Here & there
Bonnie's back with HollywoodLife.com
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Nov 18, 2009 - 1:01:00 AM

Bonnie's back with HollywoodLife.com
It's been 18 months since Bonnie Fuller resigned from American Media, which is more like decades in the celebrity news business. Since she left, Rob and Kristen have replaced Brad and Angelina as the tabs' most-talked-about couple. Stars make their own news via their Twitter accounts, and anything regarding Lindsay Lohan has become passé. But if the names and technology have changed, Fuller hasn't. She still knows what women want, a frothy collection of celebrity, fashion and beauty news, and that's what she delivered yesterday with the relaunch of HollywoodLife.com, a site aimed at women 18-35. The former editor of Glamour and Us Weekly, who oversaw the revamp of Star at AMI, doesn't do anything particularly innovative on the new site. There's an absurd amount of fawning over the "Twilight Saga: New Moon" premiere, the requisite Kate Gosselin snark and the chummy headlines that she popularized at Us and Star ("Hey Molly -- We Hear You've Got a New Man!"). There are also a lot of exclamation points, though not nearly as many as Fuller used at Star. The site's most interesting piece is a rant about Playgirl model Levi Johnston and his would-be mother-in-law, Sarah Palin, written by Fuller herself, that has real personality and a point of view. Otherwise, HollywoodLife.com publishes most of the same things you'll find at the celebrity print magazines' web sites. Is that such a bad thing? Well, no. If you didn't know who Rob (Pattinson) and Kristen (Stewart) were before you logged on to the site, you're probably at the wrong address.

Programming notes: 'Wendy Williams' renewed
“How you doin’?” Pretty well, after yesterday's announcement. TV viewers will be able to hear Wendy Williams’ catchphrase for at least a couple more years after Fox stations extended her syndicated talk show, produced by Debmar-Mercury, through the 2011-’12 season. The show launched nationally in July and has averaged a 1.1 household rating so far this year, with its greatest strength in young women demographics. Meanwhile, in other programming, MTV has picked up the U.S. TV rights to “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” the documentary that followed the singer as he prepared for his 50-concert run in London, which of course never happened. The film will also be available to air on VH1, BET and Palladia. Nickelodeon has ordered a pilot for “Summer Camp,” a half-hour comedy about, uh, summer camp. The project is from Peter Barsocchini, who wrote the “High School Musical” movies. And Planet Green has ordered “Operation Wild,” a reality series set to premiere on Jan. 8. The show follows the Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission as it deals with poachers, alligators and stranded boaters. The network has also ordered the four-part series “Ultimate Power Builders,” and renewed the shows “Greensburg” and “Wa$ted” for third seasons.

The 2009 word of the year: Unfriend
When Facebook was shiny and new and exciting, you had no qualms about friending the weird guy who sat behind you in freshman calculus 15 years ago. But after two years of status updates regarding his infection-prone cats, you've had enough. You click the "remove" button and instantly feel freer. You've also been legitimized by the New Oxford American Dictionary, which named unfriend (to remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook) its 2009 Word of the Year. Other technology finalists included paywall (a way of blocking access to a part of a web site only available to paying subscribers) and sexting (the sending of sexually explicit text messages). Other finalists were more political or economy-related. They included funemployed (taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status); choice mom (a person who chooses to be a single mother); brown state (a U.S. state that doesn’t have strict environmental regulations); and birther (a conspiracy theorist who challenged president Barack Obama’s U.S. birth certificate). Oxford also noted a host of new words created by the Twitter phenomenon, including retweet, twitterati, tweetaholic and twittermob.

Study: Spending on entertainment steady
The recession has led people to cut back on dining out and buying new clothes, but it hasn’t hurt how much we spend on entertainment media. In fact, we're spending even more these days. Overall monthly per-capita entertainment-content-subscription spending was $115 this year, according to NPD Group’s “Entertainment Trends in America” study, up 7 percent from last year. As of August, 81 percent of households subscribed to some sort of TV service (cable, satellite, etc.), while 76 percent of homes paid for internet subscriptions. “Consumers are clearly looking to the value offered by entertainment subscriptions and like what they get for their money,” NPD analyst Russ Cruprick said in a statement. “Plus, new technologies and products have helped bolster data plans and other newer kinds of subscription-based services.” That includes online music services and satellite radio, which had a 17 percent subscription rate in August, while 14 percent subscribed to online gaming services. Older media saw a bit of a year-to-year decline in subscriptions; 29 percent of people subscribed to a newspaper in August, down from 31 percent last year, while 41 percent subscribed to magazines this year, down from 43 percent.

Police raid New York papers in union sting
The circulation departments of New York City's three biggest daily papers may be embroiled in a scam that would make for juicy copy. Yesterday officers from the city police's organized crime investigation division raided the offices of the New York Times, New York Post and New York Daily News, as well as the Spanish-language paper El Diario. The officers delivered warrants for documentation on the hiring and promotion of Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union members, as part of a greater corruption probe. The police department emphasized that the newspapers themselves are not involved, merely their delivery systems. The New York Times reports that certain senior leaders of the NMDU have been accused of favoritism and links to organized crime, which is really nothing new. The union has been investigated numerous times over the past three decades, including accusations that the Mafia was wielding undue influence.



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