Business

WAXMAN’S BEAT

THERE’S life after

the New York Times for Sharon Waxman, the one-time Hollywood beat reporter who raised more than $1 million to launch Thewrap.com in January.

Last week, her site was basking in its latest scoop, an intercepted fax that showed the salaries of top-echelon executives at talent agency William Morris.

Earlier in the week, Waxman, who before the Gray Lady gig in Tinseltown had worked overseas for the Washington Post and Reuters, was back in New York for a TV appearance and a recruiting mission.

She’s the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the site, which has a seven-person staff and, she claims, about 200,000 unique visitors a month. That’s a tiny speck by Internet standards, but her news re ports on the inner workings of Hol lywood have already made The-wrap a must read for a very elite audience of Hollywood’s power brokers, studio heads and A-list actors.

Waxman attracted Seattle-based venture capital firm Maveron LLC, founded by Dan Levitan and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz as her primary backer. While she won’t specify how much money she’s raised, she said it is a seven-figure sum. “We have enough operating capital to function for two years,” she said.

And she makes no mistake that her target is the floundering ad trades, the Hollywood Reporter and Variety, which have ruled the Hollywood roost for years. In recent months, their editions have been so advertising-light they’ve looked like pamphlets.

“I don’t believe they are viable anymore,” she said. While the print editions are reeling with 30 percent declines in ads this year, the Web versions aren’t faring much better.

ComScore, which tracks Internet traffic reported the Hollywood Reporter.com’s monthly unique visitors plunged 38 percent from a year ago to only 266,000, while Variety.com collapsed by 38 percent to 546,000.

TheWrap is, as of now, untracked by ComScore. “We’re working on breaking news for the industry insiders, the movers and shakers and power brokers,” Waxman said. But she also expects to attract consumer readers who are fascinated with the inner workings of Hollywood. Charles Koones, a former publisher of Variety and executive at Reed Elsevier recently joined her board of directors.

One of her scoops was the latest axing of 10 more people at the Hollywood Reporter. “They got too comfortable in the world they were in,” said Waxman. “That time is over.”