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Longtime Hollywood insider and Variety editor in chief Peter Bart took on the blogosphere and the rights of bloggers with a decidedly negative take; a pair of movie bloggers took him to the editing room and trimmed him down to size. Peter Bart is feeling The Fear. The importance of print and publications like Variety has been shunted sideways in a big way. Blogs like TMZ.com, which seems to break Hollywood news regularly, are just more nimble than print.

Other movie industry-focused blogs try to delve deeper into the soft white underbelly of Hollywood, and race to the Internet with what they find. As to how well they do this, Bart and a couple of noteworthy blogs disagree.

"While the blogosphere has its share of heroes, it's also populated by pseudo-journalists who have never done a fact check or apologized to a public figure whose career may have been damaged by their bizarre rants," Bart said of bloggers. "They pose a challenge to the gatekeepers and the high priests of publicity who must figure out how to deal with them."

Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net called Bart's article "full of lies about publication dates that they break themselves," and suggested Bart's rant stems from Variety running out of steam.

"Don't scrap the rules entirely, but adapt them to fit into this new world," said Billington. "Press has changed, and it no longer allows for months of publication time and extensive fact checking. Grant access to everyone, don't be so restrictive to only “mainstream press” (which we should fall under anyway), and come to embrace this new medium and work together with it."

Peter Sciretta at Slashfilm echoed that thought, but also took Variety to task on several issues, the biggest being an accusation that Variety stole content from the CHUD blog without attributing it.

Sciretta also dismissed Bart's complaints about fact-checking. He was able to cite examples with the forthcoming debuts of 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Shrek' sequels that Slashfilm got right, with their fact-checking, and Variety got wrong.

"We are providing content to a targeted demographic of people who are interested in movies. And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, our articles will reach wider than the (New York) Times. This scares Bart and people of his generation," Sciretta said.