It’s hard to argue with the selection of Janice Min for this week’s LA Weekly issue celebrating “the most interesting people” in Los Angeles. The name-brand editorial director has completely re-invigorated a moribund Hollywood trade, showed Jay Penske the way with her weekly glossy print edition and essentially steered clear of Nikki Finke‘s core beat.

So much so that a New York Post story today about the contract renewal status of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter mentions Min as a logical successor. Here’s a taste from Gendy Alimurung‘s LA Weekly profile of the “tiny, friendly” 43-year-old:

The new Hollywood Reporter launched in November 2010, a scant four months after Min took charge. The compressed schedule forced her to think clearly, she believes. Sometimes too much time muddles your thinking. The proof is in the numbers: Online traffic is up 800 percent. More importantly, revenue is up 50 percent.

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It was to be called Beverly Hills Entertainment Week. But the 2012 event never happened and according to reports late last night on Deadline and TheWrap, past and present regimes of Variety are tangled up in the 90210 details.

Variety Media LLC is claiming in an April 29 LA Superior Court complaint that a $500,000 event sponsorship deal set up previously at Variety with Beverly Hills Media Group was fraudulent. In addition, the trade’s new ownership alleges that because the sponsorship deal was never properly disclosed during due diligence for the PMC-Variety deal, they are now on the hook for a penalty.

The defendants, in a counter-claim filed Tuesday, insist they tried to set up a meeting with Penske during the Variety acquisition process but were denied.* From Sharon Waxman‘s report:

The complaint accuses the unnamed “executive officer” of Variety of engaging in a “fraudulent, self-dealing transaction while the assets of Variety were being marketed for sale for the purpose of diverting substantial revenues generated by Variety…”

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This one is definitely a shocker. Stacey Farish, publisher of TheWrap, has jumped to Variety/Deadline owner PMC.

From this afternoon’s brief Deadline announcement:

Effective immediately, she leaves and becomes publisher of Deadline’s print magazine Awardsline as well as vice president of PMC Entertainment. She will be working with Nic Paul, the senior vice president of PMC Entertainment ad sales…

“Hiring Stacey demonstrates PMC’s commitment to the rapid growth of Deadline as one of the most dynamic companies to watch in the digital media arena,” said PMC founder and CEO Jay Penske.

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From a PR standpoint, it’s been a strange week for PMC.

On Tuesday, Jay Penske’s operation rolled out a new weekly edition of Variety. But for a variety of reasons (pun intended, sorry), the launch yielded not nearly the boffo media splash it should have.

Now, at the end of a Passover/Good Friday week’s close, there is news of the settlement of a contentious IP theft lawsuit filed by PMC against Hollywood Reporter parent-parent company Prometheus Global Media. In this case, perhaps PMC was readying a big Cesar Chavez Day press release. But instead, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz this afternoon got to the court documents first, followed by TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw:

When PMC filed the suit, it was seeking more than $5 million in damages, accusing THR of lifting source code from PMC’s site TVLine.com. The two parties settled on $162,500 as well as some other pieces that have not been made public, according to an individual with knowledge of the suit.

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Actually, it’s not quite RIP. But if one goes by the information at the bottom of a recent Anne Thompson Indiewire blog item, it does not exactly inspire bookmarking confidence:

UPDATE: [Editor Frank] DiGiacomo writes in an email:

“Movieline is in the process of transitioning to an all-video site, probably in mid-April. The plan is for me to become PMC’s New York-based editor at large when that changeover occurs.”

In other words, just a few months after DiGiacomo’s west coast counterpart Jen Yamato parked her byline at Deadline (a development noted by Thompson and also something we have been noticing), what was once a beloved monthly LA glossy mag is getting ready to transform yet again. DiGiacomo’s update makes it seem like there will be lots of trailers and PMC YouTube embeds.

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It’s not usually a good thing when an outlet gets the “zero” rating on gossipcop.com’s rumor-to-truth left-margin thermometer graph. That was the case this morning with Bonnie Fuller‘s HollywoodLife or, as Gossip Cop deems the outlet, “Jay Penske‘s Webloid.”

Chief cop Michael Lewittes has been all over this particular news trail since Day One. He links to a head-spinning number of HollywoodLife items about an alleged Down Under “trial separation” between Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. Lewittes claims the entire coverage block was erroneous:

It was sad, really, watching HollywoodLies — er, HollywoodLife — try to cover up its previous misrepresentations with increasingly desperate “reports” that bore no resemblance to reality.

Through it all, Gossip Cop correctly said that nothing had changed between Pattinson and Stewart, and predicted that when Pattinson returned to California, he and Stewart would make HollywoodLife look foolish. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.

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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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Last week, Variety announced the appointment of three new editors-in-chief – Andrew Wallenstein, Cynthia Littleton and Claudia Eller. Today, the trade has made another big move on the “advertorial” side, promoting executive editor Steven Gaydos to the additional role of VP.

The expanded, double title would seem to reflect that Gaydos has the full confidence of new owner Jay Penske, running a features department where most of the money will be. From this afternoon’s announcement:

Gaydos will oversee all editorial for features, events, creative partnerships, custom publishing and other special projects…

Gaydos has been responsible for nearly 200 reports and related events each year, directing the multi-platform production of territorial surveys, film, TV, digital and music reports, business-oriented personality and corporate profiles. In addition, he created and directed the “10 to Watch” program and oversees various initiatives such as brand’s Impact Lists, Hollywood’s New Leaders, Dealmakers and the Billion Dollar series.

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Timing is everything. Just a few days before this week’s LA Weekly article “Who Will Buy the LA Times?” by Hillel Aron, CNBC broke the news that JPMorgan and Evercore will be handling the sale of the paper and other Tribune Co. assets.

That context gives the piece some extra urgency, and from this excellent bit of work by Aron, we were most struck by the following:

Richest Man in LA vs. Richest Man in the World: Aron references Patrick Soon-Shiong (pictured) in connection with former mayoral candidate Austin Beutner’s effort to put together a stealth group of combined LAT buyers. Surprisingly (at least to us), nowhere in the article does Carlos Slim come up, the man responsible for the relaunch of Larry King and much more. Aron confirms to FishbowlLA that it was not a case of being edited out; “no one ever mentioned Slim,” the writer says.

Two Shades of WSJ: The article characterizes Rupert Murdoch as the man who could potentially outbid everyone, with media expert Ken Doctor telling Aron the Wall Street Journal owner remains the odds-on favorite to acquire the newspaper. Doctor also thinks the two publications’ editorial and ad operations could be streamlined in a number of intriguing ways.

Which is perhaps ironic, because Aron also reminds that Times publisher and Tribune Co. CEO Eddie Hartenstein took a lot of flack internally for his decision to allow the Journal to print at the LAT, bumping the paper’s daily schedule down and “ruining its time-zone advantage over east coast papers.”

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Is Nikki Finke still sure about those alleged March Variety layoffs? A day after the trade officially unveiled its triumvirate of editors-in-chief comes the news that Brian Steinberg has been enlisted as a senior TV editor.

The announcement is posted on the beta version of the publication’s new website. Too early to tell how close the page is to the upcoming finished product, but we’re not too fond of the headline font for this article.:

Steinberg has covered the media and advertising industries since 1998, most recently serving as television editor at Advertising Age… He’s managed Ad Age’s popular annual chart of TV spot prices for the past five years and is an expert on Super Bowl commercials.

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