LinkedIn remains a very handy tool. Per a FishbowlLA tipster, it does indeed appear that Alan Citron is newly installed as a business lead with Yahoo Entertainment.

Citron, one of the genuinely nicest guys in town, has had a long, illustrious career, one many journalists today would pine for. After working for more than a decade as a reporter and editor at the LA Times, he segued to Ticketmaster Online and MusicNet.

Most recently with BuzzMedia (a.k.a. SpinMedia), Citron was instrumental as founding GM in helping the late Jim Paratore and Harvey Levin build out TMZ. His fellow TMZ-er at Buzz-Spin, Gillian Sheldon Heckendorf, previously left for Berman Braun.

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We’ve attended many Digital Hollywood’s and similar conferences over the years. For the life of us, we cannot remember another time when editorial representatives from all four Hollywood trades participated in the same panel discussion.

The May day confluence will occur tomorrow afternoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey. Moderating “The New Digital Age of the Hollywood Trade Press” will be Rick Markovitz, president of Weissman/Markovitz Communications. And participating:

- Andrew Wallenstein, editor-in-chief, digital, Variety
- Chis Krewson, editor, THR.com, The Hollywood Reporter
- Dominic Patten, reporter, Deadline Hollywood
- Joseph Kapsch, deputy managing editor, TheWrap

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When it comes to the Top 50 mobile content destinations in the U.S., a pair of killer “B’s” crown the latest Quantcast ratings (next to comScore, these are generally agreed to be the most accurate publicly available metrics). Coming in at #7 with 4,373,802 monthly visitors is BuzzFeed, while 3,919,244 measured Smartphone/tablet visitors places The Bleacher Report at #9.

A number of listed sites have chosen to keep their profile names “hidden.” For example, if our cross-referencing is correct, #41 is Gawker.

Looking at the rest of the Top 50 group, FishbowlLA is intrigued by the listing’s reminder of the ageless value of the “Hollywood” word-brand. PMC’s hollywoodlife.com ranks 32nd and Guggenheim Digital Media’s  hollywoodreporter.com comes in 48th.

“Hollywood Life’s audience of millennial women wants to get the latest news no matter where they are or what time it is,” Fuller tells FishbowlLA via email. “That’s why they are flocking to Hollywood Life’s well optimized mobile site in rapidly increasing numbers.”

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Editors at Latina love getting thoughtful pitches. The mag has a small staff and relies on outside contributors for a whopping 80 percent of its content. Although the pub often assigns articles out to freelancers, executive editor Damarys Ocaña says she would “love to get really informed, specific pitches… that would make my life a lot easier.”

Ocaña is always looking for great writers who know Latin culture and are familiar with the publication. But do the writers, themselves, have to be Latin? “No, definitely not,” said Ocaña. “We have plenty of freelancers who aren’t.”

For more info, read How To Pitch: Latina.

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Remember those folks, like Robert Altman, who swore they would move away from the U.S. if George W. Bush was elected President in 2000? Well, thanks to a recent LA Times awards dinner, there’s now a local newspaper equivalent to that defiant promise.

According to a fun little report by Huffington Post LA associate editor Kathleen Miles, who just this past weekend was part of a panel discussing the future of the LAT, there’s a new “I love my *cough* job…” short-form at the paper. It’s spelled *Koch*:

Facing the elephant trunk-on, columnist Steve Lopez from the podium said, “Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers.” About half the staff raised their hands.

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When the nominations for the 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards are announced at 5:35 a.m. on Thursday July 18, a big change will be the number of categories honoring interactive TV. From Variety awards editor Jon Weisman‘s Monday item:

Chief among the changes is the establishment of a competitive award for outstanding interactive program, saluting either a standalone experience or one that serves as a companion to a TV program. In the Emmy context, “interactive” denotes anything that encourages proactive engagement from the audience — not to be confused with video content delivered via broadband, such as Netflix’s House of Cards.

This category can have zero or multiple awards as determined by the Academy’s 12-year-old interactive media peer group, which currently counts 627 members. The other new interactive TV awards categories cover multi-platform storytelling and visual experience/visual design, to go along with the existing brackets of original interactive program (not tied to an existing TV show) and social TV experience.

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Barry Diller Admits Buying Newsweek Was A Mistake (FishbowlNY)
The “Most Honest And Unintentionally Depressing Answer Of The Day” award goes to Barry Diller, IAC’s chairman. In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Diller admits that buying Newsweek was a mistake, and even adds that the all-digital NewsBeast isn’t likely to succeed: “For a news magazine, which is a bit of an odd phrase today, it was not possible to print it any longer. We said we will offer digital products. We have a very solid newsroom. We will see. I do not have great expectations. I wish I had not bought Newsweek. It was a mistake.” Bloomberg Businessweek IAC doesn’t officially disclose financial figures for the Newsweek/Daily Beast unit. A person with direct knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg News in July the business would probably lose as much as $22 million in 2012. The publisher cut editorial jobs in December in an effort to hold down expenses.

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It’s not every day that a TV news director can cram five new hires into a single tweet. But that was the case Monday with KTLA’s Jason Ball:

The two biggest names are of course the KTTV FOX 11 tandem of Courtney Friel and Jillian Barberie. When we spoke to Friel a couple of months ago, she said her priority was to spend some quiet time at home with husband Carter Evans. Apparently, either the novelty of that wore off or the KTLA offer was just too good to pass up.

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Fortune magazine’s three-day conference event “Brainstorm GREEN” got off to an intriguing start this afternoon in Laguna Niguel. Actor Harrison Ford, there in his capacity as vice chair of non-profit Conservation International (CI), participated in a 2 p.m. special session with CI CEO Peter Seligmann and Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer.

The first point made by Ford is a dramatic reminder of the surprising, costly and sometimes dangerous human reactions to environmental problems:

“For instance, what’s happening with the Somali pirates, you can look at that and recognize that it’s the collapse of the fisheries, the sustainable fishing, that men equipped with boats had no other options but to be involved in piracy, and that’s cost us and the rest of our NATO partners $2 billion to try and redress. That’s the national security connection to an environment issue, conservation issue.”

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Even back in 2009, when columnist and Gay Vegas book author Steve Friess wrote an item about Kenny Kerr, memories were already fading of the legendary Strip performer’s female impersonator legacy. Kerr died over the weekend at age 60.

From Friess’ December 2009 Las Vegas Weekly article:

Not even my own partner, who has been in Vegas for almost a decade, was certain what Kenny does. “He was a drag queen, right?” Miles asked.

Uh, yeah. But not in the low-rent, cheesy form that most people think of when bandying about that phrase. Kenny Kerr is — not was, is — the best performing drag queen ever to grace a stage in Las Vegas or anywhere else. Unfortunately, he’s also one of the worst businessmen. Which he cops to.

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