In the spring of 2012 a brand-new Blogspot site appeared called Trade Fools, written anonymously, with the single mission of grading and ribbing the four Hollywood trades. FishbowlLA gave it a welcoming hand. Fourteen years later, the trade-watchdog model it represented — anonymous, blogspot-hosted, low-budget, mean — is essentially extinct, replaced by named newsletters that charge subscriptions.
Then
The Trade Fools operator wanted, in the original post’s quote, to remain “anonymous on all fronts.” FishbowlLA was sympathetic to the choice, pointing out that anonymity hadn’t hurt Mark Lisanti during the launch era of Defamer and was working out fine for the operator of Crazy Days and Nights, whose pseudonymous gossip identity FBLA had recently interviewed.
Trade Fools as a site was a work in progress. Its “Whitney Houston Reality Crap: Who Had It First?” comparison piece needed more than a four-way time-stamp comparison to land. But its sidebar poll questions were funny, a May 9 item delivered some real reporting about Deadline contributor Don Groves, and the site was actively soliciting reader feedback — including, in the post that prompted the Fishbowl write-up, on the dueling The Dictator reviews by Todd McCarthy at THR and Peter Debruge at Variety. The original FishbowlLA post explicitly nudged readers to head over and comment.
This was, in retrospect, the very late peak of the Hollywood-blog watchdog as a genre. The Blogspot platform was still hosting working independent media properties. Comment culture was still a thing the operator of a small site could lean on. The four trades were still adversarial enough with each other that a fifth, smaller, scrappier voice critiquing all four had a clear niche.
Now
Trade Fools went dormant relatively quickly. The Blogspot domain still resolves but the last substantive activity dates to the mid-2010s and the watchdog identity was never unmasked publicly. The site is now what most 2012 single-purpose blogs are: a forgotten archive that the Wayback Machine remembers better than search engines do.
The model — anonymous trade criticism — didn’t disappear. It migrated. The Ankler and Puck both feature named former-trade editors operating with the same insider-watching-the-insiders posture, just with subscriber bases instead of comment fields, and with bylines instead of anonymity. The InSneider, Status, Status News, Hot Pod, Pop Junk, and a number of other newsletter properties cover the entertainment-press beat with overlapping specialization. Anonymous gossip sites still exist (Crazy Days and Nights, for one, is still running), but their share of the trade-watchdog ecosystem is a sliver of what it was in 2012.
Mark Lisanti, whose Defamer launch the original post analogized to, is now Co-Editor of The Ringer and has been one of the steadier veteran voices in pop-culture writing through every platform shift in the interval. Todd McCarthy, the THR film critic whose The Dictator review the original post linked to, continued reviewing for THR for a number of years and now contributes to Deadline. Peter Debruge has been Variety’s Chief Film Critic for the past decade-plus and continues in that role.
The trade-watchdog space is healthier than it has ever been; the trade-watchdog format is unrecognizable from what it looked like in May 2012.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2012 snapshot