Can experienced journalists go solo and use blogging and new media platforms instead of working with a traditional publisher? If so, what are the topics which will work?

One answer that seems to work comes from a former NY Times colleague Sharon Waxman speaks about her transition from LA correspondent to new media entrepreneur with AdAge’s Simon Dumenco.

Rather than return to the Metro desk in New York, Waxman launched a site covering Hollywood news called The Wrap. She had worked as a newspaper per journalist for 20 years, just finished a book and her children and husband were not ready to move to New York.

Starting about two and a half years ago Waxman employed the time-proven method of career change. Taking out a yellow legal pad she wrote down what she could do: Lecture, start her own site, get another job or move to New York. Flirting with the idea of a site, she sketched out a business plan that managed to raise US$500,000 from a few investors for a site covering Hollywood.

Now, less than a year since launch, Waxman says all the industry players who matter know her site and recognize her as “The Wrap” in film festivals.

This comes as Hollywood reporter denied rumors from Nikkie Finke’s Deadline Hollywood that they would abandon a daily print edition.

A few highlights (Highly recommend reading the full article):

Business model: There is display advertising on the site, our e-mail newsletters, sponsorship — sponsorship has to do more with underwriting different pieces of content, and usually that goes with events that we’ve had. British Airways and Four Seasons were two large sponsors. Lifetime is sponsoring an event with us, Blackberry is working with us. Almost all the TV networks during the Emmy campaigns, and we’re just closing advertising agreements with various studios for their Oscar campaigns. People are going to start jockeying for space. We’re also building up our event strategy. We’re having our third event coming up and then we’re having a screening series as well in which we’ll screen a movie that’s an Oscar contender — we’ll do a Q&A — so it’s very synergistic with our content, and then we always cover it, so then there’s that ripple effect for our sponsors. We’re also looking at subscription strategy now.

Alliances: The Wrap just announced a content partnership with Microsoft’s MSN that will see stories from The Wrap distributed throughout Microsoft’s various entertainment destination properties. This  should significantly boost traffic.

Position of the site: We aren’t a traditional trade at all, we aren’t even an untraditional trade — we’re something new and different. What we didn’t count on was that those traditional trades were going to grow so weak and be in such dire financial straits as they have been.

Harder teaching Bloggers to be journalists or journalists to be bloggers? It’s actually harder to get the more traditional journalists to sort of break their chains.