Hollywood Ending?

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TheWrap.com has a simple goal: to replace the Hollywood trade papers that have served as the primary source of entertainment industry news for the last century.

Sharon Waxman, a former New York Times reporter who founded Wrap Inc., believes traditional show biz publications such as Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter are behind the curve as Hollywood moves online.

? saw a ripe opportunity to start a business publication to cover the industry in more sophisticated ways than the trades,?Waxman said. ?he players in that space were not adapting to the clear need for information in the marketplace.?p>TheWrap features a mix of short news articles and analyses written by professional journalists, plus longer pieces posted by unpaid contributors. Movie-makers that have written on TheWrap include independent producer? agent Jeff Dowd, director Adam Rifkin, and producers Mike Medavoy and Norman Lear.

The daily news site launched in late January and now boasts about 200,000 unique visitors and more than 1 million page-views a month. Waxman? ambition is to break news.

Executives from Variety and Hollywood Reporter weren? available for comment on competition from TheWrap.

Besides the trade papers, Waxman sees the Los Angeles Times as her major competitor. She declined to talk about her war of words with Nikki Finke, an LA Weekly columnist who runs the site DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com, another show business news site. Finke did not return a call for comment.

Finke denigrated TheWrap in February, shortly after it launched, saying the site didn? break news and wasn? a force in the industry.

Waxman countered, listing her scoops ?such as Screen Actors Guild President Alan Rosenberg? plan to sue his own union. She later cited TheWrap? investigation of plans to close the Motion Picture Television Fund? nursing home in Woodland Hills as evidence of her impact.

Alan Citron, chief executive at celebrity site owner Buzz Media Inc. in Los Angeles, believes the success of DeadlineHollywoodDaily shows Finke has tapped into the zeitgeist thanks to the attitude she brings to her coverage, and that Waxman will have to develop her own style.

?he challenge for Sharon isn? to re-create Variety,?he explained. ?hat Sharon is trying to do is find the middle ground. She has to find that voice and still provide information in a timely manner.?p>TheWrap has a syndication deal to sell content to other media, so Waxman will have to avoid jargon and provide coverage other than the industry insider stuff that? beyond the grasp or interest of the lay reader.

?e ride the line between serving professionals in the industry and serving a wider general audience,?Waxman said.

On the other hand, she will separate TheWrap from the growing horde of celebrity gossip sites by a strict focus on the facts.

Waxman got the idea for the site when she was on leave from the New York Times two years ago, working on ?oot,?a book about stolen antiquities that was published last year. She quit the newspaper, formed the company in July 2008 and launched at the beginning of the year.

To fund the startup, she secured $500,000 from individual investors and Maveron, a Seattle venture capital firm co-founded by Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz. None of the investors is associated with the entertainment business.

The site has seven full-time employees and the headquarters are at Waxman? home in Santa Monica.

TheWrap? revenue sources are advertising and syndication. On the ad side, it has attracted upscale consumer brands including British Airways and the Four Seasons hotel as its inaugural sponsors. The company also stages invitation-only events for top dogs in the industry on social video and online TV, and has signed up Google and Yahoo as sponsors.

The site has secured advertising from Warner Bros. Television and Fox Searchlight in support of Emmy nominations.


Traffic trends

The youth of many show biz executives works in the site? favor. Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC, cited his study that showed today? teenagers will never read printed newspapers, but they are more hungry for news than previous generations.

?e?e clearly now seeing a path to the end of the printed daily newspapers, a trend that is escalating much faster than we had anticipated,?Cole said in a statement when the report was issued. ?nly those papers that can move decisively to the Web will survive.?p>Waxman said she hadn? anticipated the implosion of her print competitors in the economic downturn. She declined to estimate when her online publication might reach break-even because the advertising hasn? materialized as fast as she originally forecasted.

?hen I wrote the business plan in August the economy was in one state; when we launched in January it was in another,?she said. ? made the decision, and the investors agreed, to move forward. I believed then and I believe now that the opportunity to grab market share will prove worth it. … I do think that niche publications have a better shot at making it than mass publications ?and digital niche publications have the best shot of all.?enews_Column=0

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