Deadline Hollywood Daily sold for several million dollars; LA Weekly to hire new showbiz blogger

Good bye Nikki, we wish you the best… more to come…
In March 2006, Nikki Finke started Deadline Hollywood Daily as an outlet for scoops that couldn’t wait for her column in LA Weekly. She initially earned nothing extra for the blog.

Today she has sold the site, which she owns entirely, to Mail.com Media Group in a deal worth several million dollars.

“I have really sacrificed, but it was a conscious decision and I love doing this,” Finke said of the experience.

According to a person familiar with the terms, Finke, the site’s sole owner and writer-editor, will get a low seven-figure sum to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily plus several million dollars over the life of a five-year-plus employment contract. The deal also grants her a portion of the site’s advertising revenue.

Though it took its name from Finke’s column in the paper, LA Weekly had no ownership stake in Deadline Hollywood Daily. The Village Voice Media-owned publication simply sold ads and, after the site started to grow, paid Finke a stipend.

Read more at latimes.com

Media War in LA

Now the fight gets good…
The slugfest continues. As we mentioned yesterday, VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey responded via a blog post to the recent LA Times story critical of the LA Weekly and its news editor Jill Stewart. Lacey ranted against the author of the story, James Rainey, and his only named source, Marc Cooper. Lacey called Cooper “a bitter, disgruntled former employee,” and yesterday evening Cooper responded with a note in the blog comments, which can be read below.

Read the rest at mediabistro.com

LA Weekly Wins Four Press Awards

Way to go LA! You will also see that Village Voice Media took several awards.
LA Weekly led the awards among major circulation weekly newspapers again this year, grabbing four first-place honors from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies at its 14th annual AltWeekly Awards in Tucson.

The four winners were Art Director Darrick Rainey for his haunting design of a cover story about the death of a beautiful young runaway on the gritty streets of Hollywood, editor Laurie Ochoa and the LA Weekly staff for the LA People 2008 issue, food columnist Jonathan Gold for his body of work and freelancer Nancy Rommelmann for her cover story about a massive literary hoax.

Among other Village Voice Media newspapers, Phoenix New Times and The Village Voice also both won multiple first-place awards.

For the rest, go to laweekly.com

Drex Heikes Joins LA Weekly

Long-time Los Angeles journalist Drex Heikes will return to California this summer to become LA Weekly’s next editor. His homecoming follows another happy event: his acceptance last month of the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service on behalf of the Las Vegas Sun for an investigation he assigned and edited.
Go to Story at: laweekly.com

Online Classified Postings for Small Businesses Increase Dramatically

Backpage.com releases numbers that demonstrate a significant increase in online small business classified postings over the last few months. Postings in service and product categories have increased by 31 percent in the last six months.

Phoenix, AZ. June 26, 2009 — Backpage.com releases numbers that demonstrate a significant increase in online small business classified postings over the last few months. Postings in service and product categories have increased by 31 percent in the last six months. The largest increases in postings were related to therapeutic massage and health and wellness services; doubling in the last month.

“Businesses realize that the yellow pages are a thing of the past,” said Carl Ferrer, founder of Backpage.com. “Consumers want to make smart and quick decisions and they look to the Internet to do so. Backpage.com is an incredible tool for businesses to reach potential clients.”

Traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper classifieds and the yellow pages are becoming increasingly irrelevant to small businesses in their marketing efforts. These forms of marketing and advertising often require many levels of approval and lag time before an advertisement runs. Advertisements on Backpage.com post live on the site with just a few simple steps.

“Service providers use Backpage.com because their ads are immediately posted online with no delay,” said Ferrer. “The advertisements are also superior to those in traditional media or on other classifieds sites because they can include pictures, unlimited descriptions of products and links to outside websites,” said Ferrer.

Backpage.com has 80 categories which make it easy for business owners to accurately market and advertise their offerings. The process and time spent posting ads is efficient and effective on Backpage.com because of enhanced user features such as using one template to post in multiple cities and auto reposting. Users advertising on the site are responsible for complying with all state and local regulations.

To learn more about Backpage.com or to post an online classified ad visit www.backpage.com.

Backpage.com is a popular online classifieds website. Founded in March 2004, Backpage is owned and operated by the Village Voice Media, a publisher of alternative newsweeklies in many major U.S. cities. Backpage.com is in over 250 cities in the United States, Mexico and Canada. The website has over two million postings and half a billion page views per month and ranks second among free online classified websites according to Alexa and Comscore Media Metrix.

LikeMe App for the Pre

Having one of the first apps on the new Palm Pre offers a swelling of pride, and a pain in the head. I will do my best to keep a smile on my face, but I am not in love with social media geared towards only liking things. It keeps thing positive, but doesn’t allow for much wiggle room of opinion. That being said, our site and our iPhone app are very useful and fun. Here is a somewhat shabby article written on the subject.

LikeMe, a social recommendation site similar to Yelp.com lets users rate and review local businesses, attractions, restaurants, and clubs. After you join the service, you can upload info about yourself, your favorite places, and your favorite things to do in order to kick start the service’s personalized social recommendation engine.

Now the app joins a handful of others (really, just a handful) on the new Palm Pre. But before you go and download this one, there’s something you need to consider about LikeMe: their reviews may be compromised.

At the beginning of this year, LikeMe came under fire when it came out that a lot of the reviews on the site were written by ad representatives for Village Voice Media (VVM), owner of over a dozen weekly papers and a LikeMe partner. The reviews, all good of course, focused on businesses that advertised in the VVM papers. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Read the rest of the article at: readwriteweb.com