Penske Media Forces Name Change of Oscar Site Start-Up

When the Penske-owned Hollywood Reporter published a hit piece on me, suggesting that a 25-year mom-and-pop site might be taken down, at least financially, they also revealed that several of our editors — Clarence, Megan, and Joey — would be starting a new site, to be called “The Contenders.” Change of plans. Now, they’ll be launching under a new name — The Contending — thanks to an unexpected turn of events.

Journalist Rebecca Keegan had made it sound like they were rats fleeing a sinking ship but the truth is, I’d been urging Clarence and team to go this route for at least a year, maybe longer. The reason? I’d already been at the center of many a so-called “controversy.” They aren’t controversies. They are people plugged into social media whose nervous systems are tweaked by an algorithm that enables them to share and spread mass hysteria.

For Clarence, Megan, and Joey, it’s a chance to maybe someday quit their day jobs. They wouldn’t run it like I run mine. Theirs would be a “normal” Oscar site, emptied out of controversy and flame wars. There wouldn’t be armies of trolls taking a dump in their comment sections. They wouldn’t have whole Reddit threads about “what happened” to them. They wouldn’t be the subject of defamatory Facebook posts. Their brand would be clean.

So great, they get a nice bump out of the gate with the hit piece. Some good could come out of it. Wouldn’t you know it, though, as they were busy trying to build the site to launch at the end of this month, Megan is notified via a Penske lawyer that they can’t use The Contenders. They said they’d already trademarked it. It belonged to them:

“Since at least as early as November 2010, Deadline has used the trademark “Contenders” and “The Contenders” in connection with a program, panel discussion, event, and digital feature concerning awards given in the fields of film and television. The “Contenders” trademark is an important and valuable asset of PBM. You can see PBM’s use of the “Contenders” trademark at this website page, among many others: https://video.deadline.com/contenders/television-2024 (https://video.deadline.com/contenders/television-2024). PBM’s “Contenders” trademark is widely recognized in the entertainment indus
try and is exclusively associated with
Deadline
and PBM.”

Okay well we’ve all used the word “contenders.” As in:

I did a quick Google search and found no proof that there is a domain name or brand name called “The Contenders” as it relates to Deadline, except Deadline Contenders. But that’s like AwardsDaily contenders; it’s a very different thing than THE CONTENDERS.

Clarence did a check and came up empty too. All he could find was this:

It wasn’t a registered trademark or wordmark, but they were threatening legal action. So now, Clarence has to decide whether he, a guy right out of a Frank Capra movie with a wife and two kids living in North Carolina, along with Megan and Joey want to go up against Goliath? Even if they win, at what cost?

So they scrambled to find a new name for the site. Since I’ve been doing the Oscars now for 25 years, I have helped so many others who came from my comment sections or wrote for me to start their own sites. I was sued by the Academy in 2006 to change the name from Oscarwatch.com to AwardsDaily.com. I’d been running Oscarwatch for years without making any money. Once the ads started to populate the site, I had to change the name.

But finding a name for a site isn’t easy, trust me. I’ve been bouncing names around in my head for years. All the good ones are usually taken. Finding “the-contenders.com” was a miracle in and of itself.

And wouldn’t you know it, just like that, on Friday, Penske media registered “Contenders” as a wordmark:

A wordmark or word mark is a text-only statement of the name of a product, service, company, organization, or institution which is used for purposes of identification and branding. A wordmark can be an actual word (e.g., Apple), a made-up term that reads like a word (e.g., iPhone), or an acronym, initialism, or series of letters (e.g., IBM). In some jurisdictions a wordmark may be trademarked, giving it legal distinction, and potentially additional protection of any artistic presentation.

Deadline Contenders is a little different, ain’t it. To take the word “contenders” out of the awards race is a hell of a chess move. It’s like word-marking the word “award.” Man, the dude owns everyone under the sun:

Deadline
The Hollywood Reporter
Variety
Indiewire
Gold Derby
Rolling Stone
The Golden Globes (at least partly)

That meant this story, which is pretty juicy, could never be picked up by any of them. That, my friends, is called a monopoly. If anyone cared about the film awards race, the government might get involved to break it up. But these are the lowest of low stakes. It’s a money game that functions as a pipeline from the big studios down to these outlets, keeping them afloat. Penske has a huge share in it.

So in one fell swoop, he took out the competition. First, with a surveillance journalism hit piece on me in hopes the studios continue to clutch pearls and withhold their filthy lucre from little old me.

And their lawyers came after small fries Clarence, Megan, and Joey as they tried to rebrand and branch out. I guess it’s good to be rich, eh?

Clarence, Megan and Joey have decided on a new name. It will be “thecontending.com.” It’s a little harder to remember, but I told Clarence what I tell everyone. You can brand anything. Your site can be called greenfrog.com and if the content is good, people will come, Ray.

Lest you go down the road of why I would put my own writers in jeopardy, as Keegan seemed to suggest, this has been happening for a long time. It isn’t just about politics. It’s about people like me who refuse to obey rules of conformity. If you came of age in the 1980s you understand why. We were the counterculture back then. We spoke truth to power. Now that “we” are the power, everyone is always telling us to sit the hell down and shut the hell up.

When I was a little kid I was driving around with my mother and stepfather. I asked one too many questions an he turned round to me and he said, “If you ask one more fucking question, I’m going to punch you in the mouth.” That might have worked that day but I’ve never been able to stop asking questions, which is why I launched this site 25 years ago. I’m certainly not going to stop now.

Why, I always want to know, did Citizen Kane not win Best Picture? Why? Why has the entire Left, the side that used to produce the best and most exciting works of art, movies, comedy, journalism suddenly seem like skit night at the Scientology Center, why?

When you ask that question enough, eventually you arrive at the answers, answers people aren’t ready to hear. And so they try to silence the messenger.  I’m not saying I didn’t poke the rattlesnake. I did. One too many times. People like me aren’t really built to shut up and sit down — we agitate.

Clarence, Megan, and Joey didn’t fight the Penske machine. A rose by any other name will smell just as sweet.

Godspeed, The Contending. Godspeed.