Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone has also commented on Robert Welkos‘“Blogger War” piece for HollywoodNews. I wasn’t as taken with the slight re-hash of the Nicolas Chartier e-mail debacle as the minor bickering that flared between Stone and L.A. Times columnist Pete Hammond over the perception of an anti-Hurt Locker bias among L.A. Times contributors. Or more particularly, over Stone’s resentment of Hammond’s mild dissing of Awards Daily.

“There is a lot of tension between actual journalists — people who went to school for it, studied it and worked for newspapers and magazines until the online media began to smoke them out — and the self-made blogger,” she says. “Many of these journalists are not doing straight journalism anymore but are, by necessity, dipping their feet into the world of the blogger – which is mostly opinion-based. Most bloggers take a position because they must. Some of them still do objective reporting but it becomes harder and harder, I think, to figure out who is invested with whom.

“Welkos’ story did not go into the equally big story about last year’s race — the LA Times‘ continual Hurt Locker bashing prior to the ballot deadline. No one ever got to the bottom of that and it still hangs out there like a bad stench . This was, of course, part of the whole Chartier thing – the LA Times appeared to be taking a side. But that has never been proved nor investigated. It was just an accusation made by a few bloggers, Stu Van Airsdale among them.

“So Pete gets one more dig in when he says that I run a site for Oscar fans. I guess that’s one way to look at it. But I can tell you this much — that’s never how I’ve looked at it. There probably hasn’t been a more critical site of the Oscars and the Oscar race than this one. It may not be journalism but if it’s fandom for anything, it’s fandom for the movies.”

Hammond, contacted this morning, responds as follows: “It’s not a negative thing to say Awards Daily is a fan site, and that the content is all of a fan nature. It’s not Deadline Hollywood Daily with agents and people in the industry chiming in. I don’t look at what I said as a negative comment. [Sasha] can redefine it in her own mind, but that’s the clientele she does it for. And she’s an advocate for films, for certain films winning this or that Oscar. It’s not an average journalistic endeavor. She does what she does, and she does it well.”