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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The biggest Hollywood film scoop of this young year was posted Thursday at 1:33 p.m PT on TheWrap. While a number of Lucas Shaw‘s peers were immediate and effusive with Twitter praise, large chunks of the pick-up coverage about J.J. Abrams being tapped to direct the next-generation installment of Star Wars failed to credit TheWrap and this hard-working media reporter.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the trenches of THR, Variety, TheWrap and Deadline, with each being guilty at various times of co-opting film scoops by “confirming,” referencing same-subsequent “documents obtained”, slapping on a questionable EXCLUSIVE and so on. But a scoop of the magnitude of Shaw’s should have been exempt from the usual ticky-tack catch-up tricks.

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Culminating with an awards ceremony Tuesday night at the Backstage Theater on the Sony Lot, TheWrap’s inaugural ShortList short film festival recognized the top vote getters from a dozen hand-picked entries.

A judges’ panel consisting of Roadside Attractions co-president Howard Cohen, producer Cassian Elwes, actor Zachary Quinto, producer Lynette Howell and Sundance Institute feature film program founding director Michelle Satter crowned Fishing Without Nets – a drama about Somali pirates told from the pirates’ point of view – as the Jury Prize winner. The audience vote, gathered via thewrap.com and MTV websites film.com and nextmovie.com, favored The Maker. From Lucas Shaw’s report:

[Fishing Without Nets] director Cutter Hodierne nets a $60,000 reward from Panavision to be used for a future filmmaking project… Hodierne and [The Maker director] Christopher Kezelos will receive a new Sony Alpha A77 DLSR Cameras, as well as a first-look deal with Cinedigm.

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Among the quartet of Hollywood “trades,” none had been keeping a closer eye on the Yahoo! CEO sweepstakes than TheWrap. Sharon Waxman wrote several articles about this topic, working her extensive showbiz contacts. But she and media reporter Lucas Shaw today were as surprised as everyone else by the appointment to the post of Google VP Marissa Mayer:

Choosing Mayer over Levinsohn appears like another win for technology over media at one of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies… She holds a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford – a real one – as well as a bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems.

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The door has closed on a Hollywood gossip institution.

After many years at the helm of column “The Awful Truth,” Ted Casablanca (a.k.a. Bruce Bibby) announced last Thursday, right after Independence Day, that he was moving on from E! Online. This morning’s pick-up by TheWrap’s media reporter Lucas Shaw was the first we’d heard of it. From Casablanca’s farewell note:

When I first took this job at E! – in 1996, when the network founded E! Online – I was working at the established and respected Premiere magazine. Scores of people told me, “Online just isn’t the place to go.”

Everybody told me to pass on the job, and so I did. Then I called back the next day and an amazing man named Lew Harris said, yes, of course, I could change my mind. And I did.

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It wasn’t quite on the level of Mitt Romney’s “Amercia.” But yesterday, when The Hollywood Reporter rushed to beat its competitors with a Kim Masters item about the announcement of Alan Horn stepping in to take over Disney Studios, the headline blared out a memorable typo:

The flub, jokingly tipped on Twitter by Variety film editor Josh Dickey, was of course quickly fixed. But it was ironic that this new, would-be slang was attached to a story that others – like  TheWrap media critic Lucas Shaw – viewed as a very poor excuse for an “exclusive:”

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There’s some interesting grist for the Variety mill to be found in an article on TheWrap by Sharon Waxman and her media critic Lucas Shaw. The pair note that today, the Reed Elsevier property will release financials, perhaps in hopes of spurring buyer interest.

So just how profitable is the second oldest Hollywood trade? Waxman and Lucas guesstimate that on annual revenues of $45 million, the publication clears between six and seven million. As far as who makes sense as a buyer, there’s this observation in the article from Quantum Media principal Ava Seave:

Seave said the key is finding a buyer, like a Bloomberg or a Dow Jones, that could leverage existing infrastructure. “Bloomberg is super smart, and they do care about media,” Seave said. “They can, in a really intelligent way, use the content and are really great with data.”

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Yes, we know—insert your own joke here: What did this person do all day? Was his informal internal CRO abbreviation SOL? And so on.

Actually, much of what John T. O’Loughlin (pictured) did before TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw got the scoop this morning that he is leaving probably involved trying to translate the incredible success of LATimes.com into equally robust revenue streams. Here’s the statement given to Shaw by LAT spokesperson Nancy Sullivan:

“John O’Loughlin has been a valued member of the Tribune Company team for over 20 years and we wish him the very best in his next endeavors. The Times is in the process of looking at both internal and external candidates to head a strong, diverse revenue team that delivered a great 2011.”

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In the wake of today’s announcement that yet another LA Times editor is stepping down, TheWrap’s media reporter Lucas Shaw did a little digging. The result is a pretty interesting article about where the paper may be headed.

Despite a massive increase in web traffic, revenue for LATimes.com has not followed in kind. So, according to Shaw’s sources, the website paywall that has been rumored is coming in the first quarter of 2012, together with a custom tablet. He also offers some info about the next round of layoffs:

New cuts are on the horizon, with 12 to 20 staffers to be laid off sometime after the first of the year, according to one individual with knowledge of the situation. Deeper cuts may well follow after the final numbers for 2011 are in…

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After only two months at The Hollywood Reporter, deputy web editor Patrick Day has called it quits and is heading back to the LA Times as a writer/senior producer. TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw, who broke the story, writes that not only is Day leaving, but his editor Joseph Kapsch is unhappy at THR under EIC Janice Min, and is planning his own exit from the mag–which Shaw basically calls a sinking ship.

Kapsch confirmed to FishbowlLA that Day is indeed leaving. As is Lindsay Powers, who is a New York freelancer, not a deputy web editor as TheWrap reported. But he took issue with some of Shaw’s characterizations of life at THR under EIC Janice Min and the notion that he is unhappy. In fact, Kapsch had a number of other issues with TheWrap’s story. So we’re running his response in full.

As a hotly-watched media operation, The Hollywood Reporter is used to being covered. Everyone from The New York Times to Elle to Huffington Post have taken notice of our amazing transformation, for which we are grateful. We are additionally grateful for the large, enthusiastic and passionate audience we have amassed in a short period of time.

Today a small blog ran a ridiculous item about me and my online staff, for which I was not even called. Usually, we ignore such nonsense knowing that this certain breed of Hollywood blogger writes based on opinion, agenda and fantasy, not fact. But when it calls into question my character, or that of people who work here, an institution of dedicated and respected journalists, I feel I must say something. We are compelled to respond when it comes to personal and inaccurate statements about staff.

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