Welcome To The Time Stamp Jungle

I’m cracking up with laughter after breaking a story about Steve Kloves writing and directing The Jungle Book. Only to see Variety claiming to have broken the story at 11:39 AM. I was watching their website, and the story didn’t pop up until 11:59 AM, a full 20 minutes after the trade tried to claim the story. Variety made a big deal about Sundance, when Deadline popped an “exclusive” tag on the Fox Searchlight deal for The Surrogate, with the trade claiming they broke the story. The exclusive part for Deadline was revealing that Searchlight paid $6 million, which made it the biggest deal of the festival. While Variety had a two sentence item that Searchlight was in talks (this was hardly big news, we were all chasing that rumor), the trade was disingenuous by not owning up to the fact that their reporters did not report the whopping acquisition price, until after they read it on Deadline. Our time stamp corresponds to the moment you see a story on our website, not 20 minutes before it actually appears.