By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
In October 2011 FishbowlLA found itself refereeing a bitter dispute between two media outlets over a story about a third one.
Then
TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw had reported that THR.com deputy web editor Patrick Day was leaving for the LA Times, and that his editor, Joseph Kapsch, was unhappy at The Hollywood Reporter under Janice Min and planning his own exit — framing the trade as a sinking ship.
Kapsch confirmed Day’s departure but disputed nearly everything else, and FishbowlLA ran his lengthy response in full. He insisted he was not leaving, praised Min in glowing terms, and objected that TheWrap had not contacted him before publishing. He also pushed back on the ‘struggling publication’ characterization, citing THR.com traffic growth from under 400,000 monthly unique visitors to nearly 5 million.
Sharon Waxman answered point for point: TheWrap had called Kapsch but failed to leave a message, then sent an apology he acknowledged; and Lindsay Powers was, in fact, listed on the THR masthead as a deputy editor. It was a media spat conducted entirely in public, across three outlets.
Now
The careers outlasted the quarrel. Lucas Shaw became a prominent media reporter at Bloomberg, where his coverage and newsletter made him one of the more closely read writers on the entertainment business. Sharon Waxman continued to run TheWrap as an independent outlet.
Janice Min left The Hollywood Reporter in 2014 and went on to build The Ankler into a Hollywood subscription-media company. The THR.com traffic boom Kapsch was defending was real — but the digital-traffic economy that made those numbers feel decisive would itself be upended within a few years.
The episode endures as a vivid artifact of blog-era media culture: outlets covering, accusing and correcting one another in real time, with the disputed party publishing a thousand-word rebuttal on a fourth site.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.