Trades

In the arcane, moneyed world of “For Your Consideration” ads, there are each year a number of pitches that rub Academy members the wrong way. But after a paid email blast was sent out this week by both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, TheWrap reporter Steve Pond is getting some blowback for suggesting that the transmission was only borderline AMPAS-legal:

Weinstein Company COO David Glasser responded: “We are surprised that a media outlet like TheWrap, which normally has journalistic integrity, would print the strange accusation of an anonymous competitor and use this as a direct broadside against Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.”

Can you guess who the anonymous competitor is? The email in question, paid for by Weinstein Co., featured the subject line “Meryl Streep Exclusive Video” and linked to a screening Q&A conversation between the actress and Deadline.com’s Pete Hammond. During the clip, Hammond exclaims that the 29-year gap in Streep winning an Oscar really needs to be rectified.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

In recent weeks, FishbowlLA has written about two separate Variety.com blog posts that alleged the time-stamps of Emma Stone and Sundance Film Festival news items on Deadline.com were false. In both cases, Variety‘s BlogDogger–based on some stated live Web monitoring–insinuated that Deadline.com must have jerry-rigged the date-time stamps of these particular articles, to make it appear that the items were posted earlier than when they actually were.

Baloney, counters the author of both Deadline.com items, Mike Fleming. Speaking to FishbowlLA today via telephone from New York, he explained that he has the ability to direct-post articles to Deadline.com and did so with the first article in question, about Stone’s project Little White Corvette.

“I had the story done the night before,” Fleming explains. “I wake up early every morning here in New York, before driving my daughter to school. My computer is always on, and even though I had been in touch with GK Films the previous day and was told I could post the item sooner, I figured I would just break it in the morning.” In other words, Fleming says the 6:00 am ET/3:00 am PT time-stamp on the Stone item reflects what he did at his computer the morning of Thursday, January 5.

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A few weeks ago, we picked up a report from Variety‘s in-house BlogDogger, which claimed that the time-stamp for a Deadline.com item about an Emma Stone movie project had been falsified to match the 3:00am PT January 5 mark of a similar report on Variety. On behalf of Deadline, Nikki Finke responded a few days later, without—as Variety film writer Jeff Sneider and others subsequently tweeted—addressing the core issue of an apparent magical time-stamp. She explained that Deadline.com reporter Mike Fleming had been working on the same Stone news for several days beforehand, and this, apparently, justified whatever may or may not have followed.

Well, here we go again. According to BlogDogger, after Variety posted an item by Sneider and Josh Dickey on Monday night at 7:37 p.m. PT about the Sundance sale of The Surrogate, the article was followed in short order by similar items at LATimes.com and HollywoodReporter.com. Then, once again, a Deadline.com Fleming item appeared with a time-stamp that BlogDogger alleges was illicitly tweaked to cozy up to that of THR‘s third-place report posted at 8:19 p.m PT/11:19 pm ET.

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El Segundo’s Truckin‘ magazine just re-launched after a complete overhaul and redesign. We’re going to be honest, we drive a compact. So we weren’t too familiar with the mag. But the press release promises a reconstituted commitment to “every corner of the truck segment,” as well as a “men’s interest” feel. We thought “men’s interest” went without saying for a magazine about trucks. But surely there must be some ladies out there who love them some trucks too.

Truckin’ plans to boost newsstand circulation by 23,000. So we’re going to hazard a guess that “men’s interest” must mean “boobs.” 23,000 is an awful lot of extra magazines to sell to American men in a down economy.

Back in 1935, Variety famously uncorked a trade headline for the ages: “Sticks Nix Hick Pix.”

This weekend, there is another striking Variety headline, but unfortunately for the publication, this particular banner scream will go down in the history books for some decidedly less clever phonetic sourcing of the alphabet’s 24th letter. By FishbowlLA’s count, there are a boffo 30 x’s crowning Karen Idelson‘s item about the film industry’s switch to digital production means:

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Following the lead of sister publication Billboard, which spun off a Russian edition in 2007, the Hollywood Reporter is set to launch a glossy Russian-language monthly print publication in March. To be followed in short order by companion website thehollywoodreporter.ru.

The investor group backing The Hollywood Reporter: Russian Edition is the same one that underwrote the aforementioned Billboard Russia and includes Studio Three T, the production facility of writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov (pictured). Mikhalkov competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival with Burn by the Sun 2 and received a special career achievement honor at the 2007 Venice International Film Festival.

The Russian editorial team will be guided from LA by editorial director Janice Min, creative director Shanti Marlar and international news editor Kevin Cassidy. From the press release going out today:

“The Hollywood Reporter: Russian Edition represents the return of high quality field-reporting to the Russian entertainment market. We will offer readers a rare behind-the-scenes look into the Russian entertainment industry along with in-depth features and hard-hitting market analysis,” says THR: Russian Edition editor-in-chief Ivan Kudryavtsev.

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LA Times online arts and entertainment editor Lisa Fung is jumping ship to TheWrap. Sharon Waxman announced today that Fung will be the site’s new executive editor.

“Lisa has distinguished herself as a leading player in digital news within the LA Times and has deep expertise in our universe of media and entertainment,” Waxman writes. “She is the ideal candidate to lead our newsroom and grow the site as we embark on our fourth year.”

Fung was with the LA Times for 24 years. She will now be TheWrap’s first-ever “executive editor.”

FishbowlLA is hearing rumors that TheWrap may soon be in a position to make a big hire announcement at the executive editor level.* Which led us this morning to dig around the higher echelons of Sharon Waxman‘s operation.

In short order, we came across this August 2011 clip from the Bravo reality show Flipping Out. The client at the center of the stage-managed confrontation is none other than Stacey Farish, the then-LA Times exec who was appointed publisher of TheWrap in November. Make sure you watch the two-and-a-half-minute Studio City sit-down through to the end:

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Last week, we picked up on an item posted by Variety‘s new watchdog BlogDogger, which alleged some Deadline.com time-stamp funny business. Essentially, the cross-town trade wondered how, the morning after, an item with the same 3:00 am PT posting time as Variety‘s had retroactively appeared.

In an email late last night to Variety‘s Tim Gray, Neil Stiles and film editor Josh Dickey, with a cc: to this reporter, Finke argued that Deadline.com had slow-cooked the same film project news several days before Variety posted their January 5 article. Per Finke’s email:

In actuality, Deadline’s story originated two days before Variety ever published. Mike Fleming originated the story on January 3rd at 15:40 with the facts intact. He worked on the story constantly before he published.

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Rather than engage a high-priced PR specialist to blast out e-mail notices to LA media types, Variety has gone more in the Walter Winchell direction to protect its scoops. And FishbowlLA loves them for it.

The trade has launched BlogDogger, a web watchdog (in the truest sense of the word) that is dedicated to “prowling the perimeter of entertainment journalism, hounding hypocrisy, snarling at snafus and sometimes just howling at the moon.” Here’s one of the latest bits of chewed up neighbor property this canine cop brought back home:

Blogdogger was surfing the web late last night when we noticed Rachel Abrams‘ scoop on Variety.com—time-stamped for 3:00 a.m. PST—that Michael Dilberti‘s Little White Corvette, starring Emma Stone, was driving from MRC over to GK Films. We sniffed around to see if anyone else had the news and even several minutes later no one had…

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