Bloggasm

In the middle of May, Variety, the trade magazine for the entertainment industry, published an article stating that Juno director Jason Reitman would be directing a new movie based on Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air.

In the world of film fans this was huge news; with Juno‘s almost-universal critical acclaim many were waiting anxiously to find out the next project Reitman would take on. Missing from that article, however, was any reference to the journalist’s source. Also nonexistent was a mention of the movie website, Latino Review, which actually broke the story earlier that day.

Whether Variety stole the story from the Latino Review without sourcing is hard to say. The trade magazine didn’t respond to my email and El Mayimbe, the Latino Review journalist who broke the story, declined to be interviewed (“already got a bunch of other appearances to do” was his bizarre response).

But on May 20, the Latino Review‘s editor, Kellvin Chavez, published a piece dramatically titled “Why both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter TOTALLY SUCK!” In it, he not only claimed that Variety stole the story, but both it and The Hollywood Reporter fail to give credit for scoops all the time.

“As a precaution, when we broke the story we even emailed Borys Kit over at The Hollywood Reporter and a reporter at Variety,” the editor wrote. This, he said, was evidence that the two publications had directly lifted the facts from the Latino Review article without any attribution.

This was evidently the straw that broke the camel’s back. The weekend before that CAPSLOCK-filled article hit the net, several editors of popular film websites exchanged emails about this trend and some came to the conclusion that retribution was called for.

“May 20th is a special day in the Latino community because May 20th is when Cuba declared it’s [sic] independence from Spain back in 1902,” Chavez wrote. “Today, we here at Latinoreview coin May 20th, 2008 as the day we declare our independence from linking to trades.”

In other words, the website would refrain from ever sending any direct traffic to either Variety or The Hollywood Reporter ever again.

David Poland owns Movie City News, a popular film site with about 10 writers — he said he’s often referred to as the “Drudge of the movie business” — and his publication has been around for about five-and-a-half years. Poland was one of those who were involved in this email exchange, and in a phone interview he said that the trade publications often rationalize their lack of sourcing based on the notion that small movie sites publish “rumors,” which the larger publications then verify.

“The trades are used to being called first, because essentially 90 percent of the news they publish is placed by publicists,” he said. “It’s not really an investigative business. When you see something in Variety, it’s because the release of the news was timed. That’s changed enormously because of the internet — people who don’t have the relationships that Variety and the mainstream media have do what they want whenever they want to. So all of a sudden those playing in a traditional playing field are feeling a certain degree of anger and certain degree of dismissiveness; they’re claiming that these websites are not vetted in the same way [the trades are] vetted.”

While talking to Poland I couldn’t help but detect a certain degree of sympathy in his rhetoric. When I asked him about it, he said he recognized that the trades were acting the way they were out of some unspoken struggle for relevancy within an internet age.

“Traditional media has a lot of infrastructure,” he explained. “The rules are different and the pressure is on every side. Because of this people are behaving badly on a regular basis. Variety‘s editor is not a fan of the internet — he continually has been talking about how terrible the internet is. But at the same time, they’re trying to take advantage of this universe. I’m enormously sympathetic because people are worried about losing their jobs.”

But Vic Holtreman, the creator of the movie opinion site Screen Rant, told me that the trade magazines cater to an entirely different audience than the movie websites, a fact that has left him perplexed as to why Variety even feels threatened.

“I don’t know that I would categorize it as a conflict — it’s competition,” Holtreman said in a phone interview. “What happened was that the small websites started out early on as sites that found movie news and delivered to the average person. From my point of view, Variety is a trade magazine. I always felt that before the internet Variety was mainly read by industry people. It seems now that it’s trying to expand into an area that these other sites owned first. If [Variety] doesn’t succeed on the web in reaching the average person not in the industry, then it could just contract back into serving the movie industry itself, being read by movie executives, actors and writers.”

Though the Screen Rant writer was involved in the email discussion with the other sites on how to address the problem, he said that he has mostly remained on the sidelines. Because his publication focuses mainly on opinion rather than breaking original news, he doesn’t feel that scoop theft has really affected him directly.

Holtreman explained that the essence of the link — which makes it easier than ever to point to your source — has created a kind of informal code of ethics within the blogosphere when it comes to giving credit to the writers that deserve it.

“When you get down to it, fair journalism is fair journalism,” he said. “And if someone breaks a story and then you go on and report it, if you did not go and dig up the facts yourself you ought to reference the site where you first heard about it. There are times when I double source stuff … if I see something on one movie site that originated on Variety, I won’t just credit Variety, I’ll credit the site I found the link on. I go out of my way to give credit where it’s due.”

Other movie site owners I spoke to for this article agreed with this sentiment. Clint Morris, the creator of Moviehole, seemed especially bitter when recalling instances where he had been ripped off.

“Where do I start?” he wrote to me in an email. “With the major newspaper that took several of our stories and published them word-for-word (with my typical smart-assý comments left in!) a year or so back; one being our scoop about Geoffrey Rush returning for a third ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie? Oh, and the outlet didn’t deny it either when we approached them about it – they just made up an excuse (apparently they had let an intern write up all the stories that week/month/year and he/she wasn’t informed before-hand that he/she couldn’t just cut and paste articles from the web). It was an absolute disgrace though! They didn’t even change the titles of the stories!”

But William Beutler, who once wrote for the Hotline‘s Blogometer and now works for the online marketing firm New Media Strategies, said this trend of mainstream media outlets stealing scoops from the blogosphere is not confined to film publications.

At his personal site, Blog P.I., he has documented a number of instances where big media outlets — ranging from the Daily Show to Radar Magazine — have claimed “exclusives” when they were anything but.

“I do think that the electronic medium and ethic of the link make it all the less defensible,” Beutler said in a conversation recently. “And as I’ve argued before, hat tips are good for readers. This isn’t necessarily about giving credit to whomever got there first — on the web, it’s sometimes very difficult to know who was exactly first with a particular coinage or idea — but it’s helpful to the reader, so they can dig a bit further, if they so choose.”

He argued that it would actually benefit the MSM to adopt the “hat tip” rule that has been adopted by the blogosphere, mainly because it would make their reporting more reliable. By withholding sources, Beutler said, “they’re keeping themselves above the fray.”

“There’s really no excuse for it, and I suppose they think it makes them sound more informed than the reader,” he said. “I think it makes them less credible, since I can’t check it out for myself and determine if I agree with their interpretation of the source material.”

But how can a publication fight back if others continue ripping it off without sourcing? Beutler and others I interviewed were at a loss when I asked them this question. By refusing to link to the trade magazines at all, the Latino Review developed its own method of retaliation. But how effective could this be in a blogosphere made up of millions of websites? Unless a significant number of them decided to boycott a news source, then the effects would likely be minimal.

“I don’t think there is any solution except to keep on going,” Beutler said. “And if the problem persists, eventually one writer or newspaper or magazine will be made a poster child for not cribbing scoops. And perhaps some of this is generational, so over the long term, reporters and editors who have always coexisted with what Glenn Reynolds would call the ‘army of Davids’ will take them more seriously.”

Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com