Deadline Hollywood's Attribution Problem

One of the stranger aspects of success is that the most talented people tend to also be the ones least capable of admitting that anyone else is also doing a good job. That axiom is certainly in full display at Deadline Hollywood, the generally top-flight industry web site that is part of the increasingly influential PMC Media Network.

The journalists working at Deadline Hollywood are some of the best in the business and it is a site that frequently breaks news and gets exclusives that are the envy of other reporters covering the same beat. And yet the site also seems to genetically incapable of admitting that anyone else may be breaking stories.

The generally accepted way to report on a story that first appeared elsewhere is pretty simple. Mention the site who broke the story, provide a link to the original piece and try not to repost everything of value from the original piece in your aggregated post. And yet Deadline Hollywood frequently ignores that convention, reporting stories that were broken elsewhere in a manner that suggests the ideas were simply delivered by the story fairy.

It's a practice that is increasingly drawing fire from other journalists.

On Friday, Alex Weprin, Senior Editor of Mediabistro, tweeted these complaints:

Deadline Hollywood is a great site. Makes it all the more frustrating that they are so opposed to linking out or crediting others for scoops

— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) May 31, 2013

Seriously, around 1/4 of the stories there the post day were broken elsewhere, but nary a mention of any other site. Barely any links.

— Alex Weprin (@alexweprin) May 31, 2013

The Vulture's Joe Adalian recently had a similar complaint about Deadline, illustrated in these two tweets:

Classic Deadline: Billboard breaks news about Blake Shelton OK concert, 7 hours later, DHD reports it as "breaking" and says "we hear"

— Joe Adalian (@TVMoJoe) May 23, 2013

No credit to the original source,no new information. Just pretend you "heard" and don't credit original source. I know: The sky is also blue

— Joe Adalian (@TVMoJoe) May 23, 2013

There are certainly plenty of other web sites that post stories broken elsewhere without proper attribution. And it's certainly easy to forget to do in a post that you're trying to quickly grind out. The latter is a a mistake that probably every journalist working online has made at some point. But that's not what we're talking about in this situation. Deadline Hollywood seems to make it a practice and that's a regrettable policy for an industry web site to take in 2013.

I suspect part of what infuriates other journalists about the practice is that Deadline Hollywood breaks plenty of stories. They don't need to worry about admitting that someone else might have a scoop or two. Yes, it's a competitive business, but if every web site begins refusing to link back to the original source, than the journalists breaking the most stories (like the ones working at Deadline) will be the ones who suffer the biggest drop in referrals and pageviews.

And maybe that is what it will take to change this type of behavior. If other leading sites begin declining to link directly to Deadline, then perhaps that will make a difference.

To be clear, I don't think this attribution problem is the result of decisions made by the journalists working at the site. It seems to be a corporate decision, although I have been unable to get a comment from anyone at PMC. It also seems to the practice across the Deadline industry verticals, though in this piece I'm just focusing on Deadline Hollywood.

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