Thanksgiving spirit still alive: Hollywood-blogger style

Sharon Waxman posted a great scoop on her WaxWord website earlier this week, revealing that a huddle of Hollywood stars (notably Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Nick Nolte) had a secret meeting last month where they gave up a thumbs-up vote endorsing an actor's strike. Citing an unnamed source, Waxman (a former top-notch New York Times reporter) says the A-list actors were even given pieces of paper to write down their views as to how or why a strike should occur.

It sounds wonderfully cloak and dagger, especially since this was far in advance of any strike vote from the rank-and-file SAG membership. But was the story too good to be, well, true? This morning, with most of the Thanksgiving turkeys still in the fridge, Nikki Finke weighed in on her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog claiming -- gasp -- that the meeting never took place. She takes apart Waxman's post, referring to the alleged event as an "imaginary meeting," quoting an unnamed insider saying that Waxman must have confused the secret meeting -- which she initially described as happening last month, a reference now deleted from her update of the original posting -- with a SAG meeting that happened last June before the guild contract had expired. But that meeting, Finke says, was for a different purpose, to gather names for a solidarity statement during the last weeks of negotiations between the guild and the studios.

Finke also accused Waxman of deleting the post, though Waxman says she inadvertently left the post in  "draft" mode overnight while doing some additional fact checking. Waxman has now amended a few facts in her original post, notably leaving out any specific time frame for the meeting. Finke concludes: "All I can say is that this doesn't bode well for her future blog endeavors." That prompted a Waxman response saying that Finke had devoted so much energy trying to debunk the story because she was eager to embarrass a fellow journalist.

What's going on here? In short: Who knows? Waxman and Finke were once quite friendly, but clearly Finke, who was the first to establish herself as a major Hollywood blogger, isn't especially hospitable to any competition. I've been on the whip end of a few of her lashings myself, so I know all too well how easily she can overreact and distort a competitor's story. On the other hand, Waxman does seem to have a hole in her post. When I e-mailed Waxman to ask if she knew when the meeting took place, she acknowledged that she hadn't pinned it down yet. The timing is pretty crucial -- if it did occur before the June 30 contract expiration, as Finke contends, it feels like very old news, if news at all. If it was over the summer, say in August or even September, it raises the question: what bearing did the meeting have on a strike vote call in late November, if any bearing at all? 

The real issue here, as always, is the nutty environment of Hollywood blogging. Call me old-fashioned, but as a reporter, if I only have one source for a story -- and can't even use that source on the record -- I don't think that gives me enough credibility to run the story, especially when, as in this case, no one can say exactly when this alleged secret gathering even happened. The reporting standards for blogs are inevitably different from the standards for newspapers -- they are essentially two different mediums -- but some of the same standards still apply equally.

One in particular: You've got to nail down the story before you print it.

Photo: Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. Credit: Scott Nelson / Agence France Presse.

Comments

[David Poland]

Sadly, you are mistaken.

One source journalism is alive and well in all forms of the media, old and new. Sharon and Nikki have both had similar problems when at major newspapers. The L.A. Times suffers from it as often as most.

Your love of slamming this medium in which you work almost exclusively - blogging - continues to miss the point. Faulty work is faulty work, whoever is delivering it. And no one is a virgin.

The traditional idea that a source at a high level in a studio or agency or wherever else is above questioning, even when on background, is a big part of what is destroying entertainment journalism in all forms. This is a Traditional Media thing. It is time for ALL journalists to ask themselves why information is being leaked to them and not just take it as manna from heaven. This has traditionally been the job of the editor, but neither Sharon nor Nikki has a happy history with editors and beyond that, few editors know the turf well enough to “handle” a reporter into answering the key issues before a story goes to print.

The system, not blogging, is broken.

[Joe Bacon]

David, I think the point Patrick is making is that bloggers are quite happy to publish with one source. There are so many of them, after all. Newspapers (good ones, anyway) have a higher burden of proof. Who is enforcing quality reporting at a blog run by someone eager to make a name for themselves with a splashy story which will attract traffic?
There's no come back for a blogger who gets it wrong. After all, inaccurate but sexy stories will always attract hits.

[David Poland]

I agree with that in principle, Joe... but the notion that good newspapers, especially on the show biz beat, demand a higher burden of proof, is just not the case. At least not in recent years.

Sharon Waxman's failure in the NYT job - she was just fine in the lower pressure, innocuous, Washington Post version of the gig – had a lot to do with single sourcing and trying to create stories where there were none of significance. And Nikki is almost exclusively writing one-source stories that, for all her “Toldjas,” are often wrong… especially in her embellishments. No question, she does make the phone calls. But she usually uses them as a cudgel against whatever powerful person or business she has already decided to attack. If you break down what runs in her column, it is almost all, in the end, either one source or a virtual press release given to her first. She shows – as Sharon rarely did – any real interest in why the information was being handed out, so long as the source was high enough on the food chain.

As I have been told over and over by editors at the trades and at both coastal giants, there is not a lot of hard editing anymore. Sharon has been repeatedly tagged by NYT editors as uncontrollable and uneditable. Nikki’s gossip blog has become successful because of the lack of editorial constraint of any kind. And Patrick has repeatedly praised her as having “real sources” that others allegedly do not. What she has is people who feed her because she will cough up their gossip in the direction it is intended by them and – in most cases – keep them relatively hidden. Recently, when she exposed Scott Rudin in her arrogant effort to attack Harvey Weinstein, Rudin and his peeps started rolling that info to Patrick. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

There is no issue about people trying to play journalists. Happens hourly. But how journalists now move after receiving a piece of news/gossip is what is falling to seed, in all platforms. The NY Times’ “source not named because of some silly reason that is obvious and should not have been accepted” rule is a part of this downfall. Jealousy over Nikki’s profile in the last year is also part of the downfall (though if you look at her site, you rarely see non-LA Weekly ads of any kind, so the financials may be another issue).

In any case… my point is that this constant effort to make it “bloggers vs newspapers” is crap. These kinds of mistakes run at NYT. LAT runs them too. Neither ever seems to correct them because they are failures of analysis, not the specific details.

But what is most pathetic to me, is that this whole Nikki vs Sharon thing is getting play in both the LA Times and Variety, via blogs, and the same papers failed utterly in covering the Rich Raddon story until he finally quit… and even then, they were late. The insignificance of the original story, true or not, is amazing. And the beehive that cares more about its own comb than about the hive dies… as it deserves to.

And on a person note, I broke the Raddon story, from the start to the finish. All the rumors I heard were backed up by accurate reporting. The NYT acknowledged this, as it would any other media breaking news. Not the LA Times or Variety. And who cares, really… until I read Patrick talking about how honorable Traditional Media is and how lame bloggers are… again… IN HIS BLOG.

Everyone is eager to make or keep a name for themselves… even Patrick… even me. I have been on the web long enough to have already experienced the cycles of this. Patrick has not.

“The real issue here, as always, is the nutty environment of Hollywood blogging.”

No… it’s not.

“The reporting standards for blogs are inevitably different from the standards for newspapers -- they are essentially two different mediums”

No, they are not… and no, they are not.

It is and has always been as simple and as complex as knowing what you are reading and determining for yourself whether that outlet /person can be trusted. You trust the NY Times more than other outlets. Why? If “reporting standards” are all the same for newspapers, why is the NYT more trustworthy? Because they have earned more trust.

People trust me, whether Patrick likes it or not, because I have earned that trust over a decade… the same reason why people who trust Patrick trust Patrick. Being at the LA Times is a nice start, but it’s not enough. Others have developed other kinds of relationships with their reader base.

The real difference in the new landscape is that trust must be earned and maintained daily. This is a real threat to those who have coasted at big papers.

As for Nikki and Sharon, no one will ever hurt either of them as much as they choose to hurt themselves. So why cover this squabble at all? And isn’t Patrick choosing to operate at the most gossipy blog level by playing along? Shouldn’t we be able to expect more of him?

[Matty Walker]

People don't trust you Dave, they tolerate you.

[8movies4plays]

You know what is really wrong with blogs. They not only self edit. They self edit the comment section too.

Must be all the advertising dollars. or is it the sources that control the bloggers . This dictatorship over comments to their words should end.