The bigger picture here is that Deadline fudged some previously published information. They are certainly not alone on the Internet in that regard. But a trade that consistently likes to trumpet its superiority should, we think, be opting for sweeter correction music (redlining, a footnote,…).

The following sentence is no longer part of Pete Hammond‘s May 15 Deadline coverage of the opening night party at the Cannes Film Festival for The Great Gatsby. It was shortened, rewritten and made parenthetical not long after the item went live with this:

Clearly there seems to be a group of pseudo-critics who like to try and take down a movie, and this [The Great Gatsby] was a target, even though some of them (I am talking about you, The Wrap) obviously had never read the book.

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It’s been a while since there has been any real public skirmishing between The Hollywood Reporter and Nikki Finke‘s Deadline. But lo and behold, in this quietest of holiday weeks, another small chapter in the PMC-Prometheus rivalry is being written.

At issue is whether a 9:55 p.m. PST December 27 story by Deadline’s Pete Hammond about troubles with Academy member online voting had more than a little to do with a longer, more exhaustive 2:58 p.m. PST December 27 story about the same topic by THR‘s Scott Feinberg (headline displayed above). From our vantage point, it would certainly seem so.*

It looks as if, after the THR item hit, Hammond’s marching orders were to produce a version of his own, pronto. The shame of it is that an acknowledgment of the Feinberg piece in his post would have in no way denigrated the overall impact. In fact, it would have made for a more interesting Deadline item if Hammond had specifically bounced off the Hollywood Reporter article, challenging and contrasting what he has been hearing with what Feinberg reported.

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There was no HFPA silver lining this morning for Robert De Niro. Deadline Hollywood awards expert Pete Hammond thinks he knows why:

The omission of Silver Linings Playbook’s Robert De Niro [from Best Supporting Actor] was among the most surprising snubs to me but clearly those two Django co-stars DiCaprio and Waltz rode in and stole his thunder (he also was too busy working to do the all-important – in terms of nominations – HFPA press conference).

Over at TheWrap, Steve Pond leads off his analysis with a look at how the lack of a Beasts of the Southern Wild Best Drama nod underscores the starry-eyed HFPA ballot view:

How else to explain the way the Globes voters ignored Beasts but nominated Nicole Kidman for the laughably trashy The Paperboy? And not only did they go for Kidman in that potboiler, but they gave her a second nomination for her performance in the TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn.

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A cryptic Deadline advisory posted Saturday morning by Nikki Finke has some Hollywood trade watchers speculating that the PMC-Variety deal is done. The 11:34 a.m. PDT September 29 message reads:

The Deadline Team won’t provide 24/7 news coverage for at least the next week. One of the reasons is DH business affecting the entire staff in LA, NY and Europe. As a result, we’ll probably miss some breaking stories and delay monitoring some comments, emails and phone calls. Please cut us some slack for the duration.

Which begs the question – will Jay Penske be making a “big” announcement at Soho House in West Hollywood tomorrow night? That’s when the “PMC” in Penske Media Corp. will briefly overlap with “private members’ club,” as Deadline hosts a “Kick Off the Awards Season” party there from 6 to 9 p.m. A who’s who of studio execs, film publicists and awards season PR consultants will hobnob with not just Penske but many other PMC/Deadline folks: film editor Mike Fleming, tv editor Nellie Andreeva, awards columnist Pete Hammond, marketing consultant Madelyn Hammond, executive editor David Lieberman, reporter Dominic Patten, PMC senior vp Nic Paul, PMC senior sales director Cathy Goepfert, Awards/Line managing editor Anthony D’Alessandro and Awards/Line editor Christy Grosz.*

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A year ago at this time, Scott Feinberg (pictured) had just signed a contract with The Hollywood Reporter to join the publication as lead awards blogger and tumbled into his first-ever trip to Telluride. This weekend, he’s back in the picturesque Colorado mountains, ready to handicap 2012 Oscar hopefuls alongside a small group of LA journo regulars that includes Anne Thompson (Indiewire), Gregory Ellwood (Hit Fix), Steve Pond (TheWrap) and Pete Hammond (Deadline).

“It’s funny, the one place where we all end up is the Santa Barbara Film Festival,” Feinberg told FishbowlLA via telephone yesterday shortly after arriving in the rain. “It’s weird. Some of us can’t make it to Telluride, some of us can’t make it to Toronto. But the one that it just seems, year after year, all the usual LA Oscar beat writers end up at is Santa Barbara.”

Everything is walking distance in Telluride. It’s also a place where, with a very few exceptions, outlets pay the same hefty price for journalist passes as attendees. And because locals are used to living next to the likes of Ralph Lauren, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise, the already secluded event has a welcome, casual feel for A-list attendees. Starting with today’s traditional kick-off picnic.

“At the end of last year’s awards season, George Clooney told me Telluride had been one of the highlights of the circuit, which he was on for a whole six months,” Feinberg recalled. “He felt that he could walk around here with no bodyguards, no entourage… Of course, one or two people might still ask him for photos. But it’s nothing like LA or Toronto.”

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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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Andrew Rossi‘s Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times made its LA Film Festival debut last night and did not disappoint. The film really should have been called “A Year At the Media Section of the New York Times,” but we digress. It was great. The collapse of the newspaper business model, online competition from aggregators like Newser and click hunters like Nick Denton‘s Gawker network, and the challenges of no longer being informational gatekeepers are all discussed at length. No real surprises for anyone who works in the journalism world, but a nice primer for those outside the business.

Journos are bound to have their favorite moments in the film. Two immediately come to mind: Carr tearing the editors of Vice a new asshole during a salty (to put it mildly) interview, and media editor Bruce Headlam somehow managing to give an interview to Rossi, make last minute edits to a huge front-page WikiLeaks story and answer his phone all at the same time. Headlum’s not the star of the film, but there can’t be a journalist in America who saw that guy in action and wouldn’t kill to have him as an editor.
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The two most intriguing media reactions to last night’s big exclusive interview with Mel Gibson posted on Deadline.com come from Anita Busch and David Poland. Busch is the former Hollywood Reporter journalist-editor who was targeted by renegade P.I. Anthony Pellicano. In the Deadline comments, she writes:

[Interviewer] Allison Hope Weiner always drinks upstream from the herd. And was the only one to do so during the Pellicano case. Gibson picked the right [Q&A] format and the right journalist to give the interview to.

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Just how bad is this weekend’s remake of Arthur starring Russell Brand in the 1981 Dudley Moore role? We haven’t seen it, so we can’t entirely be sure; but it’s not a good sign when both Peter Travers of Rolling Stone and Pete Hammond of Box Office Magazine crank out “rotten” reviews that cannot be poached for a sometimes misleading rave blurb.

You read that right. While the Hollywood studios love to mine this pair’s pronouncements for those infamous movie poster “pull quotes,” they do so sometimes even when the overall review is neutral or even negative. What’s more, Travers and Hammond both tend to side with the RottenTomatoes.com consensus in a majority of cases (Hammond 64% of the time, Travers a surprising 79%).

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Yesterday we listed all the people who are no longer at the Calendar Section of the LA Times. We noted it makes the section look pretty dysfunctional. We don’t hear of en masse exits from say the Sports Section. But it’s been pretty consistent at the Calendar section.

The newspaper has sent us a statement saying we forgot to mention they’ve hired people too. Hear that obit writers? You should also talk about how people are being born. Otherwise it’s only half the story.

From Nancy Sullivan:

LA Times Calendar section: The Mass Influx

NEW HIRES (in the same frame):
Joy Press, Randall Roberts, Melissa Maerz, Gerrick Kennedy, Yvonne Villarreal, Nardine Saad, Nate Jackson, Rebecca Keegan, Nicole Sperling, Ben Fritz, Joe Flint, Steve Zeitchik, Julie Makinen, Deb Vankin, Jori Finkel, Amy Kaufman, David Ng

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