Nikki Finke is dead: the founder of Deadline and iconoclastic journalist was 68 years old

Nikki Finke, a tenacious reporter who revolutionized entertainment reporting with what became Hollywood business website Deadline, died Sunday morning in Boca Raton, Fla., after a long illness. She was 68 years old.

Finke’s death was confirmed by Deadline. Jay Penske, founder, chairman and CEO of Penske Media Corporation, which acquired Finke’s blog in 2009, shared a statement honoring Finke.

“At her best, Nikki Finke embodied the spirit of journalism and was never afraid to speak the hard truths with an incisive style and an enigmatic spark,” Penske said. “She was brash and real. It was never easy with Nikki, but she will always be one of the most memorable people in my life.”

After spending his early career reporting on everything from Moscow (for the Associated Press) to Washington, D.C. (for Newsweek), in 2002 Finke launched a column for LA Weekly titled Deadline Hollywood, which it went online in March 2006 as Deadline. Hollywood Daily to better cover the latest news. Rather than focusing on fame or content, Finke has placed a singularly ruthless spotlight on the studio executives and high-powered agents who make the industry work. She wasn’t afraid to call out what she believed to be ill-conceived or substandard decision-making in the most blunt terms possible, and her no-prisoners approach made her site a must-read in a media ecosystem. which Finke considered excessively flattering and gullible.

Finke’s relentless coverage of the writers’ strike in 2007 and 2008 cemented Deadline Hollywood Daily as the industry’s central media outlet. Her precocious and innate understanding of the incredibly fast and aggressive metabolism of digital journalism – she posted around the clock, updated stories on the fly and sometimes even quietly changed the facts when her original scoops failed to materialize – upended a century of domination by traditional journalism. commercial publications Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Her stories often began with Finke’s trademark “TOLDJA” shouting from the title, a reminder to readers that an official announcement or confirmation had first been reported by her.

Although she often protested that she had left her apartment, her complete lack of a public presence in Hollywood – she never attended private screenings or met her sources in person, and only two known photos of her exist. – gave Finke the aura of a mythical recluse. who still managed to keep all senior executives on speed dial. In 2011, HBO even produced a half-hour comedy about Finke called “Tilda,” starring Diane Keaton as cannabis-smoking journalist Tilda Watski who covers Hollywood through her website the Daily Circus. He did not go beyond the stage of the pilot.

Finke grew up in “Great Gatsby” territory, on the north shore of Long Island in New York. She attended Miss Hewitt’s Finishing School Classes (later called the Hewitt School) and even made her debut at the International Debutante Ball. After graduating from Wellesley College, she married in 1980 and divorced two years later, instead pursuing a career in traveling journalism. With the AP and Newsweek, she has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Observer, New York Magazine and New York Post. When the Post fired her in 2002 over unflattering stories she wrote about Disney’s Winnie the Pooh litigation, she sued the Post, News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company for wrongful termination for $10 million. The lawsuit would have been settled.

That same year, Finke began her column at the LA Weekly, building on more than a decade of research she had done for a book about Hollywood agents. Although the book was never published, it brought Finke into a world that seemed to both fascinate and repel her in equal measure, and ignited her pugnacious, anti-authority instincts to speak brutal truth to power. . At her height, Finke was feared by most, hated by some, and impossible to ignore. She made no apologies for the savagery of her copy. In 2006, she tells MarketWatch, “If there is an open wound, I will pour salt into it.” In 2007, she tells She, “All the bumps are morons.” In 2009, she tells the New York Times“I’m not mean, I just write mean,” the Los Angeles Times“Sometimes the truth hurts” and the new yorker, ” I can not help myself ! It’s as if the wickedness is coming out of my fingers!

These latest interviews followed Finke’s sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily for a low seven-figure sum in June 2009 to Mail.com Media Corporation – later Penske Media Corporation, which acquired Variety in 2012. Renamed Deadline, the site, still run by Finke, hired more staff, starting with veteran entertainment journalists Mike Fleming (covering film) and Nellie Andreeva (covering TV). What had been an uninhibited expression of Finke’s distinctive voice began to function much more like a traditional business outlet.

Despite Deadline’s continued success, for Finke, the fit ultimately didn’t work out. In November 2013, she separate ways with PMC, launching, then closing, its own entertainment news site, NikkiFinke.com, then pivoting in 2015 to an industry short fiction site called Hollywood Dementia, which was last published in 2019 She returned to PMC as a consultant in 2017.

Finke’s final Publish on Deadline, it was in 2016, to celebrate the site’s 10th anniversary. “It gives me great pleasure to see that, although Deadline is very different from what I created, it thrives as an integral part of the entertainment establishment,” she wrote.

In 2006, when DHD had just launched, Finke mentioned that she would like to be buried at the Pierce Brothers Cemetery in Westwood, the final resting place of Hollywood luminaries like Marilyn Monroe, Merv Griffin and Rodney Dangerfield.

“On my tombstone,” Finke said, “it might say, ‘She spoke the truth about Hollywood.'”

Finke is survived by his sister, Terry Finke Dreyfus; her brother-in-law, James; and his nieces, Sarah Greenhill and Diana Leighton.