Caffeinated Clint
The independent movie websites Vs. the online trades
The trades have made an enemy out of the independently-run movie websites this year.
What have they been doing? Pinching our scoops and running them as their own.
Just a week ago, Latino Review broke the news that Jason Reitman would be doing a film adaptation of the book “Up in the Air”. Less than 24-hours-later, the trades ran the same story – although without any kind of credit, or acknowledgement, to the aforementioned site.
It happened again today. Latino Review scooped the net a month or so ago with their news that Jake Gyllenhaal would play the ‘’Prince of Persia’’ in a new Jerry Bruckheimer produced flick. Today, the trades report the same news – again, no credit to LR.
The same thing happened with Collider’s scoop on “The Lone Ranger” movie.
It’s all getting rather frustrating.
We’ve had similar experiences with the trades and news wires. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen our scoops re-written by another site, without any kind of credit to us. I’ve even seen major newspapers run our stories – sometimes word-for-word! (One that comes to mind is a “Pirates of the Caribbean 3” scoop we ran a couple of years back. It was republished, word-for-word, in a major newspaper. It was absolutely low.)
These people are the ones getting paid top dollar to source stories, and yet all they do is snag other’s stories. We’re working for them…. We do the research…. They take home some coin. We might as well be writing up our scoops in notepad and be sending them straight across to Variety, for them to run.
Together, we’ve all been talking about a way to stop this…. But have been unable to fix on a plan of attack. All we can ask is that you support your favourite movie news websites!
Oh, and yes, Gyllenhaal is the “Prince of Persia” – but we already knew that, didn’t we?
