Online magazine publishing company Hutch Media today acquired the anti-tabloid entertainment website RumorFix.com, created by Jay McGraw.

Jay McGraw is the creator and executive producer of the Emmy® award-winning, syndicated daytime series “The Doctors,” a New York Times best-selling author, start-up developer, and the son of Dr. Phil McGraw.

“With strong market traction and a unique heritage in the celebrity news marketplace, the Hutch Media team is thrilled to add RumorFix to our growing family of entertainment and instructional content,” said Jimmy Hutcheson, president of Hutch Media.  “We intend to maintain the integrity of the brand, integrate RumorFix into Hutch Media’s platform, grow revenues, and expand the audience distribution footprint of RumorFix.”

“RumorFix was an important business venture for us.  With the proliferation of tabloid sites, I set out to provide a legitimate and safe forum for celebrities to “fix” false rumors while at the same time, satiate consumers’ never-ending hunger for celebrity news. The site’s success exceeded our expectations and I’m excited to watch its further development and scope under the expert guidance of Hutch Media.  Jimmy Hutcheson and his team are skilled in content development, marketing, distribution and monetization in the online publishing arena and it will be rewarding to follow RumorFix as it continues to flourish under their direction,” said Jay McGraw.

Hinting at its ambitions to enter the original publishing realm, digital agency Zealot Networks of Venice has purchased Hutch Media, a small network of websites, for an undisclosed amount of cash and equity.

Since its founding last August, Zealot has raised $30 million in venture capital it has deployed to buy a number of online marketing and talent agencies. With Hutch in the fold, Zealot’s desire to build new audiences, likely to sell advertisements against, is beginning to appear.

Hutch is a small Los Angeles company that has five employees and runs RumorFix, a celebrity rumor website; HGDIY, a home improvement website; and BestMomsTV, a parenting site. Conn Fishburn, Zealot Networks’ chief strategy officer, said the purchase underscores Zealot’s interest in building targeted content for niche audiences.

“When we look at publishing, relevancy is a massive opportunity to tap into people’s passions,” said Fishburn. “It’s a bigger play around creating relevancy and engagement and telling stories across specific verticals.”

Interest in niche content, seen as a way to build smaller audiences with intense interests as opposed to large, unfocused audiences, is growing.

“When you start to look at distribution of communities and clusters of people, the long tail is where you see the social engagement,” said Fishburn. Niche audiences are generally found on the “long tail” of the audience distribution graph.

“The primary driver of what we are doing isn’t demographic based, but psychographic based. It’s a mindset,” he said.

Zealot’s approach to making money from online content is the reverse of most modern media operations. Rather than first publishing content, building an audience around that content and then selling that audience to advertisers, Zealot has used investor cash to purchase relationships with advertisers first, in order to apparently reverse engineer audiences and content for particular marketing needs.

Hutch, said Fishburn, is just the beginning.

“We bought Hutch because of the skill set that Hutch has, their ability to understand audiences and their ability to scale up with extra resources,” he said. “It’s really the team that will be integrated into a larger publishing play.”

Digital entertainment leaders from Disney, TMZ, Ego TV, writers and creative agencies shared viral video tips at a Digital LA event on Tuesday night in Santa Monica, CA. To bring you the scoop, below are the Top 5 Viral Video Tips from this panel who know how to reach mass audiences online. From the “Whole Foods Parking Lot” video to Ego TV who focuses on reaching a male 18-35 demographic, these pros know how to reach millions of viewers on YouTube. While there is a method behind the viral video madness, one panelist profoundly pointed out, “Trying to go viral is like trying to fall in love.” Most of us have not given up on true love so let’s not give up here, and take a closer look at these tips.