Posts Tagged ‘Gail Berman’

Santa Monica-based BermanBraun announced today the acquisition of Whiskey Media, the online media company created by Shelby Bonnie, co-founder and former CEO of CNET.

But BermanBraun did not acquire all of Whiskey Media’s Internet properties. The websites Giant Bomb and Comic Vine are reportedly being sold to CBS Interactive.

The Whiskey Media web properties that will be added to the BermanBraun portfolo include Anime Vice, tech site Tested, and the film and television site Screened. BermanBraun has also acquired Whiskey Media’s content publishing platform.

BermanBraun is a film, television and digital production company owned by former TV executives Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun. Together with MSM the company operates celebrity news site Wonderwall and the women’s lifestyle site GLO.

Media Post has the scoop that celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is launching a new website:

That’s the word from Henry Copeland, Founder and CEO of BlogAds.com, which handles ad sales for the “Queen of All Media”‘s hugely popular gossip site, PerezHilton.com.

With his new site, Hilton – who, according to Copeland, has “this genetic link with 26-year-old women” – will focus on longer-form, more advertiser-friendly content.

To some, the immediate success of Wonderwall – a gossip site launched earlier this year for MSN by Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun – showed that the crude and mean-spirited coverage popularized by Perez, a.k.a. Mario Lavandeira, might have run its course with audiences.

BermanBraun: Gail Berman, who resigned this month as president of Paramount Pictures, is teaming up with another ex-exec, outsted head of Yahoo Inc.’s media group Lloyd Braun, to produce TV programs, movies and shortform shows.

Almost Famous: Fawning sentences like this one “The leggy singer with the cascade of brown hair knocked her hips from side to side theatrically,” really should be reserved for an empty profile of an A-lister. Not for an American Idol also-ran.

Straight Face: In testimony in the Scooter Libby hearings, Ari Fleischer confirms that he spent the entirety of his tenure as White House press secretary being a douchebag. To wit: “It was like a lot of things that I said to the press. It had no impact.”

UPDATE:
Gail Berman walked the plank at Paramount with two years left on her contract. Claudia Eller at the LA Times points out that this is another loss for Brad Grey, while Nikki Finke sees another woman in power become a woman in peril: Berman’s not even getting the golden handshake of a production deal.

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