In June 2011 Sharon Waxman, the founder and editor of TheWrap, did something Nikki Finke had been doing at Deadline for two years — she publicly accused a trade competitor of running her scoops without crediting them. The competitor in this case was The Hollywood Reporter. THR’s response was carefully worded but did not contest the underlying claim.
Then
Waxman’s column on TheWrap laid out four specific scoops the site had broken — about Universal Motown Records, Comcast’s pending Blackstone-stake purchase in Universal Studios, Relativity Media’s Elliott Management stake, and Epic Records — that she alleged had subsequently appeared on HollywoodReporter.com without a courtesy link back to TheWrap. The framing was direct: stop stealing TheWrap’s scoops.
THR’s website editor at the time, Owen Phillips, posted a response that acknowledged the link-back was a courtesy norm in the trade ecosystem and committed to better attribution practices going forward, while pushing back on the framing of “stealing.” The Owen-Phillips response read as the kind of careful trade-PR-meets-editorial-policy statement that the post-Janice-Min digital operation at THR was producing as standard practice by mid-2011.
The original FishbowlLA framing connected the dots: Waxman was now openly running the same play Finke had been running — public accusation, named-and-shamed competitor, courtesy-credit demand — and the broader trade-press culture was now operating with all three of Deadline, TheWrap, and THR willing to write about each other in public.
Now
TheWrap remained independent under Sharon Waxman’s ownership through the entire 2010s and into the 2020s, even as PMC consolidated the rest of the trade ecosystem. Waxman herself has continued in the editor role and has expanded TheWrap into events (the WrapWomen and WrapPro franchises) and the broader awards-season coverage business. Her continued independence is now the structural fact that distinguishes TheWrap from Variety/Deadline/THR.
Owen Phillips’s THR website-editor tenure ended later in the 2010s; he has continued in senior digital-editorial roles at consumer-facing media properties since. The “credit-back” norm that Waxman’s 2011 column was fighting for has, in practice, eroded across the broader trade-press ecosystem — partly because PMC’s ownership of three of the four major trades has removed the competitor-vs-competitor framing, and partly because the volume of scoop journalism has migrated to subscription newsletters where the attribution norms are different.
The specific scoops Waxman called out — Universal Motown’s Sylvia Rhone, the Comcast/Blackstone deal, the Relativity-Elliott stake, the Epic Records executive changes — all subsequently resolved in roughly the directions TheWrap reported. The credit-back era the column was trying to defend is the part that didn’t survive.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2011 snapshot