Is Nielsen Selling the 'Hollywood Reporter'?

Nielsen may be unloading the Hollywood Reporter to News Communications, Inc., owner of The Hill, according to the Wrap's Sharon Waxman.

Waxman didn't have a price tag. But considering the difficulties the entertainment industry trade paper and its parent company, Nielsen Business Media, has had in the last few years, and the bargain-basement price of $9.3 million Bloomberg, LP shelled out for BusinessWeek (a general interest magazine with circulation near 1 million), could the Hollywood Reporter, with its reported 26,000 subscribers, get very much at all?

Last year, Nielsen Business Media, which includes AdWeek, MediaWeek, Editor & Publisher, among others, undertook a massive restructuring last year. (This came a few months after an announced 4,000-person staff reduction was announced companywide at Nielsen.)

In December 2008, Variety reported more than a dozen layoffs at the Hollywood Reporter, which the rival entertainment paper described as "a significant reduction in the paper's reporting staff." Ten more employees were let go in June, including members of the paper's Web staff.

Writes Waxman, "The individual said that the Reporter, along with Billboard, Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek—which all have been struggling mightily in the past year—were to be sold…. Asked to confirm the report, Gerry Byrne, who heads the entertainment division of Nielsen Business Media, wrote in an email that '(I) really have no comment off or on' the record."

Nielsen's third-quarter earnings call is tomorrow. Its second-quarter announcement, from August 2009, reported a 5.9 percent revenue decline ($1.23 billion) and an increase in the company's debt from $8.58 billion to $8.71 billion.

As luck would have it, the company is co-hosting a conference with Dow Jones in New York tomorrow called Media and Money. With so many reporters scheduled to come to the event and listen to folks like AOL chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong and American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi (what?), fewer will be free to sit in on that 9 a.m. earnings call and recount the (presumably) bad news or confirm Waxman's scoop.

But that's probably just a coincidence, right?