Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA is taking five. In the meantime, FBLA co-editor Richard Horgan has moved over to FishbowlNY to cover the Hollywood trades, awards season and a broad range of national media stories.

Launched in 2005, the site has seen its fair share of illustrious editors over the years including Claude Brodesser-Akner, Mayrav Saar, Tina Dupuy and Kate Coe. Thanks to all of them as well as to Matthew Fleischer, Pandora Young and Marcus Vanderberg for keeping us in the LA loop.

We’re keeping the Twitter account @FishbowlLA active with news and updates. So follow us there, if you don’t already. Within the next few weeks, all existing FishbowlLA content will be folded into the FishbowlNY archives.

We look forward to interacting with you elsewhere on the Mediabistro blog network. If you haven’t seen the redesigned Mediabistro home page, which launched last week, check it out here.

Hasta la vista…

Initially launched as a newsletter for women in entertainment by industry veteran Jamie Foster Brown, Sister 2 Sister has been breaking stories in black Hollywood since 1988. And, unlike the gossip and innuendo rampant in the blogosphere, S2S routinely gets its information from the stars themselves.

“Our stories, they’re longer than what you’ll find in other publications, but they’re really more like conversations than interviews,” explained senior editor Ericka Boston. “Our mission is to try to teach. So, we’ll talk to the entertainers about the lessons that they’ve learned from whatever experiences they’ve gone through, and it’s more so about achieving an understanding, as opposed to just fishing for a headline.”

The pub also covers food and fitness trends and has an abundance of opportunities for freelancers. Have a great story in mind? For pitching etiquette and editors’ info, read How To Pitch: Sister 2 Sister.

– Sherry Yuan

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Rupert Murdoch Files for Divorce, Won’t Affect News Corp Split (Deadline Hollywood)
News Corp Chairman/CEO Rupert Murdoch filed for divorce from wife Wendi Deng Murdoch Thursday morning in New York State Supreme Court, Deadline learned at 9 a.m. The divorce will not impact Rupert’s mega-media holdings, according to insiders, and was deliberately announced for maximum transparency before News Corp spins off its publishing assets into a separately traded company by June 28. WSJ Nearly all of the Murdoch family’s voting stock — a block of 38.4 percent — is held through the Murdoch Family Trust, whose beneficiaries are Rupert’s six children. It is likely that a prenuptial agreement makes it impossible for Wendi to obtain voting shares in the company in the event of a divorce, an attorney familiar with New York laws said. The attorney added that a New York judge would probably not award her any stock in court, as New York courts generally don’t keep people as partners in business when they can’t stay partners in marriage. TVNewser The couple married in 1999, 17 days after Rupert’s divorce from his second wife was finalized. They have two daughters together: Grace, 11, and Chloe, 9. Wendi, who is the chief of strategy for MySpace in China, famously slapped a man who attempted to attack Rupert during his testimony in front of a British Parliament committee about phone-hacking at his London newspapers. NY Mag / Daily Intelligencer For years, it seemed apparent to Rupert’s lieutenants that he was living a separate life from Wendi and was OK with it. Wendi, for her part, seemed happy, too. Wendi reinvented herself as an alpha mom and Hollywood personality, striking up friendships with a diverse circle that included Sergey Brin and Nicole Kidman. THR A spokesperson for former British prime minister Tony Blair flatly denied media rumors that Wendi was romantically involved with him. FishbowlNY Is a new, future ex-Mrs. Murdoch just around the corner?

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The 2012 circumstances under which Frank Sontag (pictured) took over for Frank Pastore at KKLA 99.5 FM last fall were difficult. The regular afternoon show host was was critically injured in a freeway motorcycle accident and later passed away.

But such is, sometimes, life. This week, Salem Communications made the transition official, announcing Sontag as the permanent afternoon host for the 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. weekday slot on the broadcast outlet known as  ”The Intersection of Faith and Reason:”

“We are excited about having Frank Sontag join our line-up in the critical afternoon drive position,” says KKLA program director Chuck Tyler. “Frank is a true veteran of Los Angeles radio having worked at [former ABC Station] KLOS-FM for 27 years.”

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Fred Godlash, a marketing specialist with Business Wire in Los Angeles, finally decided to do something about the fact that a six-year-old article at the BW end keeps grabbing eyeballs when people type in the Google search question, How much does it cost to write a press release? He wrote a new answer.

He’s not talking about the do-it-yourself Internet press release that today goes for pennies on the PR dollar and generates about the same ratio of response. Rather, Godlash in his update post aims to accurately determine how the 2007 $5,000 pro-PR price tag calculated by former colleague Monika Maeckle has changed. The answer may surprise you:

If the press release produced in 2007 took 100 hours to produce, it is fair to say the 2013 release will take longer through adding multimedia content including video, infographics and social interaction. Comparing apples to apples, the release would need to include any available resources to make it as competitive as possible today.

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At one point during last night’s Live Talks Los Angeles event at the Alex Theatre featuring Phil Jackson and the coach’s former locker room charge John Salley, a Lakers fan sitting directly behind FishbowlLA bellowed, “Fire Jim Buss!” Never mind that the heckle-target is A) one of the team owners and B) a likely future Jackson brother-in-law.

First and foremost, Los Angeles still loves Phil, a sentiment on full display at last night’s sold-out Glendale Q&A. The talk was part of the zen coach’s very active media tour for his new book Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success and benefited from interviewer Salley’s humorous, insider approach.

For example, Salley led off with an anecdote about being hauled into Phil’s office and learning he was being released from the Lakers. Leading him to declare a change in that summer’s plans to smoking lots of marijuana.

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In terms of seed financing, Harvey Levin, the late Jim Paratore and Warner Bros./Telepictures have nothing on The National Enquirer.

When The New York Enquirer was purchased in 1952, it was a modest 17,000-circulation broadsheet favored by amateur horse racing handicappers. It would later, after a move to Florida, become the precursor to the modern era of celebrity news and gossip reporting. In a fantastic feature article in DuJour magazine, John Connolly shockingly reveals where some of the original funding came from:

For decades, rumors have swirled about the purchase price — placing it between $10,000 and $75,000 — and [owner Generoso] Pope Jr.‘s source of funds. According to exclusive interviews for DuJour magazine with former employees, the money came from two men: a $10,000 loan from Pope’s godfather, Frank Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime family and head of a national gambling empire, and an equal amount from the lawyer Roy Cohn, a friend of Pope’s who had helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and was soon to gain notoriety as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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Lauren Dolgen, EVP of MTV series development and creator of Teen Mom and 16 & Pregnant, is no stranger to dealing with negative press. Critics have deemed these shows as “glamorizing” teen pregnancies, but Dolgen says the buzz surrounding the shows is a good thing for exposing the plight of teen mothers.

“I think if you watch the show you realize there’s nothing glamorous about being a teen parent,”  she told Mediabistro for its latest So What Do You Do? interview. “And the truth is that when I do see the girls in the tabloids or [hear] people asking about the glamorization, I really do say, ‘At least people are having the discussion now.’ I mean, they were not talking about teen pregnancy at all when we first created the show. So, I say bring on the criticism, because we are actually dealing with it in a very real way, and at least it’s being talked about and discussed now.”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Lauren Dolgen, VP of MTV’s Series Development?

– Sherry Yuan

A year after Karl Jacob’s off-camera doubling for Sacha Baron Cohen as Aladeen hit theaters in The Dictator, the Minnesota-minted artist is gearing up for a sold-out Friday world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival of his co-directorial debut Pollywogs.

The drama is set in Minnesota and derives its title partly from the idea that its two lead adult characters (Jacob, Kate Lyn Sheil) are emotionally stunted. Ahead of Friday night’s big debut, Jacob spoke with Twin Cities Daily Planet movie blogger Jim Brunzell III about the many references in the film to his (and Bob Dylan‘s) childhood hometown of Hibbing, MN, as well as the challenges the movie’s title may present overseas:

“Apparently in the UK it [Pollywogs] means something different. One of the co-producers is British, and she said, “We may want to consider changing the title if it goes to Britain.” I think it could be some type of slang word.”

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LA Times reporter Jeff Gottlieb’s May 3 email to a Los Angeles Times Media Group exec is one of the ages. Two years after he, Ruben Vives and colleagues won a $35,000 USC Annenberg prize for their exposure of the massive Bell city corruption scandal (ahead of the Public Service Pulitzer), he was having to question the financial allotment practices at his own paper.

Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple thoroughly retraces the history of this long-simmering matter and also, for the piece, took Gottlieb’s complaints to newspaper spokesperson Nancy Sullivan. When, Wemple wanted to know on Gottlieb’s behalf, was that promised celebration party funded by residual Selden Ring prize money going to finally take place? From Sullivan’s quoted reply:

“A small amount was set aside for a staff party. The party was postponed several times for various reasons but will be held in the near future.”

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