The 2012-2013 Oscar season was the first year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved to online member balloting, and the rollout went poorly. The press story that surfaced the problem belonged to Scott Feinberg at THR. The story that followed — about how Deadline reported the same news several hours later — became its own minor 12/27 trade-press dustup.
Then
On the afternoon of December 27, 2012 — the dead-zone week between Christmas and New Year, when nothing was supposed to be happening — Scott Feinberg posted a long, exhaustive THR piece headlined “Oscars E-Voting Problems Get Worse.” The reporting documented an Academy online balloting rollout that was significantly more troubled than the Academy was publicly acknowledging: members getting locked out, password reset issues, members switching back to paper ballots when AMPAS extended the deadline to accommodate the failures.
Just under seven hours later, at 9:55 p.m. PST the same night, Deadline ran a Pete Hammond piece on essentially the same topic — online balloting troubles, with a separate framing around the Best Song category omissions. The pattern, in Richard Horgan’s read of the situation, looked like the Feinberg piece had hit, Hammond had been instructed to produce a version of his own quickly, and the Deadline post had landed without any acknowledgment of the THR reporting it was clearly responding to.
Feinberg, in a tweet that he later deleted, expressed being “stunned another outlet basically rewrote and posted the same article.” THR website editor Chris Krewson chimed in publicly on Twitter as well. The Drudge Report eventually linked to the Feinberg piece rather than the Hammond one, which gave THR a substantial traffic lift and underlined which version was understood as the original.
The original FishbowlLA framing was that Hammond’s post would have been a better Deadline piece if it had openly cited the Feinberg reporting and built on it — challenged it, contrasted it, contributed additional sources of its own. The trade-press norm of the era was different, though. Bouncing-off-the-competition was something The Ankler-style newsletters had not yet been invented to do.
Now
The Academy’s online-balloting infrastructure stabilized within a year or two. The 2013-2014 cycle ran more cleanly, and by the mid-2010s e-voting was settled into the AMPAS calendar. The Best Song omission controversy from that 2012-2013 cycle — surrounding the awards rules on song eligibility — was eventually addressed by a series of category-rule clarifications across subsequent seasons.
Scott Feinberg has continued at THR for the entire interval, where he is now Executive Editor of Awards. The newsletter ecosystem around awards coverage has grown substantially: Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast (which launched in 2015) is one of the most-listened awards-season properties in the industry. Pete Hammond has continued at Deadline, where he remains the title’s chief awards columnist — his weekly Notes on the Season column has been a fixture across thirteen subsequent Oscar cycles. Chris Krewson moved on from THR years ago and now runs a media-industry newsletter.
The 2012 dustup looks small in retrospect — and in fact looks like the last era of trade journalism in which a same-day repackaging dispute could become a story at all. Both Feinberg and Hammond now report inside the PMC building. The newsletter writers who would today break a story like the 2012 e-voting failures — Richard Rushfield at The Ankler, Matthew Belloni at Puck, Jeff Sneider at The InSneider — are operating in subscription products where the time-stamp matters less than the inbox.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2013 snapshot