March 1, 2011

Variety release
Variety says in an e-mail to showbiz sites: “We realize that our paywall has discouraged sites like yours from linking to our content in the past, even when Variety breaks big showbiz stories. Showblitz gives you that way let your users have access to an important source of news — and it also gives you an easy way to monitor a feed of Variety’s exclusives and breaking news.” The e-mail is after the jump.

Dear friend of Variety,

Variety is excited to present Showblitz (http://www.showblitz.com), a breaking news blog designed with you in mind.

Showblitz is an up-to-the-minute, easy-to-digest showcase for Variety’s best scoops and important entertainment news stories.

We realize that our paywall has discouraged sites like yours from linking to our content in the past, even when Variety breaks big showbiz stories. Showblitz gives you that way let your users have access to an important source of news — and it also gives you an easy way to monitor a feed of Variety’s exclusives and breaking news.

This is not a strategy shift for Variety.com. The paywall lives on. Each entry on Showblitz – short, timely, punchy and art-centric – will include links to the full stories within Variety.com. In fact, what better way to entice eventual new subscribers than great, compelling, timely and newsy content they can’t get anywhere else?

We hope you’ll explore the blog, use it as your personal Variety feed (if you don’t subscribe already; and we hope it encourages you to do so!). But most importantly, we hope you’ll start linking to Showblitz, which you’ll notice is not ad-supported – it’s built for you to use and, hopefully, help draw attention to Variety’s wealth of breaking entertainment news.

Thanks for your consideration and happy linking,

The Variety staff

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From 1999 to 2011, Jim Romenesko maintained the Romenesko page for the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based non-profit school for journalists. Poynter hired him in August…
Jim Romenesko

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