Variety and The Hollywood Reporter historically battled as the movie industry's two top trades, but THR, in the era of editor Janice Min, has become a more general-interest magazine, while sites like Deadline garner the scoops that the trades once received. Variety has valuable real estate but a precarious position--it's the last of its kind.

In Defense of Fareed-om: Yesterday, the obligatory Slate-y defense of Fareed Zakaria emerged on The Daily Beast (of course) in the form of "he didn't plagiarize." Money quote?

"By not changing enough words, he provided the 'gotcha' bait for the feeding frenzy of bloggers out for his blood."

So "not changing enough words to not be construed as a plagiarist" is "blogger bait" now? (And this comes from The Daily Beast?) Duly noted. Elsewhere, Seth Mnookin’s response on Salon was basically "NO REALLY, IT'S PLAGIARISM." And today, further examples of Zakaria sloughing on attribution responsibilities (or whatever today's euphemism for The Big "P" is) emerge. Zakaria told The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi that "people are piling on with every grudge or vendetta" against him these days. This would be difficult to take at face-value if it weren't for the fact that he said this to Farhi, a well-known media grudge-pusher whom Tony Kornheiser once hilariously labeled a "snake." [The Daily Beast, Salon, Poynter, Washington Post]

Market Editor Real Talk: Former GOOD editor, Editor Real Talk 'editor’ and current CJR in-house GIF expert Ann Friedman will be contributing to New York mag's shiny new iteration of its fashion channel, The Cut. [@annfriedman]

Jay Penske Attempting to (Figuratively) Piss on Peter Bart's Boots, Next: The same people who own Zombie Radar, The National Enquirer and more are attempting to buy Variety. This is sad and funny but also far less interesting than the fact that Mail.com's CEO, the Nantucket yachting advocate who happens to be Nikki Finke's boss and a man who has very, very, very discerning taste in women's footwear—one Jay Penske—is also in the running for Variety, which yes, still exists, and still edits copy like "talkies" are a relatively new thing. [LAT]

Further Evidence That Nobody Is Above a Few Grand for Very Little Work: How can you not enjoy The eXile's media coverage? First Adam Davidson, now Glenn Greenwald? Yep. They recently took to harassing Greenwald about speaking fees he took from the Koch Brothers. They're like the opposite of McKinsey & Co. I want them to do my taxes. [@exiledonline]

Radio Shilled the Internet Stars: Yes, BuzzFeed will now have a radio show on Satellite Radio. How can you not be curious (as to who will listen to this)? Memes were meant to be digested like Doritos for your brain, not heard. Either way, now BuzzFeed can tell prospective hires they can possibly be on its radio show, because in space (or the part of the internet that BuzzFeed occupies) nobody can hear you scream (unless it's your voice dubbed to match a meowing cat stuck in a Build-a-Bear box). So: it's got that going for it. [The Next Web]

Hungry Hungry Hires: Eater New York has a new associate editor in the form of Alexander Hancock, who was previously the inaugural editor of Eater New Orleans. Surely the surly gang of commenters over at Eater NY are giving Hancock a warm welcome in the form of relentless and arbitrary editorial critique. [Eater]

The Peacock, Not So Sure: The internet is still great for bootlegging. Proof? The many who elected to go around NBC for coverage of the Olympics. [Reuters]

Jesse's Girl: The Daily Beast senior writer (and Observer alum) Rebecca Dana recently married The Daily editor/New York Post executive editor Jesse Angelo. You know it's real when someone changes her Twitter handle. But who changed it here? Shameless Reuters media yenta Felix Salmon breaks the news. [@FelixSalmon]

Gang Green Quarterly: WWD's Erik Maza astutely notes that like this month's GQ cover boy Tim Tebow, the cover boy for GQ exactly one editorial year ago (Mark Sanchez) was also a quarterback for the New York Jets. [Erik Maza]

Person Recovers Stolen Goods From NYPD: Fully credentialed New York Times photog and two-time NYPD arrestee Robert Stolarik—who was recently arrested, roughed up and robbed of his credentials and camera by the cops—got his camera back. But not his credentials. That's what he gets for doing his job. [Poynter]

Weird Little Machine Prints Weird Little Newspapers: Really, there is nothing more to this story, and for that alone, it is enjoyable. [Fast Company]

Pratt-y Attitude: Could New York's Carl Swanson profile Jane Pratt without mentioning former xoJane columnist/current VICE columnist Cat Marnell/making Marnell the star of the profile? He could not. And why would he, when he's getting stuff this great?

When I talk to Marnell on the phone one night (she asked that I call her before she started "smoking dust" so that she would be coherent, which she was, though her dealer’s call did interrupt) she seemed to miss Pratt. "She’s a total libertarian, fabulous like that," she says. "She just really appreciates creativity. People think, Oh, she was enabling you. But she was just letting me be flawed."

Controversial? Yes! Unconventional? Absolutely. Dicey? No question. But brilliant and worth it for Pratt? Totally. Also, we eagerly await the day everyone in New York finds out that when Cat Marnell talks about "dust" she's actually referring to Fresh Step. [NY Mag]

Bristling at Bristol: In the event you haven't had time to do your routine ESPN quality check lately, here you go. [@TheCajunBoy]

Snap: When Times editor Jim Roberts tells you a photo is good, you listen. He will not disappoint. [@nytjim]

Have any tips, kitty-litter dealers, unconventional sore-throat cures or inspirational quotes? By all means, send them here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Flixtracker is a paid subscription database for film and digital entertainment that is still in development, like a pre-natal IMDB. It's the latest effort in Variety’s bid to establish a lucrative data and research division, now branded as Variety Insight.

The Variety Group acquired broadcast television database TVtracker, the model for Flixtracker, earlier this year. It will launch two more products, Incentives Tracker and VScore, in 2012.

“It’s becoming much harder to make a profit in film and television,” Variety president Neil Stiles told the Observer. “People need more insightful information to make decisions, so moving to data and research for us is a logical step.”

Flixtracker aims to use Variety’s journalistic DNA to bring a level of accountability to the fast-changing and rumor-prone arena of film development.

“We’re not TMZ, we’re not the trashy end of that marketplace,” Mr. Stiles said, explaining why studios are eager to give the information to Flixtracker. It doesn't hurt that they're staffing it up with studio veterans.

“We just hired a former development executive out of Fox who’s heading up the tracking effort with Flixtracker,” he said.

A Flixtracker subscription costs $1,000 annually, per user. Around 250 companies currently use TVtracker, which was launched in 1999, with between 20 and 200 individual users each.

Its chief competitor is Baseline StudioSystems, the subscription film and television industry database that The New York Times Company sold to Laurie S. Silver and Mitchelle Rubenstein, the L.A. entrepreneurs behind Movietickets.com, earlier this year. (The New York Times Company reportedly paid $35 million for it in 2006.)

According to Mr. Stiles, TVtracker's edge over competitors is that it’s more forward thinking.

“It’s the only company that’s consistently monitored the digital portal,” Mr. Stiles said.

Like many publications weaning themselves off advertising revenue, Variety has launched a corporate conference series, hosting 31 this year alone, and has erected a digital pay wall. As a result Mr. Stiles anticipated an increase in paid circulation around 6,000 in January's audit.

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.

He called this new offer "very interesting." "The Reporter's making a big splash right now," McCarthy told The Times. 

Min joined the trade publication last May after vacating her position as editor of US Weekly. Since relaunching as a weekly, the Reporter has been poaching talent from places such as Variety to contend with that paper's reputation and readership. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234

In his first post, McCarthy said he's looking forward to embracing the less formal aspects of the new medium.

"With this new site, I will continue writing formal reviews of important new pictures, but the blog aspect will permit me to write about so many other things, from Hollywood personalities I encounter as a matter of course to observations about my son's progress as a blossoming film buff. In this welcoming column alone, I'm able to write in the first person as I rarely could at Variety, and the possibility to expand the way I write about films and the film world is enormously energizing."

“My dad always said 'I'll believe when I hear it from the horses mouth,'” was the message his subscribers received. “twitter is the horses mouth. no more 'well the news said ...'”

By Friday, April 17, Mr. Kutcher became the first “Twitterer” to attract a million readers. He beat CNN.com's continuous headline feed, also syndicated to Twitter, by a half an hour.

Mr. Kutcher did not dismiss the Hollywood press corps in fewer than 140 characters. They've done it themselves, and the words keep pouring out about it.

Once upon a time, Variety owned the town of Hollywood. It was the hometown paper. Something only became news after it was reported in Variety. And if that ray of sunlight ever hit and you finally found yourself reading your own name in Variety, then maybe one day you’d be a “topper” somewhere.

And then—as the now-familiar story of journalism goes these days—the Internet happened, and so did the imploding economy. And so a vacuum of power, that motor of everything in Hollywood, opened up in the Hollywood press corps.

“Along come the blogs, and now they share that agenda with us,” said Neil Stiles, the publisher of the Variety Group. “There’s no question about that.”

“The agenda of the day,” he added, thinking aloud, “where we once had that on our own, we now share that.”

Of course, they're not all sharing nicely.

Or, put another way, Variety ceded its grip on the town entirely, and now the Hollywood press corps is in a state of revolution. There is no power structure. It’s all turned inside out and upside down. Everyone claims victory, but no one seems to have it, nobody is powerful enough to measure it. And, above all, it’s one nasty, mean, shrill place.

“For people working in the industry Variety and The Hollywood Reporter gave information,” said Sue Mengers, the original super-agent, reached at home. “You could see what movies are casting. What movies are shooting. Newspapers could never publish that information.”

Has she noticed anything different lately about Variety?

“Well, yes. It’s thinner—there’s less content,” she said.

Variety's Spicy Life

“In the universe there are 1,000 news sources,” said the veteran ICM power agent Ron Bernstein. “I’m just stating the obvious. Now there are a million alternate sources for news.”

And the business model for Hollywood news, everywhere, fell to pieces. Between Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—once a worthy competitior to Variety that has been ushered to the sidelines—the business has been tanking, but also, everywhere.

Between 2007 and 2008, IMS, a third-party tracking service, said that ads and barter ads in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The Daily Gotham went down 26 percent; according to an internal hand count by Brian Gott, the publisher of Daily Variety, they are down 31 percent in the first quarter for the three publications.

For years, Variety made money hand over fist. It was a machine. Recently, former editor Peter Bart said that “niche journalism is the most profitable sector if it works.”

If it works. And somehow it stopped working for Variety. Reed Business Information, its parent company, recently cut 7 percent of its staff, including 8 percent of the Variety Group.

Mr. Bart, the longtime editor, got kicked upstairs in favor of longtime No. 2 Tim Gray.  Mr. Stiles, its publisher, outlined a few core reasons the business started tanking. The writers’ strike started it; the credit crunch followed; and then the Academy Awards season, said Mr. Stiles, was considerably smaller—fewer movies and fewer ads, particularly after Christmas, when big studios gave up on any chance of putting up a campaign against Slumdog Millionaire.

“From early on it looked like Slumdog Millionaire was going to clean up,” Mr. Stiles said. “So companies backed off a bit and said, ‘Look, we don’t have a prayer of winning so we might as well back off on the ad units because there’s no point in trying to influence people.’”

And there went the all-important “For Your Consideration” ads that buoyed the trade, targeted at Academy voters.

In many ways, the Slumdog phenomenon shows how the problem with the Hollywood press corps is only an extension of the churning of the larger Hollywood power structure. After all, who made Slumdog a winner? Not the studios themselves. There was already a wolf at the door.

Sure, Variety.com was a huge traffic generator—but there was a problem, the same one that is dawning on all major newspapers around the country. Bundles of readers and page views doesn’t translate into cash.

“Everybody has figured out how to build the traffic,” said Mr. Stiles. “What they didn’t work out is that when you get to the Promised Land, is it worth being there? The fact of the matter is, the business model is never going to be attractive.”

And it wasn’t: as a business, the magazine has taken a hit, and as everyone has learned—The New York Times included—digital advertising money is pennies to the (diminishing) print ad dollar.

Mr. Stiles said there needs to be a new focus—online will charge for some content, but not all. News should be free, but the archives and some specialized content will be entirely behind a paywall, which he believes will bring in money.

But, we asked him, if Variety isn’t on top now, what will it take to get back?

“It wasn’t, then it was, and now it isn’t again, and it will be,” said Mr. Stiles, the Variety publisher. “We just have to own that space again.”

“It might be Variety, it might be—I don’t know,” he continued. “I’m aiming to make sure it is Variety, but I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume we will be.”

Across town, the L.A. Times has never been able to fulfill its potential as a must-read in Hollywood. For years, the paper has been grappling with its identity. Dean Baquet, the former editor of the paper, liked to troll the hallways and say that the Times was going to own Hollywood!

But that never happened. The L.A. Times became hamstrung by too many internal conflicts (competing desks going after the same story, staffers upset that the Web site gives into celebrity link-baiting temptations) and, of course, a staff that is less than half the size of what it was eight years ago.

And they suffer from a similar problem to Variety. Bloggers like Nikki Finke have been nimble and fast, and while an L.A. Times reporter is on the phone waiting for confirmation, Nikki puts it up regardless if it’s right or wrong.

So perhaps in an attempt to combat Nikki Finke, the L.A. Times has restarted Company Town, which will be written by Joe Flint, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

“We’ll be able to do things like a rumor of the day,” said one staffer. “Newspapers need to figure how to do this, to report on the things that we know—we know— are true, but that no one is confirming. And that’s where Nikki kills everyone. She goes out there and says it, and sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it isn’t, and no one holds her for account for what’s not true. And everyone credits her when she’s right. Hopefully, [Mr. Flint] will be able to figure it out.”

The Replacement Killers

“The trades have become increasingly irrelevant,” said Sharon Waxman, the former New York Times reporter who has started a blog of her own, The Wrap. “I used to get the trades. I used to get Variety every day and it’s been a long time since I got Variety every day.”

“When I started the Web site, I think people were—not surprised— but I think people realized ‘Oh my God, here’s the truth! This is not the pabulum that I’m getting every day,’” said Nikki Finke, the writer behind the daily blog Deadline Hollywood.

“The L.A. Times has a very strange relationship in Hollywood,” Ms. Finke said. “Sometimes it’s in bed with them, sometimes it’s not. It’s changed owners, changed editors, changed focus and—along with The New York Times—the L.A. Times has desperately needed advertising by the studio and networks and they have become more groveling. You just don’t see those negative stories that you used to.”

Whether it’s true or not—she would argue that everything that she says is true—it’s what gave her an opening and a following.

The Web site launched in March 2006, and by time the writers’ strike hit in the fall 2007, it was a bona fide hit and a must-read among everyone in Hollywood (and earned Ms. Finke our Media Mensch of the Year award).

“Nikki is the one to beat right now,” says the now-retired longtime Hollywood reporter Anita Busch.

Ms. Finke reported on her blog that Variety wanted to buy her (Mr. Stiles, the Variety Group publisher, said there was an early conversation, but it didn’t get much farther than that). Business Insider reported that Arianna Huffington was interested in buying Deadline Hollywood as well.

“We are not in any conversations to buy Nikki Finke,” Ms. Huffington said when we asked her about it. But had she ever entertained the idea? “We’re not in any conversations now. That’s all I can say.”

It might have been a good move.

“What is clear—what is absolutely clear—is that people in Hollywood have been hungry for an alternative,” said Ms. Waxman.

Ms. Waxman has a full-time team of six people, and a series of other contractors, many of whom are on one-month contracts, and her largest single investor is the venture capital firm Maveron, which was co-founded by current Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan, a former managing director at Schroders who helped with the Starbucks IPO.

In her office, in her West Coast home, she’s got a list of words up that can’t be used by contributors at The Wrap.

“We are not the trades,” she said. “We’re just not. Inevitably, people have come to us who are from the trades. So if I have to beat it out, I will do that! I do have a sign up that says I don’t want to see any of that industry jargon that is incomprehensible to the average reader. ‘A starrer! A helmer! A lensman!’ None of that stuff goes in The Wrap.”

She said she wants to watch her spending because when there’s a shake-out, which she said will inevitably happen with the trades and the broadsheet papers, she wants to be there. "They've come to The Wrap in great numbers because they want to read a site that doesn’t have an agenda and doesn’t have a nasty tone to it that is interested and knowledgeable about their lives and their business and their world and wants to report on it in a way that is lively and has a pulse, but isn’t mean-spirited.”

It sounded like a not-so-subtle jab at Ms. Finke, and before we knew it, we were in the middle of yet another fight.

“People around Hollywood are terrified of her,” said Ms. Waxman. “I’m surprised how terrified people of her. A journalist only has so much power as you give them.”

“I can’t believe that she’s saying that with a straight face,” Ms. Finke said. “Her site is getting no traffic and is inaccurate and boring. And no one in Hollywood is talking about it. She must be desperate.”

Several posts on The Wrap—down to analyzing how much Deadline Holllywood could sell for and another where a contributor calls Ms. Finke “emblematic of a true danger that now exists in journalism: the unchecked reporter”—have come after her.

Ms. Finke, characteristically, returned the fire.

“When I started my Web site, Sharon would say to me, ‘I hate your Web site,’” said Ms. Finke. “She said, ‘You take all your time and everyone is talking about you and I hate it.’ And I said ‘Sharon, if you’re my friend, aren’t you pleased? If you had something going for you, I would be pleased for you.’ Then she said ‘No, I hate it, I hate it.’ Then she lied to me about what she was doing! She said she was going to start a blog about politics. Totally lied to me!  I had to hear from everyone else that she was going around to people and saying she was going to compete with me. What friend does that to another friend!”

Ms. Waxman called that account “inaccurate,” and added: "Nikki has her own view of reality which does not always accord to reality as others see it. The way she twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts—and I put facts in quotes—is in a way that suits her.”

‘A Small Town, Filled With Sociopaths’

We asked Mr. Bart if he ever saw Hollywood like this before.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “During my first stint [at The New York Times], it was downright clubby. To the real old-timers, this harkens back to the days when there were giant feuds between Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. They would go at each other in screaming fits of rage. It’s a reminder of that era.”

Throw a line out and you’ll find dozens of feuds tumbling in.

In fact, we did just that, with Anita Busch, who didn’t take long to start a feud from beyond the journalistic grave.

“I do think it’s kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog,” Ms. Busch told us. “I think she’s even one of the worst journalists I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never seen anybody that ignores the basics of Journalism 101 as she does. I find it surprising that she’s got this blog.”

“I try not to click through on Sharon’s Web site because I don’t want someone who doesn’t care about journalism to succeed,” she added, for good measure.

(Ms. Waxman replied: “I feel sorry for Anita Busch for saying such a thing like that. I think that’s a pretty sad statement. I think it says more about her than me.”)

Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times and Brian Lowry of Variety threw jabs at each other as well. Mr. Goldstein frowned upon the way Variety did business—serving as a mouthpiece for a studio, essentially.

Mr. Lowry, in a blog post singling out Mr. Goldstein, calls him lazy, petulant and a weak reporter. “Now you have this blog, ‘The Big Picture,’ so I’m thrilled to see a newspaper that has laid off more than half its staff since I left in 2003 has finally dictated that you squeeze out more than 800 words a week,” wrote Mr. Lowry.

It goes on. Variety did a piece on bloggers—Ms. Finke was mentioned in a not so flattering light. Then she slammed back hard as well.

“I was told that Peter Bart and Mike Fleming of Variety were going around town telling Hollywood to stop giving scoops to Nikki! Ha-ha!” she said. “Hollywood was laughing at that, saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding! What, do you think we spoon-feed her? She finds stuff out on her own!’What they didn’t understand, there’s something called reporting.”

We told Mr. Bart this.

“I think that’s childish,” he said. “Once again, the idea that’s a little presumptuous is that I would advise people how to handle Nikki Finke. I’ve got more interesting things to do.”

“The important people don’t talk about the media noise,” said Mr. Bart, almost aspirationally.

And maybe that is the problem.

“We’re seeing that the entertainment vertical has become a one-stop shop where you can get the latest news in and from the Hollywood community,” said Arianna Huffington, the creator of The Huffington Post. “We’ve had members of the community like directors, producers want to go directly to the user with blogging.”

That is: Why drop your message with a trade, a newspaper—even a blogger—when you can reach a million readers without any of them?

Ms. Huffington pointed to the self-defense she published on her Web site by Ron Howard responding to the Catholic League that his upcoming movie, Angels & Demons, is anti-Vatican. Scarlett Johansson wrote about why it’s “reckless and dangerous” for celebrity rags to obsess over the weight habits of movie stars. Alec Baldwin recently lectured his Huffington Post audience about the need for newspapers: “Journalism is what is required now. And, yes, some commentary. But more journalism than commentary. That's what a newspaper does.”

Even proximity to a tweety star gives you a voice, as when Demi Moore, called "wifey" in a tweet by husband Ashton Kutcher, barked at him not to suggest an unhealthy dietary cleansing routine to his many fans.

When celebrities doing journalism lecture journalists about doing newspapers, for Web sites that compete with newspapers and magazines to cover the industry the celebrity works … Wait, what?

“For one thing, you have bloggers who need traffic and are desperate for attention,” said Mr. Bart. “The overriding truth of the blogging community is they’re trying to figure out how to monetize their endeavors. So you have to call attention to yourself. On that side, you have a clear motive.”

Put more bluntly, Ms. Busch said, “Hollywood is a small town filled with sociopaths. And when you’re assigned to cover that? You really have to be on your feet.”

As long as you don't get your legs broken, that strategy will work just fine.

On Sunday night, Mr. Kutcher was giving another “status update” to his million-strong audience. Celebrity news, straight from the horse's mouth!

“Off to a suprise b day party for … ,” he wrote; then, “Uh maybe not.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article characterized Howard Schultz as an invididual investor in The Wrap, instead of co-founder of the venture capital firm that made the investment.

According to Times Assistant Managing Editor Sallie Hofmeister, the new version of the blog will feature five or six posts a day and offer breaking news. "It's not just gonna be press release stuff," Ms. Hofmeister told The Observer. "It'll be original stuff we dig out."

Once or twice a week, short bits from the blog will make their way into print edition of The Times under a 'Company Town' slug. (Ms. Hofmeister said the name is actually trademarked by The Los Angeles Times and was used as a banner for stories a decade ago.) The print version will run in the paper's Business section where Ms. Hofmeister works with a combination of reporters from entertainment, business, and the Web whose beats all converge around Hollywood. This consolidation, which she was tapped to oversee about a month ago, is reminiscent of changes to The New York Times' Media desk which The Observer's John Koblin wrote about in September 2008.

What will make the new Company Town different from other Times entertainment blogs—in June 2008, we wrote about one from columnist Patrick Goldstein—is that Mr. Flint and his contributors will wrestle more with rumors, something increasingly prominent Hollywood news sites like Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily and Sharon Waxman's The Wrap (not mention trades like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter) do on a daily basis but which The Los Angeles Times has thus far resisted.

"Our standards for the paper are, we like to have three sources on any bit of speculation," Ms. Hofmeister said. "We like to have confirmation. I think that's kind of held us hostage in the online competition because we feel compelled not to mislead our readers."

Company Town will cover what Ms. Hofmeister called "persistent rumors" but label them as such. And if online stories prove difficult to corroborate, they will not make it into the print edition.

Ms. Hofmeister conceded that "It's a kind of a crazy news cycle when you cover the industry. There are constant tips and rumors and trying to beat the competition, we just weren't able to feed the blog on a constant basis." With the addition of Mr. Flint and a gradual rollout of a blog redesign timed for early June, she hopes Company Town will offer a "reliable voice" for industry coverage seven days a week—though less "vigorously" on Saturday and Sunday.

"We're not promising to be 24/7," she said. "We're not crazy."

"It's not a very sexy story, and that's why I'm sort of amused by all this speculation about 'behind the scenes' stuff," he told The Observer. He was insisting that "What happened is so annoyingly simple," and for a moment or two there, he certainly sounded annoyed. (Maybe it was because of the roundup we did yesterday?)

Mr. Bart was referring to the pileup of blog posts from industry observers who picked over the news that Tim Gray would become the top editor at Variety (effective immediately) for any bits of information they could find to assail Mr. Bart and his tenure at the trade. Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke wrote, "I don't need to tell you there's been bad blood between Bart and [Publisher Neil] Stiles"; David Poland sounded a more ominous note: "Bart was in the way of the future."

Mr. Bart called all this "noise." "It's just so irrelevant, it makes it sound like I'm this 35-year-old kid who lost a power struggle. And I'm 76-years-old and there is no power struggle."

Mr. Bart told The Observer he initiated his own title change and the hand-off of editorial duties to Mr. Gray several weeks ago. (Something he also told The New York Times' Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply on April 6.) Giving up day-to-day operations would be something of a relief after 20 years, he claimed: "I don't have to worry about [the paper] on Sunday night, as I did last night, changing headlines," Mr. Bart said, laughing.

As for his critics' claims that he was "pushed up and out," Mr. Bart wanted them to know, "I still have my office and I still come in everyday. I'll still have opinion about breaking news."

"I still write a weekly column," Mr. Bart said. "I write a blog, there are a lot of interesting plans for the future."

Those plans include Variety getting into television. (Pressed for details—What network? What show?—Mr. Bart teased, "I can't yet. But I will.") He also referred to Variety's Web site and hinted, "there are all kinds of important plans, but I just can't talk about them yet."

In 2001, Los Angeles Magazine famously put Mr. Bart on its cover and asked "Is This The Most Hated Man in Hollywood?" Did that criticism hurt his feelings at all? "I spent 17 of my life, as you know, as a studio executive," Mr. Bart explained. "And if when you're running a movie studio, you take seriously all the criticism and all the noise, you'd have a serious meltdown."

"What editor of paper doesn't get criticized?" He wondered. "That's what you're there for. I just think that's part of the territory. If I was never criticized then I'd consider myself a failure because I'd be boring."

Cough.

What we meant to say was that this weekend, it was announced that Peter Bart, editor-in-chief of Variety for the last 20 years, would become vice president and editorial director of the trade publication and Tim Gray would take over the top editorial job.

Almost immediately, reporters and bloggers who share Mr. Bart's beat weighed in with a spontaneous outpouring of criticism (and just a smattering of compliments) not seen since Amy Wallace chronicled his long career as a producer and a journalist in a 2001 Los Angeles magazine cover story headlined Is This The Most Hated Man in Hollywood?

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke called Mr. Bart's new title "meaningless" and put out the word that "Hollywood can now safely ignore Bart." She also cited a source who claimed Mr. Bart was spotted having lunch with an executive from Nielsen Business Media, which owns Variety's closest competitor, The Hollywood Reporter, a meeting Ms. Finke described as "having lunch with The Enemy."

An un-bylined piece in The Hollywood Reporter said blandly, "Trade paper's editor-in-chief will segue into vp post."

For the sake of clarity, it should be noted that Variety recently mounted a three-part attack on Hollywood blogs in general and Ms. Finke in particular with How I got blogged down, by Michael Fleming, Tempest of the 'toldja!' journalists by Cynthia Littleton, and Hollywood's blog smog from Mr. Bart himself, all from March 22, 2009.There's really no love lost between the trade and Ms. Finke's site.

Sharon Waxman's The Wrap News went with a subtle image of Mr. Bart being yanked offstage by a cane like an old Vaudevillian who's tap-danced one number too many. In the accompanying story, Ms. Waxman wrote:

Any Hollywood executive picking up the daily trade cannot help but notice Variety's shrinking size and the lack of advertising since the Academy Awards in March, a worrying shift for the flagship publication of Reed Business Information, even in a fallow time of year.

Ms. Waxman did offer some praise, saying that Mr. Bart "is credited with professionalizing the newsroom at Variety."

David Poland, of The Hot Button, was less generous, saying in a piece headlined Another Veteran Gone, "This was inevitable, but not quite a solution. Bart was in the way of the future."

Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells called Variety's new editor "less prickly and more in tune with 21st Century currents," and went on to say:

To tens of thousands in the entertainment industry, Variety is a comfort blanket. It's a community gathering place, a church, an old friend, a reassurance of normality and stability. Not just an entertainment-industry Bible and paper-of-record but a kind of guidance counselor, preacher, accountant, community agent and next-door neighbor saying 'hi' over the fence.

What no one can seem to agree on is if Mr. Bart is moving "up" (New boss at Variety, Peter Bart moves upstairs, wrote Kevin Roderick of LAObserved.com), "down" (Variety editor steps down after 20 years, was the Associated Press's headline), or simply "out" (Peter Bart, 'Variety' Editor-in-Chief Pushed Out, went Danielle Berrin's 'Hollywood Jew' blog on jewishjournal.com).

Maybe it's semantics, but to some, it clearly matters.