Big news this afternoon on the Hollywood trades front. And it’s Nikki Finke once again letting the Variety cat out of the bag.

Film editor Josh Dickey, who recently lost his pit bull reporter Jeff Sneider, has accepted a job with TMZ.com. He will be the site’s new managing editor. From Finke’s brief dispatch:

Dickey will become TMZ’s managing editor after giving his notice at Variety where he was film editor. Variety’s New York editor Jill Goldsmith was let go on March 8th as was Variety’s creative director Paula Taylor more recently.

This is a huge score for Harvey Levin. Dickey, formerly of TheWrap, is leaving the trade quadrangle for a site that sometimes spends a little bit too much time in the sensational gutter. Hopefully, he can temper that. For example, TMZ.com recently got a lot of flack from the family of a Hollywood nightclub shooting victim for airing full cell phone video footage of the crime.

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Lots going on these days at TheWrap. As we previously reported, Joseph Kapsch is set to begin Monday March 25 as deputy managing editor. Also, in a separate, unrelated move, Jon Thurber has been completing his tenure at the outlet this week.

Now comes word of another hire very closely connected to the incoming deputy editor. Jethro Nededog (pictured), Kapsch’s longtime friend and colleague at Zap2it, The Hollywood Reporter and Celebuzz (where he is currently), will be starting at TheWrap April 1 as senior TV writer. He will report to Tim Molloy.

The news was shared internally this afternoon with the trade’s hard-working staff and included the following quotes:

Nededog: “I’m ecstatic about joining the TheWrap team. Not only does it bring me back to the caliber of stories that I enjoy writing and breaking, but I get a chance to work and learn from some talented people who I’ve looked up to, including Tim Molloy, Joseph Kapsch and, of course, Sharon Waxman.”

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Film editor Gregg Kilday, senior editors Alex Ben Block and Borys Kit and the rest of The Hollywood Reporter film team have a new colleague starting today. He is Sean Phillips (pictured), making the jump after a long and illustrious stint with Yahoo.

From Janice Min‘s internal communiqué:

I’m very pleased to announce that Sean Phillips is joining us as executive producer of THR.com’s movies coverage. As such he’ll be responsible for expanding our digital coverage of movies with a particular focus on growing our already-expanding consumer audience.

Sean has significant experience in this area. While at Yahoo over the last nine years, he has focused on content programming and worked closely with the sales and marketing teams to help expand the Yahoo! Movies audience from about 5 million monthly unique users to more than 32 million monthly uniques, and helped drive the business from $6-7 million in sales to $38 million annually.

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The New York hiring spree continues at Variety. Following the poaching of Brian Steinberg from Advertising Age, the trade has recruited Todd Spangler for the position of east coast-based digital editor.

From today’s announcement:

Spangler was most recently the technology editor for Multichannel News, a leading publication covering the cable industry. Prior to that, he was an editor and writer with several technology publications, including PC magazine, Interactive Week and Baseline.

During his tenure as a senior editor at Baseline, the magazine won three Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Awards in 2005-2006.

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Among the various Twitter wise-cracks posted in response to the news that Variety, Deadline (and other PMC Web publications) will soon be sharing the same LA westside digs was this one:

More like reality TV show. Especially since one of the floors being leased at the Westwood high rise will feature “a full video production studio and three green-screen rooms.”

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The new, paywall-free Variety website is definitely a work-in-progress.

Clicking at press time for example from the home page to the Video section (or any other inside portion) takes users from an all-white to an all-black background design layout. And… when you get to the video index page, several of the top-listed items are previews of last weekend’s Academy Awards.

There is also a “Coming Soon” for the VScore menu bar tab.  Today’s announcement promises that when this feature becomes available, it will offer “an interactive dashboard for all of the critical business metrics across the industry as well as custom analysis from the Variety team.”

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They are Andrew Wallenstein, (digital), Claudia Eller (film) and Cynthia Littleton (TV). Colleague Tim Gray is not going away but rather will remain in a “leadership role.”

What’s most intriguing here is that Jay Penske is continuing a pattern of promoting female staffers (Littleton) to heretofore male-dominated editorial roles. Last fall, he appointed Michelle Sobrino-Stearns associate publisher. From this morning’s announcement:

The installation of Eller and Littleton as two of the three editors-in-chief marks the first time in the brand’s storied history that women have served in the top editorial role.

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Maybe it’s just us. But when a mid-Wilshire office staff is forced to evacuate because of a white, powdery substance found inside an envelope, we don’t think that should be the set-up for weak Twitter jokes.

Several reporters, including one from The Hollywood Reporter, made circa-1980s cocaine cracks after THR‘s LA offices were briefly evacuated this morning. There was also this bit of odd civics boosting:

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The word of the day is “etiolated.” Put to excellent use by Brooks Barnes in his New York Times snapshot of the resurgent Hollywood Reporter:

As recently as 2010, The Reporter would have had a hard time persuading its own etiolated staff to gather for a party, much less marquee stars. The trade newspaper, founded in 1930, was bleeding from layoffs, vanishing advertisers and ferociously competitive entertainment industry blogs. It had become what moviedom dreads most: a has-been.

Indeed, there was no Spago mojo coursing through that sickly, weakened staff. It was a gang that Snoop Dogg, the DJ at the February 4 event from which Barnes leads, might have deemed distinctly lacking in  ”shizzle.”

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When it comes to Hollywood film awards season, print still matters.

Hoping to inject some momentum into the final balloting phase for the Oscars, which begins tomorrow and ends February 19, Columbia Pictures has turned a ton of PR cash into a poly-bagged extra for today’s editions of Daily Variety. You know it’s a major bit of marketing when it gets its own in-house blog item:

The 38-page, full-color bound booklet features a kudos roll call, critical praise and screenplay excerpts, as well as director Kathryn Bigelow‘s Los Angeles Times op-ed defending the film’s depiction of torture.

The final words on the back page are a quote from Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune: “A movie that will endure.”

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