So Howard Kurtz goes to the Daily Beast and Todd McCarthy, after a primarily revenue-sharing blogging stint at indieWIRE, heads on to The Hollywood Reporter…

And people think this is complicated.

To quote The Washington Post’s most famous source, “Follow the money.”

Todd has a family. He needs a steady, secure income. You can be assured that he is making what he made at Variety and perhaps a little more at The Hollywood Reporter, where they are buying, in Todd, credibility. They are also, as I suggested they must months ago, find positive ways of connecting to Hollywood if they want to get back into the Oscar advertising game. Thus, Bill Higgins, who has been talking about retiring for a while now and got moneyed into sticking around a little longer before heading to an island somewhere. And now, Todd as the only name critic at either trade. (With due respect to the veteran crew at Variety, many of you are very good critics, but not “name” critics the way Todd is.)

By next year at this time, we should have a pretty clear idea of what Janice Min’s Hollywood Reporter is actually going to feel like. How much of it will be Trade and how much of it will be Tabloid and will any of it actually be News? No way to know. I don’t think she knows. But she is giving herself the freedom to play to all fields as she figures out what things will look like.

Meanwhile, over at Deadline, they are trying to buy their way to becoming The Establishment as well. Nothing wrong with that. Will Deadline “own” television by hiring one name from Entertainment Weekly, as C. Nikki boasted recently? Of course not. But in today’s market, one strong voice can make the difference between being a “must read” and the same old same old… as NIkki herself probed by spewing bile all over town and being treated like royalty (to her phone) in response.

The difficulty there is that Deadline is clearly chasing The Old Model and who knows what that will mean in a year or two. The trades have been a dying model for years now. Can Deadline – or anyone – sustain on the basis of getting press releases 2 hours before others and having a legitimate scoop 3 or 4 times a week (which may or may not be fully reported and accurate)? The way things go over there now, I get 2 or 3 calls/e-mails every week from people on the other side of Deadline scoops who want their version out there. Mostly, I’m not interested. But someone will become the backboard to Deadline and other websites that do a lot of one-source “reporting.”

On the flip side, Old Media is still obsessed with anything they see as success in New Media. The reporters are ALL afraid of losing their ride. And as long as there are billionaires, from Barry Diller to Jay Penske to Ted Leonisis and almost-as-rich guys like Jimmy Finkelstein who are good at putting together massive sums, willing to keep investing in the Next Generation, there will be writers who have already lost their jobs and writers who see a bleak future where they are, who happy to find a new, funded home.

But being in the game is not winning the game. And while these heavily funded companies have a big leg up, as Old Media play continues to be the legitimizer by which media measures its own importance, profitability is not certain by any means. Even in that small group, these four cannot, realistically, all emerge in the limited air space. The Daily Beast is not really an industry site, so they may be more in competition with Vanity Fair than anyone else. But the fact that they felt compelled to hire Howard Kurtz, who certainly did not leave The Washington Post for less money, tells you how treacherous the field is. Establishment as they come, Kurtz hasn’t been a newsmaker for years. He is an iPhone 3… once the cutting edge, still perfectly functional, but not the future… the past. TDB doesn’t need him to create more content. There is already more content on that site than anyone can or will consume. But clearly, they need to have establishment names to get establishment attention from the Old Media. Too much is not enough. They need – or feel they need – someone who will get play in the NY Times ahead of all the whippersnappers. And that paves the way for the future… overseen by Tina Brown, who is no media spring chicken herself.

So one wonders, why keep rebuilding the same pyramids? It’s not because they are so great. It’s because at some point, you need to be in business and if you are in the media ouroboros game, the only bait is familiarity or contempt. And contempt gets boring fast. Worse, you have to maintain it yourself, which can give cancer to a person who feels compelled to act like a cancer.

As for the “trade” sites, all this competition is exposing the truth… which is that anyone can buy their way into this business. And in terms of differentiation and legitimization, everyone seems to fall back on 50+ year olds who are on the back side of their careers, and one has to wonder, what happens when this “hey, look who I hired” phase ends – invariably in self-satisfied gluttony, as we have seen over and over – what “there” will be there?

This is why my bet is on the model-breaking Min at this point. She seems to know that she needs to make THR a bit more industry-safe, for now, but her play is not to compete for press releases. And how long can it be before people realize that they are simply reading old, tired, barely reported trade stories with urgency only because of the urgency with which they are being sold?

Meanwhile, over at indieWIRE, Brian Brooks has been tied at the hip to Eugene Hernandez for, it seems, ever, and can do the job. But with Eugene headed off at the end of his first contract with SnagFilms and not enough money to secure Todd McCarthy when they had him in their clutches this summer, what is iW? How long will Leonisis choose to throw money at this business? Or will he step up and throw more money at it in order to compete with the other billionaires?

What really strikes me is that some of the very smartest people in media have not figured all this out yet. How do you make money on the web? These are the big dollar plays. And still, no real answer. So we get all these distractions of veteran talent being hired here or there. And Old Media keeps treating the hires like they are part of some movement… when the only real movement is the movement to as much job security as can be mustered in the current environment.

It’s no insult to point out that “veteran” tends to mean “old.” Todd McCarthy, should have another 20 years in the tank, God willing. And I am glad he has the gig. But isn’t what will distinguish The Hollywood Reporter – or others – going forward be finding and building the next Todd… or the next Joe Morgenstern or the next Roger? Doesn’t The Hollywood Reporter need an Eric Kohn to go with their Todd? Or a kid madman? Or something that pokes at the status quo while they also bow to the establishment? I guess that’s Min’s challenge.

I guess that’s everyone’s challenge.

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