Latest posts
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July 2012: Eriq Gardner’s THR item, Dan Abrams’s Mediaite response, and a photo-copyright suit
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, July 2012 In early July 2012, FishbowlLA tracked a small back-and-forth between The Hollywood Reporter and Mediaite. THR’s legal-affairs writer Eriq Gardner had published an item about a photo-copyright lawsuit against the Mediaite-network site Styleite. Mediaite owner Dan Abrams fired back…
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April 2012: Deadline gets fooled by a WorstPreviews April Fools ‘Prometheus sequel’ item
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2012 In early April 2012, FishbowlLA documented a small trade-press embarrassment: a WorstPreviews.com April Fools item — a fake story claiming James Cameron wanted to direct a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus — had been picked up as real. The…
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January 2012: a California prison bars an inmate from reading The Atlantic
By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, January 2012 In mid-January 2012, FishbowlLA picked up a story — originally surfaced by sister blog FishbowlDC — about a California prison barring an inmate from reading the December 2011 issue of The Atlantic. The inmate, a woman serving a long…
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Stephen Randall’s 2012 LA Times op-ed on the Variety-Deadline ‘love match’ — read in hindsight
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2012) · Wayback archive → In mid-October 2012, Playboy deputy editor Stephen Randall wrote a humorous LA Times op-ed about the just-closed PMC-Variety acquisition, framing it as a love match between the two trade properties. The piece was lightly satirical. Six months later, half of the…
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The day PMC bought Variety — and Nikki Finke didn’t get to run it
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Pandora Young (2012) · Wayback archive → In early October 2012, PMC’s acquisition of Variety from Reed Elsevier was announced. Jay Penske told the LA Times immediately that Nikki Finke would not be involved in running Variety, and that the publication would be operated separately from Deadline.com, though…
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The September 2012 Deadline ‘no 24/7 news’ advisory — and the PMC-Variety deal it telegraphed
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2012) · Wayback archive → On the Saturday morning of September 29, 2012, Nikki Finke posted a cryptic Deadline advisory: the team wouldn’t provide 24/7 news coverage for at least a week because of “DH business affecting the entire staff in LA, NY and Europe.” Hollywood…
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Rebecca Schoenkopf vs. Dennis Romero — March 2012 Twitter spat between Wonkette and LA Weekly
By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, March 2012 In late March 2012, Wonkette’s editor and new owner Rebecca Schoenkopf got into a high-profile Twitter feud with LA Weekly staff reporter Dennis Romero. The proximate trigger was a grammatical-error tweet that escalated into an extended public exchange. Then…
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Two Hollywoods on one Hollywood Reporter week — Norman Lloyd’s 98 years and the Next Gen 2012 list
By Cassidy Lee · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, November 2012 In early November 2012, The Hollywood Reporter staged two cultural-celebration events in the same week that captured opposite ends of the industry’s generational range. The Next Gen 2012 list — Hollywood’s fastest-rising executives and creatives under 35 — was…
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January 2012’s Deadline-vs-Variety time-stamp fight — Mike Fleming responds to Emma Stone and Sundance scoop accusations
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, January 2012 In late January 2012, Deadline.com’s Mike Fleming publicly responded to back-to-back Variety.com blog posts that had insinuated Deadline had been falsifying the time-stamps on its Emma Stone and Sundance Film Festival scoops. Fleming’s response was that the accusations were…
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Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Dotcom cover story — Daniel Miller, Matthew Belloni, and the Megaupload prosecution
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, May 2012 In early May 2012, The Hollywood Reporter ran a cover story on Kim Dotcom — the Megaupload founder whose January 2012 New Zealand arrest had triggered one of the most-cited copyright-and-platform legal cases of the era. Daniel Miller and…