatedly violated my client’s rights, including but not limited to violations of the antitrust laws (giving rise to treble damage claims), as well as unfair competition and trade libel. Indeed, MMC’s attempt to monopolize newsworthy subjects by threatening spurious lawsuits is, in itself, violative of the law, as are its numerous attempts to threaten and coerce others to refrain from supporting or dealing with TheWrap and its repeated publication of false and defamatory statements about TheWrap.”

Seven months later, PMC filed suit against The Hollywood Reporter’s parent company, Prometheus Global Media, alleging that code from the PMC site TVLine.com was used for THR’s website. Prometheus responded by removing the offending code from THR.com.

It’s easy to see why THR’s website would be scrutinized by PMC. In the 13 months since Ms. Min has taken over the reins, her blend of consumer-friendly celebrity news and trade coverage has brought in record traffic. According to Quantcast, THR had a record month in October drawing approximately 6.5 million readers, a much larger audience than either TheWrap or Deadline attracts.

Ms. Min is not a fan of the traditional trade approach. “In some ways, the whole thing had evolved into some echo chamber where 1,000 people were talking to the same 1,000 people,” she said. Conventional wisdom on Ms. Min’s revamp of THR is that she has broadened the focus by adding more consumer friendly celebrity coverage. Ms. Min said her approach isn’t simply about mixing celebrity and trade media, instead, she prefers to think THR has “expanded what is considered to be an entertainment story pertinent to the business.” Still, getting away from inside-baseball trade news, she added, has felt “a little like being the first prospector in California.”

Ms. Finke has staked out the opposite approach. “We’ve always been a celebrity-free zone,” she told us. “And Hollywood tells us it’s grateful for that. We are an entertainment business site and proud of it.”

Meanwhile, Variety, which dealt with the new digital challengers in the trade space by walling off its online content, has largely disappeared from the conversation.

“In Variety’s case, it’s almost that we don’t even know it exists anymore,” a THR writer told us. “We don’t even care.”

According to the web traffic measuring service Quantcast, Variety’s online traffic of approximately 360,000 monthly readers is dwarfed by their competition. Web circulation may be down, but Kimberly Gebbett, Variety’s director of marketing, said the paywall has had other benefits like 6,000 new paid digital subscribers and an increase in paid print circulation.

“We believe our content is absolutely valuable enough to be paid for and our subscribers believe the same,” Ms. Gebbett said. “It’s absolutely profitable.”

Meanwhile, despite Ms. Finke’s success, insiders say all is not well in the House of Penske. Other sites owned by Penske Media Corporation, Hollywood Life, Movieline, Boy Genius Report and OnCars.com, aren’t enjoying similar growth, and the company recently suffered a spate of layoffs due to cash-flow problems. Morale is said to be low.

Focusing on lifestyle and gossip, Hollywood Life was launched by Ms. Fuller in the summer of 2009. Former employees say PMC has repeatedly had to warn the editor about budget overruns exacerbated by her lavish personal expenses.

We reached out to PMC for comment, and Mr. Penske emailed to tell us, “I feel very fortunate to be working with two of the most prolific and successful editors in entertainment journalism. Though Deadline and HollywoodLife are two separate businesses of PMC, and Nikki and Bonnie produce two very different editorial products each day—in their respective fields, there is no equal.”

According to multiple insiders, Ms. Fuller was repeatedly warned to get her budget in line. “They basically told her, between the freelancers and your expenses, it’s not working, so if you go over your budget, it’s coming out of your salary,” a former HollywoodLife employee said. “She spends a ton of money, she expenses every little thing,” our tipster added. “She’ll write ‘two dollars’ on a post-it and then she’ll be like, ‘This is from November, it was a coat check.’”

Our sources also said Ms. Fuller put family and friends on the payroll including one woman who was given a six-figure salary before being fired by PMC for chronic lateness and absenteeism. Sofia Fuller, Ms. Fuller’s college-age daughter, has also worked at HollywoodLife. Another former employee said Sofia also spent freely from her mother’s expense account.

“She said, ‘I went to go hook up with my boyfriend. I was so wasted that I expensed it to my mom’s account,” said our source.

Welcome to Hollywood.

hwalker@observer.com

Additional reporting by Aaron Gell

Update (4:47 p.m.): This story was updated to clarify current traffic statistics for THR.com, TVLine's role in the web code lawsuit and Mr. Kapsch's employment status.

via NYPost.com

Back when Janice Min was editor of US Weekly, she seemed like a general in the celebrity-industrial complex's war on culture.

Now that she's editor of Prometheus' glossy L.A. trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, she says she was always more of a mercenary.

“I found growing the business interesting, but I didn’t find the actual content interesting,” she told Nick Axelrod in an Elle profile this month (that doubles as  great media business read). “I didn’t want to be the Us Weekly lady for the rest of my life.”

Like any self-respecting overachiever, she gave it her all anyway. Mr. Axelrod writes:

Min’s commitment to the job was all-consuming, as evidenced by the tale of her spending the entire weekend before giving birth to her first child [...] negotiating coverage of the surprise wedding of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony. The cover story on the nuptials closed in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and by 7:50 a.m., Min was dishing withToday’s Matt Lauer about J.Lo’s intimate, 40-person reception in the backyard of her Beverly Hills home—“absolutely the anti-Bennifer wedding,” she noted. (Though, of course, J.Lo and Anthony announced their very Bennifer breakup this summer.) Afterward, Min left Rocke­feller Center to see her doctor, who told her that her water was breaking. She went to the hospital that afternoon and gave birth to her son, Will, two days later. The issue sold 1,009,217 copies on newsstands. It was Min’s first million-plus seller.

And she did it all while looking out for number one, of course. Elle reports she brought in $2 million a year thanks to her "politely relentless negotiating prowess."

We were happy to learn that her years in celebrity wrangling weren't for naught. Industry execs are just as press-hungry and vain.

The Reporter, is more Chaucer, less Dante, busy chronicling (and in part creating) characters who, while they may make dumb, even craven, moves, are never villains. It’s all for one and one for all in the magical world of Min’s Hollywood. And playing nice, or at least nicer—certainly the Reporter’s glossy cover, now coveted promotional real estate, is an appeal to the town’s vanity—is not without tangible benefits. Last November, the producer of ABC’s hit Two and a Half Men, Chuck Lorre, shone on the front of the Reporter, and a few months later the website broke the story that Ashton Kutcher would take over Charlie Sheen’s role on the show. In July, a January cover boy, Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy, called the Reporter with this nugget: He was replacing the show’s three biggest stars—Lea Michele, Cory Monteith, and Chris Colfer—after the fourth season. Coincidence, or good old-fashioned reporting, combined with the clout that comes with fulfilling peoples’ narcissistic needs? Does it matter?

Under Janice Min, who was brought in by Richard Beckman to helm THR after a stint editing Us Weekly, the publication has ditched the daily print model that had become economically unfeasible — especially in the era when Nikki Finke and her ilk can get scoops papers like THR and Variety used to have a lock on. 

The Wrap, a THR competitor, responded to the cover by sneering that it featured only white actresses. According to The Wrap's rationale, this merited a comparison it to Vanity Fair's March 2010 "New Hollywood" issue, which featured nine on-the-rise actresses and little diversity. The Annie Leibowitz-shot cover spread drummed up a decent amount of criticism, and in the end didn't even sell that many copies. The 300,000 snapped up were enough to make it the magazine's worst-selling issue at that point in the year. 

Considering the amount of vitriol Sharon Waxman and her colleagues at The Wrap have expended on The Hollywood Reporter, we'll chalk the accusation of white-washing up to petty bickering. If the sites' difference in traffic from a few months ago has stayed contant, however, The Wrap's inferiority complex may lead them to keep firing shots. 

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Last week Ms. Waxman wrote a column about how Janice Min's sensibility was turning away Hollywood Reporter readers (Ms. Min allowed the word "bitch" to be used in a headline). This week Ms. Waxman is back to go after Richard Beckman for spending too much money on THR.

"Is anyone counting what they are spending over there?" asks Ms. Waxman. "Finkelstein’s new empire is throwing millions around like they’ve figured out how to make them back." It's nice that Ms. Waxman is worried, but her competition's budget shouldn't be a legitimate concern of hers unless she's nervous about being outclassed.

Ms. Waxman is alarmed by how much money Richard Beckman offered to Richard Johnson and how well executives on the ad side are being paid. She also heard from a THR insider told her that Ms. Min is spending $2 million on a redesign. "Oh! My! God!," she wrote.

Earlier: Sharon Waxman Pitches One Over Janice Min's Bow After 'Bitch'-y Headline

Ms. Waxman points to a story about Jennifer Aniston's latest film The Switch. A THR article about the film's lackluster box office ran under the headline "'Switch' a bitch for Jennifer Aniston." That sort of language is unbecoming for a trade publication. Ms. Waxman continues:

If the aggressive headlines are meant to spark attention, other August headlines are focusing on warmer, fuzzier celebrity fare, including such articles as:  “Emma Thompson deals with ‘mild depression'" and  “Mary Kate Olsen opens up about early career.”

This is the kind of fluff Ms. Min said she told The New York Times she was going to avoid at the beginning of the summer.

“For an industry publication, they’ve got to decide what they are," one Hollywood publicist told Ms. Waxman. "It certainly seems a little out of place.”

Fair enough, but also worth noting that this is essentially a hit piece on Ms. Waxman's competition, and it comes two days after THR announced that it was slaughtering The Wrap in traffic.

(via)

Design director Shanti Marlar, senior online editor Lindsay Powers and staff writer (Min's former assistant) Lauren Schutte are all following their old boss to Los Angeles, according to Keith Kelly. The three women bring the count of former Us Weekly staffers at THR up to five. Mr. Kelly reported earlier this week that Us Weekly's ciruclation has fallen to around 800,000. The title was regularly moving well over 1 million copies per week during Janice Min's tenure .

Earlier this week Glamour lost executive fashion editor-at-large Suze Yalof Schwartz to the West Coast. We hear the summer never ends there.

The May 10 issue of People — with Sandra Bullock and her recently adopted baby on the cover — sold 2,225,000 copies off the newsstand. ABC will release complete set of ciruclation data from the first half of the year on August 9.

Ms. Min reiterated that she is not interested in covering "what Lindsay Lohan Wore today," although she will attempt to reach a larger audience.

"The key audience is still the industry influencers," Ms. Min said. "I would like THR to reach a broader audience of business influencers. When you think who is reading the industry trade you’re thinking of people in executive or creative roles. We live in very different era, where what goes on in Hollywood is impactful to lots of other industries — media, fashion, style."

"I think the opportunity with THR is to help set the news agenda for the industry instead of covering picky little details. I think you can capitalize on its history to have a powerful influential platform and voice," she said.

US Weekly circulation more than doubled during her tenure by making the magazine more relatable for the average reader.

Ms. Min recently moved out west, and wrote a piece in the Post about her anxieties over a $2 million–a–year salary that well exceeded her husband's salary. She recently sold her New York apartment for $7.3 million.

Mr. Beckman likes to spend, and he is no doubt giving Ms. Min a very, very handsome salary, as well.