Perhaps Charlie Sheen’s marketing appeal should now be measured by an east coast BBQ restaurant. Especially since his recent antics basically torched one-half of his audience base.

In a Daily Beast article, Maria Elena Fernandez gets the name of a marketing intelligence firm a tad wrong. It should read The Q Scores Company, not The Q Company. Former ABC-TV marketing VP Henry Schafer tells the reporter that although the Anger Management star’s Q score is up, that notoriety has come at a price:

“It looks like from everything that transpired, it was his female appeal that got hit the hardest,” Schafer said. “He’s a complete turn-off to women right now, whereas, back in the day, at the height of Two and a Half Men, he was way above average with female consumers. He’s lost most of his consumer strength with women of all ages and men 35 and older. But young males, 18 to 34, were relatively unaffected by all of his ranting and raving.”

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Like the tragic shooting of publicist Ronnie Chasen in Beverly Hills, the May 1 disappearance of Fox film executive Gavin Smith has transfixed members of the film and TV industry. Today, the formidable Daily Beast reporting tandem of Maria Elena Fernandez and Christine Pelisek takes a look at the latest circumstantial evidence and tries their best to uncover something new.

Contrary to the family’s initial statements, Smith was staying with a female friend in Ventura County far longer than just the night before his disappearance. According to the reporters, he had been there basically since returning to LA from CinemaCon in Las Vegas around April 20:

“They were kind of friends and he was hanging out there for a few days,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. homicide division’s Sgt. John O’Brien said. “There was no romance in that at all. Just hanging out with a friend for a couple of days.”

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Company Town editor John Lippman is the latest to leave the Los Angeles Times Calendar section. He’s off to New Hampshire, where he’ll be the editor of a small town paper.

Lippman is the 14th voluntary exit from the Calendar section in a little under two years, an unusually high rate of departures at a time when newspaper jobs are increasingly hard to come by. We’ve heard grumblings about the section’s editor, Sallie Hofmeister, but as Kevin Roderick points out, Lippman was a Hofmeister hire, and his departure is apparently nothing to do with his boss.

After the jump, the updated list of Calender refugees:

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Former LA Times reporter, Maria Elena Fernandez has secured a new gig at The Daily Beast/Newsweek according to our sources. She’s set to start next month as their senior entertainment reporter. In addition to the LAT, Fernandez has worked at the Washington Post, Atlanta Constitution and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

Congratulations Maria Elena!

Look, we’re old salts when it comes to journalists changing gigs. We were there for what we call the ’08-’09 blood bath. Tens of thousands of journalists laid off. It was like blogging at a morgue.

Anyway, the post-Apocalypse LAT Calendar section is still losing talent. Today’s exit: one of the last remaining senior television writers Maria Elena Fernandez. That makes three senior writers whom have left Calendar in the past month (music critic Ann Powers and reporter Chris Lee being the other two).

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Twelve year vet at the LA Times, Maria Elena Fernandez, is no longer with the paper as of yesterday. She was a reporter in the Calender section covering television for nearly seven years.

Fernandez tells FishbowlLA, “You just need to read the Calendar section and look at the Web site to know that in the last two years something has gone terribly wrong. The Times is moving in the wrong direction, and it’s been painful to see. Calendar is not the joyous, inspiring place it once was and the paycheck just wasn’t worth it anymore. I am sad about leaving so many good friends behind and wish them only the best.”

Fernandez told us she has a gig lined up but can’t tell us the details yet.

Good luck to you, Maria!

Unlike some of the other prizes recently, SoCal newspapers are better represented in this morning’s announcement of Loeb finalists (the award is based out of Los Angeles, so we’d better be!).

Some of the local points of pride:

Finalists in the Breaking News category include Claudia Eller, Richard Verrier, Maria Elena Fernandez, Jay A. Fernandez, Meg James, John Horn and Joseph Menn for their LAT writers’ strike coverage.

In the Best Writing category, Lisa Girion is up for her story “Coverage Denied.”

Congratulations!

(photo of 2001 winners from the OC Register)

Aaron Sorkin is displeased with the LA Times. Maria Elena Fernandez, Scott Collins, and Deborah Netburn dared write in a critical way about Studio 60. Sorkin recounts their misdeeds to Shelley Gabert from Film Stew, as well as dozens of others on the TCA press tour. He doesn’t actually call for them to be horse-whipped, but maybe there’s a follow-up coming.

Netburn made the fatal error of asking other writers about Studio 60, and not all of them were Sorkin’s A-list buddies. Some of them were unemployed, and thus, not worthy to touch the hem of his garment. He should be glad Netburn didn’t ask some of his pals from rehab.

He also was distressed that Bill Carter in the NY Times had quoted bloggers, saying:

We live in the age of amateurs, and we can all go on the Internet and find people to say mean things about any show, But everybody’s voice ought not to be equal.

What a tool. FBLA wonders if there’s a secret test you have to pass to watch the show. Some pigs are more equal than others.