By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011
Aggregation without credit was a running sore in early-2010s online journalism. In January 2011 FishbowlLA caught columnist Roger Friedman naming names.
Then
Roger Friedman, the New York-based showbiz columnist behind Showbiz 411, had never been shy about calling out outlets he said lifted his reporting and then claimed it as their own exclusives. FishbowlLA noted that spotting his latest accused poacher was half the fun of reading him.
On this occasion Friedman went for what FishbowlLA called a thievery trifecta. He accused People of taking Nicole Kidman–Keith Urban baby-naming details, and the Deadline.com operation of two uncredited borrows: a TVLine item by Michael Ausiello about Ricky Gervais possibly guesting on the US version of The Office, and a Deadline piece on Regis Philbin’s retirement announcement.
Friedman singled out Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva by name, and joked that if filching from others were an option for him, it would free up a great deal of his time.
Now
The credit-and-aggregation friction Friedman was policing never resolved — it simply moved. As social platforms compressed the news cycle, the question of who broke a story and who owed a hat tip became a permanent, low-grade feud across entertainment media.
The figures kept working. Roger Friedman continued Showbiz 411 for years; Nellie Andreeva remained a central byline at Deadline, rising to co-editor-in-chief on the television side. Michael Ausiello’s outlet TVLine grew into an established TV-news destination and was itself acquired by Penske Media in 2018.
The episode is a small period piece about a real structural problem of the blog era: original reporting was expensive, aggregating it was cheap and fast, and the etiquette for crediting a source never quite kept pace with the speed of publishing.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.