Bonnie Fuller invented the modern incarnation of the celebrity gossip magazine at Us Weekly aesthetic — the screaming palette of pinks, purples and yellow, the starburst cover lines, the hand-drawn arrows, and picture pop-outs — which were widely duplicated as a sure-fire formula to get ladies to buy magazines at newsstands. This home page for her newly redesigned site uses all of her old magazine tricks. Simultaneously.

This stew of soft celeb chatter on HollywoodLife.com is all the more overwhelming because of the truly massive pictures Fuller insists on placing on the home page, thus requiring absurd amounts of scrolling to see just one item. That's not the only magazine throwback on the site; the right margin of the homepage is studded with little Us-esque sidebars, which should be as painful for Fuller's poor underlings to maintain/update as they will for readers to skim.

Which isn't to say Fuller's early stumbles will be lethal for her or her boss Jay Penske, who is building a stable of Hollywood news sites of widely varying viciousness. Pictures and chaotic sidebars aside, HollywoodLife has a serviceably clean design, and Web publishing in any case is all about iteration. Fuller just needs to coax a series of user-friendly tweaks from her staff. Given Fuller's notoriously ferocious approach to management, that shouldn't be much of a problem.

Finke's numbers just went onto Quantcast, no doubt through the efforts of her blog's new owner, heir and budding Web mogul Jay Penske, who presumably hopes opening his stats will help sell advertising. Finke is making north of $625,000 from Penske over eight years, according to the New York Times.

She gets around 30,000 to 40,000 people on her site each weekday. The may indeed be influential people. But there aren't that many of them. Except when Finke is the subject of a New Yorker profile, which she can turn into a traffic-spiking multimedia catfight.

It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Finke to attract the several hundred thousand daily readers of an LATimes.com, or the couple hundred thousand of a Gawker.com. Her site is very specialized in insider gossip, more akin to a Variety or Hollywood Reporter. In fact, 30,000 is roughly the circulation of one of those Hollywood trades, if not both.

But if Penske wants to use Finke as a linchpin of a robust online empire — and if Finke wants to seize the incentives that could reportedly double her take to $10 million over the life of her deal — those numbers will need to come up, which means Finke will somehow need to broaden her appeal. Loud fights can only take one so far, after all.

One of Finke's many charms is the way she has treated her readership like her boss—she'll call in sick via a post, or beg for just a few more minutes to get her thoughts together on breaking news. And as any regular reader knows, she scarcely goes a month without going dark for a day or two for some reason or other, which she invariably explains on her blog in the manner of a harried writer trying to get an editor off her back: I'm down with the flu, I've got jury duty, this damn internet's not working, I had some bad dental work, I broke my hand.

We're all for writers taking time off. And we're in no way prepared to put our own work ethic up against Finke's. But ever since she sold DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com to Jay Penske's Mail.com in a reported multimillion-dollar deal that has her earning $400,000 a year, we've wondered how Finke's frequently erratic work habits would mesh with a real boss, who has investors to satisfy. So we've decided to keep an eye on Finke's "I'm out today" posts, to see what a $400k blogger can get away with.

Last Thursday, Finke wrote that she had been in the hospital by way of explaining a shortage of recent posts. We hope she's OK. Finke has written in the past that she suffers from diabetes, which may explain her frequent absences from blogging (though it hasn't hampered a long and active career that has included stints in Moscow and London for the Associated Press). She seems to have bounced back fairly quickly from her latest illness, with a lot of posts over the weekend.

To put Finke's salary in perspective, we've gone through her archives and put together a sampling—and this really is just a sampling—of her posts offering reasons for not being able to work. We hope that in her new, corporate environment, Finke will find a way to pace herself and accommodate a more predictable work schedule. Because we agree with this blogger, who wrote a post called "Why Hollywood Gets No Work Done" in 2006:

I was shocked to hear that Hollywood types were already leaving town for the July 4th holiday. It's bad enough you guys cancel four straight scheduled meetings with screenwriters. Or have your assistants book appointments six months ahead which you'll cancel anyway. And all without a twinge of guilt. But lately you've become Slacker Town.

Finke is no slacker—anyone who's been on the business end of her reporter's notebook knows that she is not afraid to put in the hours on any given story. But she certainly does seem to cancel a lot of appointments with her readers:

September 17, 2009

September 14, 2009

September 10, 2009

August 12, 2009

July 31, 2009

July 13, 2009

July 9, 2009

July 7, 2009

June 29, 2009

April 20, 2009

April 15, 2009

April 6, 2009

April 2, 2009

March 30, 2009

November 10, 2008

November 3, 2008

October 15, 2008

September 11, 2008

September 4, 2008

August 1, 2008

July 28, 2008

July 9, 2008

June 10, 2008

June 9, 2008

May 20, 2008

May 16, 2008

May 15, 2008

April 23, 2008

April 1, 2008

February 20, 2008

February 12, 2008

January 23, 2008

January 14, 2008

January 9, 2008

December 27, 2007

December 17, 2007

December 10, 2007

November 30, 2007

October 16, 2007

October 10, 2007

October 1, 2007

September 13, 2007

August 13, 2007

July 20, 2007

July 13, 2007

July 11, 2007

July 7, 2007

February 25, 2007

December 30, 2006

December 5, 2006

September 11, 2006

June 12, 2006

[Full disclosure: Your blogger's wife works as an editor at Finke's former employer, Village Voice Media, and occasionally edited her stories.]

To be clear, we don't know if the two deals are connected, and certainly don't have any info to suggest there was anything untoward about them. But given Rattner's history of greasing deals—recall that he bought Chooch, a low-budget film by the brother of the chief investment officer of New York state's pension fund, shortly after the fund invested $100 million in Rattner's Quadrangle Group—we thought we'd throw it out there.

Here's what we know:

In September 2008, Quadrangle Capital Partners—part of Quadrangle Group—invested $35 million in Mail.com, Jay Penske's would-be online empire. The money was for "selective acquisitions and new management hires," which means hiring Nikki Finke and Bonnie Fuller. Two of Quadrangle's partners got seats on Mail.com's board. Mail.com had little to recommend it at the time as a hot pick for internet supremacy, and the investment came shortly before Quadrangle would wind down its media-focused hedge fund amid 25% losses, but who knows? Maybe it'll turn out to be a rocket.

Four months later, in January, Rattner's name started getting bandied about as Obama's pick for "car czar," and six weeks after that Rattner left Quadrangle to join the Treasury Department with the goal of saving the auto industry.

One way to do that is to keep Saturn, with its 13,000 employees, alive. General Motors made clear that it couldn't keep Saturn going, so it went on the block. And in June, none other than Roger Penske, the billionaire car mogul who happens to be Jay's father—and perhaps the provider of seed capital to Mail.com?—emerged as a buyer. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal says Saturn's service and parts operation alone has been valued at $100 million.

And then last month, Rattner stepped down amid chatter that Quadrangle, and perhaps Rattner himself, was getting drawn further into the pay-to-play pension scandal that gave us Chooch.

Here's what we don't know:

Was Penske doing Rattner a favor in swooping in as Saturn's savior, or did Rattner hand it to Penske on a platter? Without knowing the terms of the deal, it's impossible to know. But the news of the deal sure made Rattner look like a hyper-competent technocrat calmly steering an industry in crisis. If Saturn had simply been liquidated, it would have been seen as a disastrous signal. On the other hand, according to the New York Times, the brand had attracted "16 potential bidders," so maybe Penske was the one looking for an edge, and maybe Rattner helped him find it. Or maybe Penske was the most rational buyer for Saturn, and it's a coincidence that the guy who was essentially running GM when it was sold happened to own a piece of Penske's son's business.

Given the timeline, it's virtually impossible that the Mail.com deal itself was some kind of sweetener—coming as it did in September, Rattner would have to have had the foresight to know that Congress would bail out the auto industry, and that Obama would win, and that Obama would hire a car czar, and that Rattner himself could land the gig, and that Saturn would need to be off-loaded from G.M. Only under those circumstances would a relationship with Penske's son be something worth having in your back pocket, and Rattner would be a much richer man if he had that sort of vision. (Cf. Maxim.)

So is there any more connective tissue out there that might make render the above datapoints more sensible? Let us know.

Why quibble? Because that's how much rival Hollywood webpreneur Sharon Waxman — who wouldn't mind pushing up the price of websites about the entertainment business — insists the deal is worth. In her story today about Penske's nabbing of magazine editor Bonnie Fuller to run HollywoodLife.com, Amy Kaufman writes at Waxman's The Wrap, "Last month, TheWrap reported that MMC purchased Nikki Finke's blog Deadline Hollywood Daily for a deal totalling $14 million."

Still, Finke is now pulling in one of the largest blogger — excuse us, news website editor — salaries around. And as Carr points out, Finke has her sharp elbowed, merciless, style that she's known for to thank for Penske's millions. One the big debates about Finke's is whether she is a hard-nosed reporter trying to keep Hollywood honest or a recluse ranting on the corner of Journalism and Vendetta?

We've had Nikki's digital spittle on our faces a number of times. And so have many others, like an editor at GQ for instance. This email from Nikki sent to the GQ is one of our is one of our favorite postcards from the stormy isle of Finke:

Subject: Re: LA story
Date: 8/17/2004 3:13:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time

From: Nikki Finke

To: XXXX

You think having an unnamed Hollywood agent talking about poaching unnamed clients is a "get"? I have 300 interviews with real live Hollywood agents ON THE RECORD talking all about stealing clients and naming names, dates, places, etc. not to mention a whole bunch of even juicier stuff. But do you people ever think to actually call me to do an article for you? Noooooooooooooooooooooo....

Because I'm not 24 years old...
Because I'm not making up stuff.

Because I don't live in New York.

Because I don't kiss up to the idiots who decide which stars magazines like GQ can and can't put on their covers.

Because I actually know something about Hollywood.

Here's a thought: Why not ask me to put together the juiciest Hollywood stories I know for your magazine. Oh, you're running late for lunch at Michael's?

How come I'm not surprised.

C'mon guys! Who wants to buy Nikki lunch? As a burgeoning chronicler of the entertainment scene, I have to tell you that judging from this highlight reel Nikki Finke is an absolute inspiration to me. She proves that you can be successful despite your tendency towards spleen venting tirades, outrageous public feuding, intolerable smugness, and overall an contemptuous personality. There's hope still!

Perhaps "stable" isn't the right word for a collection of media personalities known for their trail of enemies. Finke has had more than her share of feuds and bloodsport.

While Finke tends to spar with competitors and subjects, Fuller is known more for her demanding and abusive treatment of underlings, distance from family and exorbitant pay. After making her name at Us Weekly, the editor flailed atop tabloid publisher American Media and was eventually pushed out.

Now she'll take over Penske's HollywoodLife.com, and adjunct to the failed HollywoodLife magazine shut down by his holding company, Mail.com Media Corporation, last year. It's hard to imagine how Fuller will differentiate the site on the Web, already teeming with celebrity news, hard and soft, from a wide variety of other, better known sources. Penske is surely spending a tidy sum to find out; maybe he can use some money from the same pot to buy some news.

(Pic: by Esther on Flickr)

Finke's success at turning the thin gruel of studio press releases into high-drama gossip has always hinged on her ability to put herself into the middle of every story. Everything is "Toldja!" this and "I just spoke to" that. Take her coverage of this past weekend's executive shakeup at Paramount - Finke can only write in the first person:

4:20PM: As my sources predicted...
4:20PM: I just heard that
3:50PM UPDATE: I've just learned that my story today

She is a fantastic story-teller, but the greatest character Finke has created is herself: dogged scoop-monger with spies in every corner of every studio lot and agency suite. It's neat stuff, and puffing up one's persona puts her square in the tradition of columnists — well, good columnists — everywhere. But Deadline Hollywood Daily is a pretty small Internet property. Finke's 90,000 pageviews per day is less than a tenth of what Gawker (to pick a site at random) receives on a good day. So, when figures start getting thrown around about how she sold her blog for $15 million, it's easy to suspect that there's some self-mythmaking at work. (On that basis, Gawker.com alone would be worth $150 million. Hey, Nick! I want a raise!) To put that number in perspective, you would have a tough time finding anyone to pay $15 million for The Hollywood Reporter these days.

The deal was announced this morning via a press release that did not disclose the terms. But sometime this afternoon, PaidContent started the ball rolling with a report that Finke's deal was worth around $1 million, which even then was hedged. Citing just "sources," Rafat Ali wrote, "the sale amount was in 'seven figures' and there are some other incentive triggers built in. My bet is it is in very low seven figures." Though even that number was pretty jaw-dropping, it's pretty easy to imagine that there are incentives — Penske guarantees some salary to Finke and bonuses based on revenues or traffic — that could theoretically push the value of the deal up to seven figures.

But pretty soon, another zero was added. Jeff Bercovici got ahold of "a source with knowledge of the details" who put the pricetag at $10 million. He qualified that by noting that included "a long-term contract for Finke's services" — again suggesting that there is no way that Penske cut a big check to Finke today — but still struck a gobsmacked tone: "Who says you can't get rich blogging? Showbiz reporter extraordinaire Nikki Finke did — to the tune of eight figures."

Then Finke's arch-nemesis Sharon Waxman, who's got her own startup The Wrap to run, took up the story. Waxman said Finke "would not comment on the purchase price" and couldn't get ahold of Penske (a classic journo tell), but she got the scoop: Deadline Hollywood was sold for $14 million. And we weren't done yet. The Financial Times, without citing anyone, just stated flat-out that the deal is "worth about $15m."

Do I know that it's Finke spreading this absurd number around? No. She didn't reply to my email, which in my state of shock after seeing Waxman's story was, in its entirety "$14M? Really?" And when I told Waxman "I simply do not believe the $14M number" she stood by her report as the "real deal" and added a qualification that "the number is paid out in chunks, over years. And she has something like a 10-year contract." Her story, however, was a less explicit: "The individual knowledgeable about the purchase price said it would be paid out over several years. Normally such deals are tied to traffic or to revenue projections. Nonetheless, it is an exceedingly high price for a relatively small website."

And then she noted the most important part of why these ludicrous values are being tossed around the Internet: because it suits everyone's purposes to think that an industry gossip blog is worth major bucks. As Waxman noted: "It is a crazy-stupid number, in my opinion, but I'm very happy about it — I'm all for people paying stupid money for websites."

Finke no doubt received a nice little pay-day in her deal with Penske, but I would be willing to bet $15 million that whatever check he wrote today wasn't for anything close to $15 million.

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.

The sale amount hasn't been disclosed. Penske, the son of car-racer-businessman Roger Penske, fancies himself an emerging new-media mogul—his company MMC recently revived Movieline.com and also owns Hollywoodlife.com and OnCars.com. With Finke added to his stable, he now has three partially overlapping entertainment-oriented sites as part of his "large and rapidly growing portal."

Penske was the co-founder of Firefly Mobile, which markets cell phones to kids. He also runs a rare and used bookstore, Dragon Books, and has followed in dad's footsteps with a racing team he co-owns with Seagate Technologies chairman Steve Luczo.

Finke told All Things D's Peter Kafka that she hadn't been looking to sell the site, which had been run by LA Weekly:

"I was not anxious to sell. I was not looking to sell," she says. "This was sort of a process where various people kind of wore me down…I'm very pleased with what happened. What wound up happening was nothing like the offers I was getting a year ago."

How demure! We wonder, though, why someone who wasn't looking to sell their web site would say she can't discuss Variety's attempt to purchase said web site "because of non-disclosure agreements I have with other interested parties," as she put it in March. And Jill Stewart, her editor at the LA Weekly, said Finke had been discussing the deal with Penske for at least two months. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but Stewart says Finke characterized it as "so much money" while she was deciding whether to make the jump.

In any case, more power to Finke for capitalizing on something she's worked extremely hard on over the years. And for keeping control of the site during her tenure at Village Voice Media's LA Weekly, which ought to be apoplectic over the fact that it let her develop a sale-able online property while she was in their employ without, it would seem, owning a piece of it.

Finke will have some new colleagues now in the MMC empire, including MovieLine's Stu VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan, neither of whom she seems to like very much. When the pair was at Gawker Media's Defamer, Finke took them to task for allegedly repeating bullshit rumors. When Gawker Media folded Defamer into Gawker and they decamped for MovieLine, she wrote, sympathetically: "Neither of those guys are journalists."

We wish Finke the best in this new phase of her career, and look forward to her expansion into her old stomping ground, New York. As for any potential complications that may arise from her new role as a general manager and editor in chief of a web site with staffers other than herself, we'll just quote Kafka, who approached the matter with just the right amount of delicacy:

That will be a tricky expansion to navigate: Recent history shows that blogs produced by dedicated/obsessive proprietors often stumble when they expand, in part because dedicated/obsessive proprietors may not be the best managers, and in part because it's tough to find people who want to, or are able to, work for dedicated/obsessive proprietors.