Variety Launches New Paywall-Free Blog Showblitz

Variety has announced the launch of a new free blog its calling Showblitz. Here’s a partial description from the release:

This is not a strategy shift for Variety.com. The paywall lives on. Each entry on Showblitz – short, timely, punchy and art-centric – will include links to the full stories within Variety.com. In fact, what better way to entice eventual new subscribers than great, compelling, timely and newsy content they can’t get anywhere else?

In other words, the site is basically a fancier version of a Facebook wall, but one that may draw in some traffic from Google and other search engines.