In early January 2012 Variety launched a feature called BlogDogger — an in-house watchdog blog dedicated to “prowling the perimeter of entertainment journalism, hounding hypocrisy, snarling at snafus and sometimes just howling at the moon.” Its first viral catch was an apparent timestamp anomaly on a Deadline scoop about Emma Stone.
Then
BlogDogger’s framing borrowed Walter Winchell-era trade-press pugilism for the digital age — a Variety in-house property explicitly written to police competitors. The first chewed-up neighbor’s property the blog brought back was a Rachel Abrams scoop on Variety.com about Emma Stone joining Michael Diliberti’s Little White Corvette — moving from MRC to GK Films — timestamped at 3:00 a.m. PST.
The catch: when BlogDogger sniffed around to see who had the news, it found that Deadline’s parallel item had a timestamp identical to Variety’s, 3:00 a.m. PST — implausibly precise alignment, in BlogDogger’s reading. The implication was that Deadline had backdated its timestamp to match Variety’s rather than admit a lag.
The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring — FBLA “loves them for it,” Horgan wrote — about the willingness of an established trade to operate a public-facing watchdog feature aimed specifically at its primary competitor. BlogDogger’s tone, half-jokey and half-serious, was a fresh form for the trade-press rivalry that had been bubbling for two years.
Now
BlogDogger as a Variety in-house feature ran for several months and produced multiple subsequent catches — including the Sundance 2012 timestamp dispute that became one of the most-cited trade-press episodes of that year. The column wound down quietly in late 2012 after PMC’s acquisition of Variety, which changed the title’s appetite for sustained public attacks on Deadline — which was, by then, also PMC.
Rachel Abrams continued at Variety for years after the Emma Stone scoop, with subsequent journalism positions at the New York Times and other major U.S. outlets. She was one of the reporters on the New York Times’ Harvey Weinstein investigation in 2017 — a meaningfully larger story than the timestamp dispute her 2012 byline was at the center of. Emma Stone’s Little White Corvette project did not, in the event, get made under that title; her career trajectory in the years since has included a Best Actress Oscar for La La Land in 2017 and a Best Actress Oscar for Poor Things in 2024.
The BlogDogger format — a trade publication running an in-house watchdog of competitors’ editorial practice — has not been seriously replicated since PMC’s consolidation of the major trades made the model structurally incoherent. The newsletter ecosystem now plays a version of that role from outside the trades’ corporate walls, with The Ankler, Puck, The InSneider, and Status doing what BlogDogger did at smaller scale.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2012 snapshot