BuzzMedia Can't Bill Out: Remember BuzzMedia? They're the Mom-and-Pop Blog Devouring Machine that recently took over Spin. And a press release today announces their latest new and exciting addition to the team: Suri's Burn Book! How excited is everyone for this? 

BUZZMEDIA’s mission is to define digital culture. One way we do this is by publishing digital media brands that engage a loyal and devoted fan following with their authentic voice, compelling original content, and unsurpassed storytelling. There are a limited number of influential publishers, and that is very true for the entertainment categ—

We'd rather not let you finish, BuzzMedia CEO Tyler Goldman, because at the end of the day, you just purchased a Tumblr. Then again, it is a brand world. And the more brands you own, well, the more brands you own.

One thing they didn't announce in that press release: That their Vice Preisdent/GM of Music Bill Jensen—previously Village Voice Media's Director of New Media—is out at BuzzMedia after just eleven months (compared to a five-year-plus run at Village Voice Media). An email to the publicist who sent us the press release about their acquisition of Suri's Burn Book wasn't immediately returned, because it's probably not the response they expected, is why. Jensen was with BuzzMedia during an intense spree of acquisitions, including the aforementioned Spin, as well as a foursome of punk rock blogs and an electronic music blog. What could ever be so volatile in a company dedicated to swallowing smaller companies as a growth strategy that would result in the parting of a fairly credentialed new media guru after only eleven months? You tell us.

Beloved Music Writer Gets Important Job: And speaking of Village Voice Media, last week, we took note of Bullett writer Luke O’Neil's piece about reading something so terrible it made him want to quit writing about music. The piece he read was an LA Weekly blog post titled "The 20 Worst Hipster Bands," and yes, it did in fact read like a bad Facebook note written by an insecure Young Republican having a tough first semester away from his parents. That guy who wrote it? His name is Ben Westhoff, and get this: Village Voice Media has put him in charge of the company's music coverage, "particularly the blogs," according to an internal memo. But of course.

And the guy who put him in charge? VVM executive associate editor Andy Van De Voorde, who is basically the Isaiah Thomas to VVM chief Mike Lacey's James Dolan (which is to say: not naming him alongside Lacey in this piece titled "How Management Killed The Village Voice" is to deprive the man of some serious due credit). As for Bullett's Luke O'Neil, if he hasn't hung up his music writer shoes and already started life as an organic tomato farmer by now, well, this ought to do it.

MSNBC President Excited Network Can Live Up To Base Expectations: So MSNBC president Phil Griffin exclaims with glee to Michael Calderone about the network besting others on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention:

"I'm thrilled. You kidding me?" Griffin told The Huffington Post, shortly after getting the news. "You have to take a moment. For all of us in here, we're just taking a moment. Nobody thought we could do this. But to beat CNN and Fox on a big night like that? To beat ABC and CBS on a big night like that? That is friggin' fantastic.

Flash back to New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley's astute review last week of MSNBC's news coverage, entitled "How MSNBC Became Fox's Evil Liberal Twin" in which she explains MSNBC's core product as a diametrically opposed but otherwise nearly identical version of Fox News. All of which goes to say: Why wouldn't you watch the DNC on MSNBC? They're obviously going to give it every second of airtime is does deserve, doesn't deserve, and then some. They're taking the nuance out of singularity. It may be a numbers victory for MSNBC—albeit a shortsighted one—but it's also a symbolic data-point for what it's taken to get there, and that's abandoning the pretense of news in favor of being an informational arms dealer for one of two factions. Thrilling. [Huuffington Post]

Today's Sole Piece of Semi-Uplifting News: News Corp bonuses got cut. So, schadenfreude out. [The Guardian]

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Tips? Love notes? Easy instructions for the assembly of an army of paper cranes? Thoughts on how loving How I Met Your Mother makes you feel vaguely uncomfortable? Tumblrs for BuzzMedia to acquire? Send 'em here, and we'll try to talk someone out of something.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

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.

LAObserved's Kevin Roderick offered some details:

Mr. Roderick goes on to write, "The sources I've heard from who know how the Weekly gets produced can't imagine the place functioning without a managing editor or copy chief, especially since the fact-checking staff was eliminated a while back."