Roger Friedman Points Thievery Finger at Deadline.com

New York based showbiz columnist Roger Friedman has never been shy about outing media outlets that allegedly steal material from his Showbiz 411 website to then claim the news, exclusively, as their own. In fact, learning about the latest poacher(s) is half the fun of checking in with Friedman’s (recently revamped) site.

Yesterday, Friedman went for the thievery trifecta, accusing People of grabbing some Nicole Kidman-Keith Urban baby naming background info and the Deadline.com website family of two uncredited showbiz news borrows. The first, claims Friedman, involved a TVLine.com item by Michael Ausiello about Ricky Gervais possibly guesting on the US version of The Office; the other was a Deadline.com piece about Regis Philbin‘s retirement announcement.

Deadline lifted an entire story out of this column yesterday [1/18], about Regis not retiring from his career but simply leaving his show. This Nellie Andreeva is really a piece of work.

If not for the fact that it would probably involve stealing back from himself, Friedman acknowledges that filching from other sources would afford him a lot more free time.

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