The firm, founded by private-equity investor Alan Patricof in 2006 to invest in digital media startups, has raised a new $130.7 million fund following a $75 million fund in 2006. Rounding up the cash for the new fund wasn’t an easy process, however.

Ian Sigalow, a partner at Greycroft, says the firm started raising money more than a year ago in March 2009. In total, the firm had 160 first meetings with potential investors and dealt with many months where no investors committed, he says. “The first quarter of 2009 was miserable,” Mr. Sigalow says, recalling the deep-freeze that followed the stock market meltdown in late 2008. “It was cold. (Some investors) were saying why would we invest in a new fund?”

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Actually, that turned out to be true. But some angel investors are getting into the game again, and a  small number of VCs have even been able to round up dollars for new investments.

Today’s example: Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which has all but completed raising a new fund.

Patricof and his team won’t comment officially about the status of the fund, which follows a $75 million fund he raised four years ago. But he hasn’t been discreet about it, and lots of start-up investors have been chattering about Patricof’s attempt to raise $125 million for new deals.

That’s partly because Patricof is famous in the investment community–his resume goes back to the late 1960s and includes wins in Apple (AAPL) and AOL (AOL), as well as bets on media properties like the Huffington Post and PaidContent’s parent company, ContentNext. And it’s partly because Patricof has, by his own admission, struggled to raise the money over the last year.

Yesterday, for example, Patricof spoke about his fund-raising effort quite candidly at the OnMedia conference. From Mary Kathleen Flynn’s account at The Deal:

“A year ago when we started raising our second fund, which is somewhat bigger, we wanted an institutional base,” Patricof said. “We went out for six months and didn’t get a single response. Then we went back to our original investors, sent out a letter again, and four weeks later we raised a lot of money with just a letter and no phone calls. The individual investor market is a great market.”

Fundraising is “tough” these days, said Patricof. ”But I wouldn’t be smiling as much as I am today if it wasn’t having a positive ending.”

It’s unclear how much Patricof has raised this time. When I talked to him about his progress in mid-November, he told me he thought the fund would be oversubscribed. But sources believe he may also end up breaking the fund into two chunks.

While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.

Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter and the ill-timed Inside.com. But his entrepreneurial effort has taken off and become one of the better sites for up-to-the-minute information about the online media business.

Just this weekend, for example, Ali broke the news that Wenda Harris Millard was out as Yahoo’s ad chief (though I did predict the move–an educated guess on my part–here last week), as well as posting stories about breaking news at Dow Jones, ABC and the $8 million in funding that Digg founders just got for their new online video show site, Revision3.

ContentNext got a small amount of funding last summer from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners and recently added longtime online exec Larry Kramer to the board. The company now has 20 employees, including the tireless executive editor Staci Kramer. It makes its revenue via advertising and now also from conferences.

So here is a video I did on my recent visit to ContentNext’s Santa Monica, Calif., digs, which they moved into in March (most of the company’s offices had previously been at Ali’s various homes), along with some observations from Ali: