In May 2011 The Hollywood Reporter announced it had hired Joseph Kapsch — the editorial director at Tribune-owned Zap2it.com — as its new website editor, replacing Bryan Alexander, who had decamped for USA Today. The hire was a clean signal of how seriously the post-Janice-Min THR was treating its digital build-out.
Then
The departure of Bryan Alexander a few weeks earlier had created the opening. The hire of Kapsch — to start May 23, 2011 — was framed as a step up: the website editor brief was slightly different from Alexander’s outgoing digital editor role, but the move came at a moment when THR’s comScore numbers were spiking. The site had registered 4.6 million unique visitors in April 2011, a number that signaled what the Min-era investment in online product was producing.
Kapsch came in with an online-entertainment background that spanned the broader 2000s consumer-web era. Before joining Zap2it in 2009 he had worked at the LA Times and Access Hollywood websites, with earlier stints at ABC-Disney, MSN, Viacom, and Sony Pictures Digital. The original FishbowlLA framing was that Kapsch couldn’t have picked a better moment to land — THR’s digital growth curve was steeper than the print product’s, and the website editor role was where the strategic decisions were going to be made.
Now
Kapsch’s THR tenure was the bridge from the post-Nielsen e5 era into the eventual PMC ownership transition. He moved on from THR.com to a series of digital-entertainment editorial roles across consumer-facing properties, including at TheBlast, Celebuzz, and other celebrity-and-trade-adjacent outlets. The 2011 hire matched a moment in time — the last few years when “website editor” was a distinct role in a print-trade structure, before the digital and print operations effectively merged at every major trade.
Bryan Alexander, who left THR for USA Today, has continued at Gannett-owned publications and remains an active entertainment writer in the broader consumer-press space. Zap2it itself — the Tribune property Kapsch came from — was eventually shuttered as a standalone brand and folded into broader Tribune digital properties, then changed hands through subsequent Tribune dispositions in the 2010s.
The comScore 4.6 million unique number that signaled what THR was building digitally in mid-2011 looks small by 2020s benchmarks but represented, for the period, a genuine growth trajectory that the website-editor structure was set up to capitalize on. The actual capitalization — the THR digital franchise as it exists in 2026 — eventually came under PMC ownership several years and several editor hires later.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: May 2011 snapshot