This story at THR about HBO basing a new series on Nikki Finke as a blogger is hilarious, mostly because of her supposed hatred of bloggers. I've seen a few people over the years react almost violently to being called bloggers, as if it were more than a petty insult, but roughly akin to calling them child molester.

Within a month or so of this blog's launch, IESB and Cinematical got into a tiff after Comic-Con, 2007, over some really dumb things Robert Sanchez said about bloggers. I wrote about it back then, focusing what Sanchez said about blogging because that's the part that interested me:

"It's not only established media ... we're not bloggers, for God's sakes. I'm not a fucking blogger. You know, we might have a blog, but we don't blog. Chud's not a blog. Latino Review's not a blog. And I hate when the established 'quote unquote' media treats us as bloggers.

He was originally talking about sites that take news from his site and report it without giving credit. That's actually a fair point worthy of some debate (not so much the petulant whining) but what caught my eye was how much hatred Sanchez holds for bloggers and how upsetting he finds it to be associated with them and called one.

IESB is a blog, ok? It just is. It's not a print publication. It posts extremely short stories with almost zero creative content in reverse chronological order. It probably runs WordPress or some other blogging software on the backend. It didn't exist before blogs did. And yet IESB does everything that other sites that acknowledge being blogs do. Absolutely nothing that site does sets itself apart from the other movie blogs on the Internet and there are quite a few things (lack of editors, fact-checkers, journalistic ethics, shunning if opinion in favor of news, etc) that place it firmly in the blogopshere away from news magazines and real press organizations.

[Note: I'm not saying anything about the relative value of blogs or news sites here, I've seen many blogs do more impressive and valuable work than "real" news sites, but that's more an exception than the rule.]

Chud and Latino Review are both blogs. So is Cinematical. Founded by Jason Calicanis who basically invented the modern blog network, Cinematical was one of his top properities before he sold his business (Weblogs Inc.) to AOL. IESB doesn't do anything that Cinematical doesn't, and yet everyone is happy to accept that it's a blog.

IESB is no different.

Airlock Alpha is the same way. Not only does Hinman deny that he's a blogger and that his site is a blog, he gets emotionally upset as if it were some dirty accusation of wrong-doing.

These people think they are better than bloggers and their first and practically only defense is that they don't post what they eat for breakfast -- or funny stories about their cats -- as if that's proof that they are serious writers. That is an old-media steroetype that hasn't been true for years. There are many blogs that break news that the mainstream media misses and ignores (Talking Points Memo broke the U.S. Attorney firing scandal during the Bush administration) and many more that have more readers than many print papers and make a heck of a lot more money.

Nikki Finke, as you've probably guess, is the exact same way. While I'd give Finke more wiggle room than just about anyone else -- having worked at a real newspaper -- she's still a blogger. Her site, Deadline.com (formerly Deadline Hollywood Daily) runs WordPress for crying outloud.

If she is working on a deal with HBO for a series loosely based on her that features a Hollywood blogger, then everything she's angrily said about not being a blogger and hating blogs was either a lie, or she's a hypocrite that doesn't have a problem with it when somebody dangles a dollar bill in front of her face.