Powerful Media has raided the Hollywood Reporter for its latest hire, snaring the trade’s New York bureau chief Steve Battaglio to cover TV.
The small New York office of the Reporter has been shaken by key defections over the past year.
In addition to Battaglio, staffer Thom Geyer just left for a job at Entertainment Weekly that starts next Monday and staff writer Paula Bernstein jumped to arch-rival Variety last year.
But Powerful Media is an equal opportunity poacher — it also just landed Tom Bierbaum, a media reporter who had been a steady contributor to Variety over the years and earlier hired Variety’s news editor, Chris Petrikin.
The raids come just as Powerful prepares to go into the market for a second round of financing.
Powerful is run by co-chairman Kurt Andersen, who wrote “Turn of the Century,” and former Spin editor Michael Hirschorn, who is editor-in-chief and co-chairman. The company raised more than $5 million last year in its first round of financing from Flatiron Associates, Chase Capital Partners and Jim Cramer.
Powerful, which is still slated for a launch “sometime this spring” plans to do a combination of spot news and investigative pieces on the media and entertainment world as well as offering digests of news that appeared in other media, according to Hirschorn.