One of my pet theories about the mystique surrounding Nikki Finke — beyond her own exquisite ability to involve herself in every story she writes on her site — is that she has intentionally or not devised an ingenious strategy of dealing with the people who write about her. Journalists tend to be naturally concilliatory creatures. As they report and write their stories, they try to negotiate middle-ground ways to say things so that they have plenty of cover when their sources get upset after they publish. Finke, backed by a reputation of being fairly litigious, slyly plays into this trait by barraging anyone who's taken on the task of writing about her with so many complaints, insults, and veiled threats that the "middle ground" becomes her side of the ledger. And then, she shits on the writer anyway. It's pretty effective.

Anyway, Nikki Finke has been pretty upset with Gawker's coverage of her over the last few months. To recap:

• In June I scoffed at the anonymously sourced reports that she had sold her blog to Jay Penske's Mail.com for $15 million. Later stories which she's cooperated with have confirmed what my source told me at the time.
• In September, John Cook tallied up the frequent number of times that Finke has called in sick to the readers of her site. As I happened to be on vacation at the time he posted that, I was somewhat sympathetic with her gripes about that one.
• In October, Ryan Tate wrote about her niche-sized traffic stats pegged to the fact that her site, which she moved from Deadlinehollywooddaily.com to Deadline.com after her deal with Penske, had just gone on Quantcast, the traffic-counting service that we consider the gold-standard for stats.
• That same day, we offered a $1,000 bounty for a recent picture of Finke because the only ones we've only ever seen two, and certainly someone must have a photo laying around that's been taken since the turn of the millenium? That prize remains unclaimed. (Have a snap? Please email me!)
• A few weeks later, John got a pretty excellent catch in his RSS reader showing Finke changing a box office report on Michael Jackson concert doc This Is It showed how she went from "extraordinary" to "disappointing" after she heard some spin from a rival studio.
• And then, in November when Finke's great scoop about Oprah Winfrey quitting her syndicated show panned out, a tipster pointed out to John that a transcript of Winfrey's announcement that Finke posted had been cut and pasted from a Chicago Tribune blogger.

So that brings us to today. When she posted a press release claiming that "Deadline.com's Deadline/Hollywood by Nikki Finke now has a larger readership than Variety and The Hollywood Reporter combined," I was intrigued. The release cites figures from comScore claiming that Deadline.com had 1.1 million uniques in November, compared to 515,000 at Variety.com and 336,000 at HollywoodReporter.com. But different services can give wildly different counts and Compete.com actually has Variety.com over Deadline.com for November.

There is no doubt that Finke had a great November. And Quantcast's monthly uniques are roughly in line with comScore's but their daily figures (see the chart at the top) suggest that much of it was driven by that Oprah spike and her numbers will come back down pretty soon. On Nov. 23, her best day according to Quantcast (see the chart at top), she had 330,000 unique visitors. But since then, traffic has settled back down under 100,000, which is roughly the territory where Quantcast puts Finke's trade competitors. There's nothing wrong with making traffic boasts, but seeing as how the data wasn't as clear cut as Finke's press release made it sound, I passed on posting an item about it.

She, of course, saw this as a personal slight, sending in an angry email falsely accusing Ryan of using the wrong numbers in his traffic item back in October (he used the right ones) and never calling her for comment (we have).

A semi-heated exchange ensued. And when I started writing this, I had planned on posting the whole thing. But now it just seems so tiresome. See how Finke's magic works?

P.S. Nikki: I sent you an invite to comment. It will make you a star commenter and anything you post will go straight onto the site.

• These late days of print media bring some strange potential owners out of the woods to poke around at the fire sale and see what kind of bargains they can land on unmatched, only-slightly-singed argyle socks. The Wrap reports that the venerable journals, the Hollywood Reporter and Billboard have been sold by their parent company Nielsen to James Finkelstein's News Communications Inc. publisher of Who's Who and The Hill. Also included in the sale, The Wrap reports, Backstage, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek and Editor & Publisher. [The Wrap]

• After a strong debut, the ratings for ABC's V took a tumble last night with 29 percent drop-off. [Hollywood Reporter]

• Carrie Underwood's hold on the music charts has not let up. "Play On", the former Idol star's third album easily took the top slot on Billboard's Hot 200, selling 318,000 copies in its first week out, knocking the soundtrack to Michael Jackson's This Is It down to #2. [Billboard]

• There was an actual bidding war over content in Hollywood yesterday and in the end, Peter Chernin's New Regency walked away with the prize. Chernin beat out Universal and Warner Brothers to snatch up the rights for My Name is Memory, the first book of a trilogy about a college couple whose souls have been intertwined for hundreds of years. [Variety]

• Simon Cowell has topped primetime TV's top-earners list. According to Forbes, the Idol judge/America's Got Talent creator rakes in $75 million a year, soaring past Donald Trump in the #2 slot at $50 miilion. [Forbes]

• To promote its new film Nine, the Weinstein Company has signed a deal to annoy ABC viewers in unprecedented ways. According to the deal with the network, the film will be written into the plotlines of a variety of ABC shows including its daytime soap operas, will be featured on Dancing With the Stars. [Variety]

• And if you're keeping score, it hasn't been a great week to be Nikki Finke. Not only does she inform blog readers that she is down with the flu, but she gets beaten by Sharon Waxman on the Hollywood Reporter story (assuming it pans out) and her biggest scoop of the year, the news about Oprah's departure from her syndicated show, still has yet to be confirmed by anyone else, with all sources still, a week later, publicly saying that no decision has been made. It may yet turn out that Oprah will end up making the leap, but some are wondering is it possible Nikki jumped the gun claiming the deal was done?

Nikki, the internet remembers everything. For instance, it remembers — courtesy our RSS reader which handily enough tracks changes in blog posts — how you originally characterized the opening numbers of the new Michael Jackson movie This Is It as "extraordinary," and changed it to "disappointing" after getting spun the other way. One of those is true!

This isn't the first time she's turned 180 degrees without any disclosure as to what changed her mind. In Tad Friend's profile of Finke in The New Yorker, he retells the tale of how she once posted an item claiming that Jeff Berg was out at the talent agency ICM, only to later erase that text and replace it with a new item that started, "Let me knock down that rumor making the rounds that Jeff Berg is supposedly leaving ICM." She told Friend that the original, completely wrong post "was up for about a minute." There's no real way to tell because she never noted the change and never changed the original time stamp.

There was also an incident concerning her "scoop" about who was going to direct the third Twilight movie:

Finke is conscientious about fixing errors noted by her sources, but she is less hospitable to challenges from colleagues. In March, Patrick Goldstein, who writes the Big Picture blog for the Los Angeles Times, reproved Finke for getting her facts wrong when she wrote a story saying that Summit Entertainment was telling people that Juan Antonio Bayona would direct the third installment of the hit vampire series "Twilight." (The job eventually went to David Slade.) Finke might have simply riposted with further evidence that Summit executives had picked Bayona but were embarrassed that he hadn't taken the job; instead, she wrote a followup story blasting Goldstein: "I'd hate to think Patrick is becoming one of those journalists who, because they can't break news, dump on those who do."

Other bloggers jumped in, delighted to see Finke under fire. One pointed out that Finke had quietly returned to her original post about Bayona and inserted qualifying material, including the sentence "I'm not saying he's been offered the job or hired, which in Hollywood involves deal memos, signed contracts, and the like." She explains, "I didn't change what I wrote-I added to it."

So, here's what Finke wrote this morning about the This Is It numbers:

THURSDAY 10:30 AM: Sony just announced that Michael Jackson's This Is It opened Wednesday to an extraordinary start all around the world in 99 countries with a 1-day gross of $20.1 million. The film opened to 7.4 million domestically and $12.7 internationally. Foreign highlights include strong performances from the UK $1.940, France $1.370, Japan $1.160, Germany $1.050, China $.730, Sweden $.490, Holland $.390, Mexico $.370, Brazil $.350, and Australia $.330. The film opens in 10 additional territories today. The studio believes that the worldwide launch, with very strong performance across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia, represents an amazing beginning for the film and...

Here's what she says now:

THURSDAY 10:30 AM: Sony just announced that Michael Jackson's This Is It opened Wednesday all around the world in 99 countries with a 1-day gross of $20.1 million. Immediately, Hollywood considered that disappointing after all the pre-sales hype surrounding the concert footage and its 2-week limited run. The film opened to a paltry $7.4 million domestic even including Tuesday's $2.2M late night showings. That's almost 50% less than the $17M Sony hoped for, and 39% less than the $12M Hollywood expected. "This is not promising," a rival studio exec just told me. Even overseas, where Michael Jackson is considered more popular than here, its solid but not spectacular debut was $12.7 million internationally. (Foreign numbers included UK $1.9M, France $1.3M, Japan $1.1M, Germany $1.0M, China $730K, Sweden $490K, Holland $390K, Mexico $370K, Brazil $350K, and Australia $330K. The film opens in 10 additional territories today.) The studio tried to put the best face on the bow, claiming the worldwide launch featured "very strong performance" across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia, and "represents an amazing beginning for the film and a reaffirmation of the global appeal of Michael Jackson". Uh, no. In North America, This Is It took in the highest gross ever for a Wednesday in October, which is a rather minor record. "The studio expects strong word of mouth and impressive critical acclaim to continue to drive ticket sales," a Sony spokesman said. There was some good news for the studio: the movie received an "A" Cinemascore across the board.

Interestingly, Finke posted the first one at 10:30 a.m., and then got a call or e-mail from some sniping exec telling her how "Hollywood considered" the numbers disappointing, and then traveled back in time and posted the second one at "10:30 a.m.". This woman's powers transcend temporal instantiation. No wonder no one can take a picture of her.

We called Finke to get her reaction and had a delightful conversation. Here's what she said on the record: "You're full of shit. Gawker doesn't practice journalism and lives to impugn those who do." She followed up with an email: "I'm flattered that Gawker reads me so closely, especially when I had the Sony press release up for all of a few minutes. Once I had a chance to analyze the numbers, I updated that they were disappointing." When Nikki Finke regurgitates press releases without analysis, she only does it for a minute.

UPDATE: At 3:44 p.m. EST, we changed the lead tag on this item to "get me rewrite," because this new-fangled tag system rendered our original choice of "do-overs" as "doovers," which looked silly, right?

Right off the bat, Finke admits she's not into lists, writing:

"Last year I was on Elle's Women in Hollywood power list; this year I was asked to write it. That's ironic, because I hate power lists more than one-size-fits-all spa robes. These influential jobs are not necessarily comparable. Are the casting directors I included more important than the cinematographers and film editors I didn't? So what I have is a very subjective roster of women I deem essential to a town run by alpha males who don't play well with others. Women in general do."

The List is split up into sections; there's The Movie Executives; The TV Executives; the awfully titled "The Wives & Daughters." But first and foremost there's The Talent — which includes Tyra Banks, Beyoncé, director Kathyrn Bigelow, Miley Cyrus, Ellen DeGeneres and Tina Fey. Also on that list? Michael Patrick King, whom Finke calls "2009's honorary female." Finke explains:

He gave us the best years of Sex and the City on TV and can be credited for reviving the chick flick in Hollywood when the movie version grossed $415 million.

The commenters on Women In Hollywood are split. One writes:

I just dislike that she left out a woman in order to include Michael Patrick King as an "honorary female". It is not good to be told that a man knows and produces women's films better than women.

But another replies:

That bugged me as well… but then I thought, well… It's the biggest film starring a cast of women of all time. He may not be a woman, but his film surely did something great for women in Hollywood, especially with a cast of women 40+.

Here's the question: If a man sympathetic to women is in power, is it as good as a woman in power? I'm going to go with: No. Because the more women pulling strings and making executive decisions the better. But since Finke makes a point about the SATC franchise being a powerhouse — and generates some buzz by including a man — she gets a pass from me. Disagree?

The Most Powerful Women in Hollywood According to Nikki Finke [Women In Hollywood]
Nikki Finke's Power List [Elle.com]
Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood

Earlier: Hollywood Heavy Nikki Finke: Victim Of Misogyny, And Misogynist Extraordinaire

The problems for Finke being, that as much as the Old Nikki might have liked to put together a list like this herself:

(a) The Least Liked List no doubt features many of her most favored sources.
(b) The thought of any other website getting attention probably makes her head explode slightly more than its normal exploded state
(c) The Temp Diaries site is a noted Finke taunter which has already incurred her rage.

Luckily, Nikki eventually found a way to cover the story about the story without covering the story. Her path, after a long day of sitting out The Brown List news, was to make it a story about the state of journalism, upbraiding the LA Times for, like everyone on the internet except her, linking to the Brown List in a fairly thoughtful post by Patrick Goldstein.

Under the grandma-throwing-her-bathroom-slippers-at-the-TV-set headline "Just How Pathetic Is LA Times Coverage Of Hollywood? Well, THIS Pathetic!" Nikki's response however, reveals more about where her loyalties and friends are than anything else she could write. Once the self-anointed guardian of the lowly and down-trodden of Show Biz, Finke dismisses the Brown List and the site which compiled it, calling it derisively a "temp website." She continues, "I'm not kidding so it bears repeating: the author of "The Brown List" runs a website for temporary workers and is self admittedly neither a Hollywood insider nor responsible journalist."

She also criticizes the methodology of the poll which, say what you will about it, was completely explained and transparent when the list was posted.

So just to make it clear, Nikki, to what level do people have to ascend in Hollywood before they are allowed to have opinions? Shall we say, VP and above? Hopefully the world will soon invent a sub-internet so all these little dayshift workers can have a cellar to hide in while Nikki and her fellow insiders and responsible journalists can practice real Big Time Interneting.

But wading through all the miles of pixels spilled about Hollywood's most notorious monger of gossip about entertainment executives La Finke, the same damn picture pops up again and again. Over and over, the same black-and-white picture of Nikki in what appears to have been a audition photo for the role of the evil headmistress in a 1940's film.

At Gawker, we're prepared to do something about this distressing dearth of Finke images. We are hereby offering a $1000 prize to the first person to bring us a recent photograph of the scourge of industry reporting.

How does this happen, that a woman who is the focus of so much attention is so little seen? As far as we can tell there is but one other known picture of the most hated woman in Hollywood media; a mysterious rumpled image dating back to Nikki's debutante days in which the first seeds of diabolic rage can clearly be discerned.

The hunt for Nikki sightings is a long and venerable one, stretching back almost a decade. Around that time, as she first began to ruffle feathers with her LA Weekly column, people around Hollywood began noticing that no one had actually seen the great columnist in quite some time.

Theories abounded about why she had become a shadowy presence. Some speculated of agoraphobia; some thought she was afraid to run into those she had trashed in writing; while others said that it might be vanity, her appearance not being what it was perhaps at the time of the Evil Headmistress photo.

And through this time, Nikki began to make strange appearances and non-appearances in and around the press. There was a strange little incident during one of her earliest feuds with the late blogger Cathy Seipp in which, mid-fight, Cathy began receiving comments on her blog from someone identifying him/herself on as Nikki Finke's attorney and demanding (more or less) that her attacks on Nikki cease. Checking the IP address from the attorney/commenter, Seipp found it was identical to Nikki's own.

Whatever the case was with the lawyer in that episode, Finke soon developed a taste for deploying her legal pitbulls on a succession of journalists who dared question her. Stories among journalists abounded of lawsuits actual and threatened by Nikki. This tactic of course is not unknown to those she covers — legal stonewalling and badgering as a PR tactic; the Church of Scientology kept their critics at bay for years with such a strategy. But for a journalist to employ it herself is unusual, to say the least — particularly from one who becomes near rabid at the least suggestion that she is not receiving full and total openness from any source of her choosing. We are quite sure that Tad Friend and the New Yorker absorbed the brunt of this particular strategy.

Reports also circulated of her responding to the most innocuous inquiries with foaming-at-the-mouth, rage at imaginary slights responses. Reporters who phoned her for the most routine inquiries found themselves embroiled in endless back-and-forths, bickering over the smallest points in their stories; demanding retractions to any and all slights real or perceived. Discussions with her typically led down rabbit holes of contorted, self-justifying logic until it became impossible to sort out what was true anymore.

There was for instance the fight with Gawker itself after former editor Jesse Oxfeld suggested the deck might be a couple cards short in otherwise favorable comments given to a profiler. And the Women's Wear Daily story that was obliterated from the web after Nikki's badgering caught the author in a slip-up having not informed her he was taping a phone conversation.

As we say, not abnormal tactics for a Church of Scientology, a machine politician or a Hollywood mogul for whom thugishness toward a free media is a matter of pride, but odd from one who benefits from the protections of the fourth estate herself. To say the least.

And as her battle on the rest of media descended into trench warfare, Nikki herself became almost invisible in Hollywood, reports of her sightings dwindling to a precious few. People reported her failing to show up for planned interviews, and her appearances at Hollywood events all but evaporated.

And so we are thus stuck with the one darn Evil Headmistress picture appearing again and again in wave after wave of profile and profile-debunking.

Everybody complains about the weather but Gawker is ready to do something about it. We hereby offer a $1000 bounty to the first person who can produce a web-ready, usable, recent photograph of Nikki Finke, sparing media consumers of the future another thousand go-rounds with Evil Headmistress.

We encourage bounty seekers to pursue the prize through all legal and honorable means; please no urban ninja tactics and remember the laws of the land still apply, even to Hollywood picture-takers. But surely someone out there has or will seen her, or seen a picture and can help save the web from this terrible drought.

We'll start the ball rolling the comments section with the known photographs and artistic renderings; please add your own to the record. Although not eligible for the prize, please feel free to post any old photos you may have, or create your own artistic renderings for the public good. Let it not be said that when the internet was suffering, this generation failed to rise to the challenge.

Finke's numbers just went onto Quantcast, no doubt through the efforts of her blog's new owner, heir and budding Web mogul Jay Penske, who presumably hopes opening his stats will help sell advertising. Finke is making north of $625,000 from Penske over eight years, according to the New York Times.

She gets around 30,000 to 40,000 people on her site each weekday. The may indeed be influential people. But there aren't that many of them. Except when Finke is the subject of a New Yorker profile, which she can turn into a traffic-spiking multimedia catfight.

It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Finke to attract the several hundred thousand daily readers of an LATimes.com, or the couple hundred thousand of a Gawker.com. Her site is very specialized in insider gossip, more akin to a Variety or Hollywood Reporter. In fact, 30,000 is roughly the circulation of one of those Hollywood trades, if not both.

But if Penske wants to use Finke as a linchpin of a robust online empire — and if Finke wants to seize the incentives that could reportedly double her take to $10 million over the life of her deal — those numbers will need to come up, which means Finke will somehow need to broaden her appeal. Loud fights can only take one so far, after all.

"I'm too superficial to read The New Yorker because it's so unrelentingly boring. Even the cartoons suck these days," begins Finke's post reacting to the profile. Touche, babes! I feel you. But occasionally they come out with something interesting, and this—in or out of context—is definitely one of The New Yorker's more valiant efforts. Too bad it's so mediocre. Highlights:

• The New Yorker loves to write about bloggers as secluded, melodramatic cretins sniping away from the comfort of their living room while they're too socially anxious to do anything else. Which is true. Also, we learn her cat's name:

  "...In seclusion she manages to seem ubiquitous, covering the golden acres from Santa Monica to Sunset-Gower from a home newsroom containing six phones, a laptop, and her cat, Blue. Her all-knowing voice on the phone is reminiscent of Charlie of "Charlie's Angels"-yet she salts her site with references to her diabetes and dental work, drawing readers into the drama of her daily struggle."

  
  

• Finke does drams. Watch her recount the tale of her learning Dick Cook was being canned/leaving Disney: "Finke told me, 'I literally ripped the I.V. out of my arm to leave the hospital, and I would have had the story an hour earlier if I hadn't stopped to get an antibiotic.'"
  
  
• This was nice: Studios hosting dinners with Hollywood journalists having a salon about how the journalists were going to do their jobs. Finke didn't show, naturally.

  "In April, 2007, Stacy Ivers, who was then in charge of media relations at Universal Pictures, invited about thirty people-a mixture of journalists and P.R. executives from the studios and talent agencies-to dinner in Laurel Canyon. Ivers's idea was that the two camps could mingle over salmon and lemon bars, and hash out Hollywood's new rules of reporting. Ivers's dinner, attended by most of Hollywood's top corporate publicists, as well as by Fleming, Waxman, the Variety reporter Anne Thompson, the Hollywood Reporter's film editor, Gregg Kilday, and a Los Angeles Times editor, Sallie Hofmeister, among others...."

  
  

• Several allusions comparing Nikki to the communist witch hunts of Hollywood, including Warner Bros. studio chief Jeff Robinov.
  
  
• Nikki just making fun of Friend:

  After a moment, she added, "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy' "-a suggestion that Bart was too submissive to the former agent Michael Ovitz, an enduring adversary of Finke's. "I can't help it!" she said, laughing. "It's like meanness pours out of my fingers!"

  
  

• Finke talking to her cat and her assistant the same way: "She was often funny and warm, and at times appealingly distractible, breaking off to talk to her assistant ("I can't eat this-no offense, but it's gross! Yuck!") or her cat ("Yeah, there's food there-what the hell is your problem?")."
  
  
• Nikki Finke, the lonely, sad blogger:

  "One Saturday evening, after we concluded a three-hour call, she phoned back twenty minutes later to say, "Everyone tries to portray me as sad, pathetic, lonely-that's not me at all." "I don't think of you that way, Nikki," I said. "You don't know anything about my private life," she said, quietly. "That's probably true." "O.K."

  
  

• Nikki Finke, the depressive maniac:

  "There was a constant undercurrent of a kind of financial and professional desperation," her friend Bernie Weinraub, who was then the Times' Hollywood correspondent, says. After Finke's book was cancelled by Dial Press, in 1996, she wept so intensely that Lisa Chase, who edited a column Finke was writing for the New York Observer, called the Los Angeles sheriff's department and asked them to check on her. Deputies arrived at Finke's apartment at the same time as Weinraub, who had also spoken to Finke and grown concerned, and when she opened the door, sobbing, holding a knife she was using to open a package, the deputies shouted, "Put down the knife!" Later, Weinraub would jokingly blackmail her about that moment-and Finke would tease him about the time he'd fallen asleep while interviewing Jim Carrey.

  
  

• Nikki's excuses for missing deadlines, two of which I've used: "‘I was locked out of my apartment,' ‘I had food poisoning,' ‘I was being evicted.'"
  
  
• Endeavor agents talking to Friend about Ari Emmanel's handling of Finke during the Endeavor-William Morris merger:

  "Ari fed Nikki perfectly," one Endeavor agent says. "He used her just enough to help the merger."

  
  

• The only person Finke's afraid of:

  Finke is tickled by such bluster, and says that the silky David Geffen is the only person in town she's actually afraid of, adding, "I'm sure he'd take it as a compliment." (Geffen, perhaps cultivating his reputation for veiled menace, said, "Just say I had no reaction at all.")

  
  

• And finally, Finke's kicker:

  "I don't think for a minute these people like me," Finke told me. "They talk to me because that's how the game is played. They'd like to ignore me, but they can't. The best way for them to think of it is: I get bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow."

That person—or people—according to Finke's blog post, are David Remnick, Tad Friend, and most of the New Yorker's working masthead. But before we get there, let's do a quick rundown of the language used in Friend's piece:

• Finke portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who golf at exclusive preserves
  
  
• Jeff Zucker, the C.E.O. and president of NBC Universal, is "one of the most kiss-ass incompetents
  
  
• "Stick it where the sun don't shine, you asswipe," she recently counselled a CBS publicist.
  
  
• Nikki wrote it like the runaway bride was a whore."
  
  
• In October, 2007, Finke posted a story about Jeff Robinov, Warner Bros.' president of production: "Warner's Robinov Bitchslaps Film Women."
  
  
• "I did call Peter ‘Ovitz's buttboy'"
  
  
• "Then you see a comment-maybe from someone who's in an insane asylum-saying, ‘When I worked there, he shit in the kitchen sink and wiped his ass with $100 bills.'"
  
  
• Nikki's response was that I was a pussy.
  
  
• "New Line was left holding its dick"
  
  
• "starts whining like the pussy he is,"
  
  
• A source of Finke's says, "Somehow I've become like the poster child for her-I'm her bitch."
  
  
• Ray Stark once told Finke, "Girlie, if you ever fuck me, I'm going to personally come over to your house and give you a hysterectomy."
  
  
• "You make me sound like a wuss!"
  
  
• bitch-slapped today, and someone else'll get bitch-slapped tomorrow

And that wasn't even a thorough search. This thing's full of awesome Finke-isms. But the bottom line is that the juciest stuff in the profile about Nikki—she changes posts on the fly, she can be shifted by her sources, some people are afraid of her, some not so much, she's a rebel, an outsider, comes from money, lives a mysterious life, is kinda kooky—are things we already knew or could've guessed. The best part of this story, of course, is Nikki's reaction.

Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker the title of her post proclaims. How does she go after the New Yorker? Her full assessment, in its most basic form is

As I expected, it's an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I'm relieved that The New Yorker didn't lay a glove on me.

Ah, but there's more. Finke argues that Friend's reporting was mediocre, and that he and the New Yorker got totally played by Hollywood. Back to the bullet points, one more time:

• Her time was wasted.
  
  
• The best stuff she gave Friend wasn't even used.
  
  
• She spoke with Friend on piles of pre-conditions only.
  
  
• Friend's work was "no better" than David Carr's NYT profile on her.
  
  
• She found Friend "easy to manipulate."
  
  
• She enjoyed "bitchslapping" New Yorker EIC David Remnick "throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process"
  
  
• The New Yorker "bent over" for Hollywood.
  
  
• Brad Grey's flack Steven Rubenstein got every reference in the story to him deleted.
  
  
• Harvey Weinstein had "cunt" replaced with the word "jerk" on his quote.
  
  
• More on Hollywood "had their way" with the New Yorker, and then this Eminem-esque kicker: "You, too, can make The New Yorker your buttboy. Just act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck."

Jesus.

I contacted Tad Friend, David Remnick, and deputy editor Pamela McCarthy at The New Yorker for comment on Finke's rebuttal. None of them replied. The New Yorker's PR director, Alexa Cassanos, did:

No, no comment from David or The New Yorker. Thanks for checking though.

I figured I'd fire one Finke's way since she's having such a great morning. What'd she think of the New Yorker's silence? Also: what she thought of the article's assertion that she could be "(positioned)..to some degree."

I have no idea what that sentence means. I do know that in the 3rd graf of the story it reads, "she's very, very, very accurate, extraordinarily so..."

And that, right there, is the Nikki Finke story: playing her own press as hard as the subjects she covers try to work her, and when occasionally caught in the middle, celebrating the nihilism of her bloodsport with a hearty "who cares?" Finke is Shiva, a force of destruction, kinda crazy and overly obsessive, caring only about how respected and powerful she is, and taking it by brute force. She's playing her game by rules she makes up as she goes along, elbows out, and occasionally tossing around doublespeak to back her transgressions and fouls. It's really quite fun to watch even if, as Finke might suggest, you have no reason to give a fuck.

One of Finke's many charms is the way she has treated her readership like her boss—she'll call in sick via a post, or beg for just a few more minutes to get her thoughts together on breaking news. And as any regular reader knows, she scarcely goes a month without going dark for a day or two for some reason or other, which she invariably explains on her blog in the manner of a harried writer trying to get an editor off her back: I'm down with the flu, I've got jury duty, this damn internet's not working, I had some bad dental work, I broke my hand.

We're all for writers taking time off. And we're in no way prepared to put our own work ethic up against Finke's. But ever since she sold DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com to Jay Penske's Mail.com in a reported multimillion-dollar deal that has her earning $400,000 a year, we've wondered how Finke's frequently erratic work habits would mesh with a real boss, who has investors to satisfy. So we've decided to keep an eye on Finke's "I'm out today" posts, to see what a $400k blogger can get away with.

Last Thursday, Finke wrote that she had been in the hospital by way of explaining a shortage of recent posts. We hope she's OK. Finke has written in the past that she suffers from diabetes, which may explain her frequent absences from blogging (though it hasn't hampered a long and active career that has included stints in Moscow and London for the Associated Press). She seems to have bounced back fairly quickly from her latest illness, with a lot of posts over the weekend.

To put Finke's salary in perspective, we've gone through her archives and put together a sampling—and this really is just a sampling—of her posts offering reasons for not being able to work. We hope that in her new, corporate environment, Finke will find a way to pace herself and accommodate a more predictable work schedule. Because we agree with this blogger, who wrote a post called "Why Hollywood Gets No Work Done" in 2006:

I was shocked to hear that Hollywood types were already leaving town for the July 4th holiday. It's bad enough you guys cancel four straight scheduled meetings with screenwriters. Or have your assistants book appointments six months ahead which you'll cancel anyway. And all without a twinge of guilt. But lately you've become Slacker Town.

Finke is no slacker—anyone who's been on the business end of her reporter's notebook knows that she is not afraid to put in the hours on any given story. But she certainly does seem to cancel a lot of appointments with her readers:

September 17, 2009

September 14, 2009

September 10, 2009

August 12, 2009

July 31, 2009

July 13, 2009

July 9, 2009

July 7, 2009

June 29, 2009

April 20, 2009

April 15, 2009

April 6, 2009

April 2, 2009

March 30, 2009

November 10, 2008

November 3, 2008

October 15, 2008

September 11, 2008

September 4, 2008

August 1, 2008

July 28, 2008

July 9, 2008

June 10, 2008

June 9, 2008

May 20, 2008

May 16, 2008

May 15, 2008

April 23, 2008

April 1, 2008

February 20, 2008

February 12, 2008

January 23, 2008

January 14, 2008

January 9, 2008

December 27, 2007

December 17, 2007

December 10, 2007

November 30, 2007

October 16, 2007

October 10, 2007

October 1, 2007

September 13, 2007

August 13, 2007

July 20, 2007

July 13, 2007

July 11, 2007

July 7, 2007

February 25, 2007

December 30, 2006

December 5, 2006

September 11, 2006

June 12, 2006

[Full disclosure: Your blogger's wife works as an editor at Finke's former employer, Village Voice Media, and occasionally edited her stories.]

And Hollywood hates surprises.

The genial Cook who began his Mouse career as a Disneyland ride operator gave little reason for his decision, merely saying "I have been contemplating this for some time now and feel it's the right time for me to move on to new adventures … and in the words of one of my baseball heroes, Yogi Berra, 'If you come to a fork in the road, take it.'" But Friday night, the town and the internet were abuzz with speculation focusing on Disney Boss Robert Iger's unhappiness with the studio's recent lackluster performance.

Variety's quasi-official rendition noted, "The studio's most recent movies, like "Race to Witch Mountain," "Bedtime Stories" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" have been disappointments and CEO Bob Iger expressed unhappiness with the studio's slate in a conference call with Wall Street analysts in May."

The LA Times repeated this theme adding, "Internally, Iger was growing increasingly frustrated with Cook's management style, people familiar with the situation said, citing Cook's tendency to play his cards close to the vest."

The LA Times also captured the despair of Johnny Depp, star of Disney's Pirates films. In the item, Depp "said his enthusiasm for a fourth Pirates movie has waned with the news of Cook's exit." Hard to imagine that anyone's enthusiasm for the tiredest mess of a franchise currently afloat could ever wane, but without the right man in the front office, somehow the fun of robbing hundreds of millions of film fans of their popcorn money loses its luster.

Nikki Finke, just "out of the hospital" claims the story as an "exclusive." And indeed her item is timestamped 5:03, so if the stamp is accurate, it was posted a good five minutes before five minutes before Variety's and a full 14 minutes before the LA Times' piece. So for five minutes, Nikki Finke readers were the only people in America who knew about Cook's departure, and presumably the executive who will be named his replacement used that critical window to maneuver brilliantly, sending Robert Iger a fruit basket and a card telling him how much he loves Willow's Huff Post Living Now section, while the Variety reading executives sat at their desks clearing off another game of mine sweeper.

Nikki adds the news that Cook was "blindsided" by the firing, and morally outraged that it would come on Rosh Hashanah. She also adds Steven Speilberg, who just moved his production company to Disney, to the list of people who are very, very upset. Nikki says the news is "playing very badly" on the Disney lot. And you know what happens to news that plays badly on the Disney lot...Well, nothing actually.

The Wrap assures us that Oren Aviv, President of Buena Vista will not be Cook's replacement, and speculates that either Pixar Chief John Lasseter may be positioned for another step up the ladder.

• It's a waiting game to see whether Vivendi will exercise its put option on its remaining 20 percent stake in NBC Universal, possibly sending the network studio hybrid into the fabled lands of IPO. While the anticipation mounts, Vivendi's chair said the company would take the next few months to make up its mind. [Variety]

• Oprah's Harpo Productions, Sam Mendes and Focus Features are teaming up to bring Joseph O'Neill's celebrated cricket pot-boiler Netherland to the big screen. [Variety]

• Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro announced plans to make a series about Alphabet City for Showtime. Alphaville will be an ensemble drama set in the 1980's. [Hollywood Reporter]

• With a mere two months until its release, pre-sales of tickets for New Moon the second installment of the Twilight saga have been brisk, with many locations reporting showings have already sold out. [Hollywood Reporter]

• What you won't read much about in the trades is the rumors about the trades themselves. Yesterday, Nikki Finke declared Variety was planning to take its website behind a pay wall and the Hollywood Reporter to cease publication entirely. The Wrap attempted to find the truth behind the rumors. It quotes a "high level" Reporter exec reacting "with amusement" to Finke's item, while Variety remained oblique about its online plans. [The Wrap]

On the surface, the remade site looks pretty much exactly like the old site, with some new fonts and a suspiciously familiar skybox at the top. However, in her welcome to the makeover letter Nikki writes, "Most, but not all, of the site's new features are ready, and those that aren't will be coming soon (some as quickly as later today)." So we went poking around for these awesome new features.

There appears to be a Greatest Hits section, where visitors can relive Finke classic Shockers, Stunners and Toldjas like "SHOCKER! Paramount Moves Scorsese's 'Shutter Island' To February 19, 2010" and "Toldja! Ari Emmanuel's Dry Cleaner Names him Customer of the Century! Picture to Hang on Cash Register!"

There is also the intriguing promise of the Finke "Premium" section. (We wondered if as one of its services premium subscribers will be offered the opportunity to write their own stories about themselves, but doesn't she already offer select customers that service?)

We were also dismayed to learn that Nikki had dropped the delightfully unwieldy url deadlinehollywooddaily.com for the more brandable deadline.com. A major step back in our book.

Most chilling of all however, is the specter of a worldwide Finke empire about to arise. In her note, she writes, "Immediate editorial plans also include a Deadline New York senior editor/writer, followed throughout the next year by correspondents in other cities like London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Sydney, all of whom will report to me."

In general we would dismiss this as another example of Finke bluster that never materializes, but in Peter Kafka's media memo today he writes of speaking with Finke's new owner Jay Penske:

Penske tells me that the new hire, whom he describes as a "well-known figure from established media," has been locked up, is finishing paperwork, and will be on board within two weeks. Finke also promises to have hires in "London, Paris, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Sydney" within the next year.

Not that long ago, it would have been inconceivable to see a big-name media macher go to work for a one-woman blog owned by a white-label email services provider. But now that Web publishing has lost most (but not all) of its reputation as a backwater for second-raters, wannabes and has-beens, and now that traditional publishing is on life support, it's a whole lot more believable.

Which raises the chilling question: we know we're in the last days of media and all that, but how desperate would your life have to become to go to work for Nikki Finke? What can that possibly be like?

If anyone has applied for those jobs or done anywork for Worldwide Finke Incorporated and has stories to share, our ears are open. Our number is tips@defamer.com.

Why quibble? Because that's how much rival Hollywood webpreneur Sharon Waxman — who wouldn't mind pushing up the price of websites about the entertainment business — insists the deal is worth. In her story today about Penske's nabbing of magazine editor Bonnie Fuller to run HollywoodLife.com, Amy Kaufman writes at Waxman's The Wrap, "Last month, TheWrap reported that MMC purchased Nikki Finke's blog Deadline Hollywood Daily for a deal totalling $14 million."

Still, Finke is now pulling in one of the largest blogger — excuse us, news website editor — salaries around. And as Carr points out, Finke has her sharp elbowed, merciless, style that she's known for to thank for Penske's millions. One the big debates about Finke's is whether she is a hard-nosed reporter trying to keep Hollywood honest or a recluse ranting on the corner of Journalism and Vendetta?

We've had Nikki's digital spittle on our faces a number of times. And so have many others, like an editor at GQ for instance. This email from Nikki sent to the GQ is one of our is one of our favorite postcards from the stormy isle of Finke:

Subject: Re: LA story
Date: 8/17/2004 3:13:52 PM Pacific Daylight Time

From: Nikki Finke

To: XXXX

You think having an unnamed Hollywood agent talking about poaching unnamed clients is a "get"? I have 300 interviews with real live Hollywood agents ON THE RECORD talking all about stealing clients and naming names, dates, places, etc. not to mention a whole bunch of even juicier stuff. But do you people ever think to actually call me to do an article for you? Noooooooooooooooooooooo....

Because I'm not 24 years old...
Because I'm not making up stuff.

Because I don't live in New York.

Because I don't kiss up to the idiots who decide which stars magazines like GQ can and can't put on their covers.

Because I actually know something about Hollywood.

Here's a thought: Why not ask me to put together the juiciest Hollywood stories I know for your magazine. Oh, you're running late for lunch at Michael's?

How come I'm not surprised.

C'mon guys! Who wants to buy Nikki lunch? As a burgeoning chronicler of the entertainment scene, I have to tell you that judging from this highlight reel Nikki Finke is an absolute inspiration to me. She proves that you can be successful despite your tendency towards spleen venting tirades, outrageous public feuding, intolerable smugness, and overall an contemptuous personality. There's hope still!

Finke's success at turning the thin gruel of studio press releases into high-drama gossip has always hinged on her ability to put herself into the middle of every story. Everything is "Toldja!" this and "I just spoke to" that. Take her coverage of this past weekend's executive shakeup at Paramount - Finke can only write in the first person:

4:20PM: As my sources predicted...
4:20PM: I just heard that
3:50PM UPDATE: I've just learned that my story today

She is a fantastic story-teller, but the greatest character Finke has created is herself: dogged scoop-monger with spies in every corner of every studio lot and agency suite. It's neat stuff, and puffing up one's persona puts her square in the tradition of columnists — well, good columnists — everywhere. But Deadline Hollywood Daily is a pretty small Internet property. Finke's 90,000 pageviews per day is less than a tenth of what Gawker (to pick a site at random) receives on a good day. So, when figures start getting thrown around about how she sold her blog for $15 million, it's easy to suspect that there's some self-mythmaking at work. (On that basis, Gawker.com alone would be worth $150 million. Hey, Nick! I want a raise!) To put that number in perspective, you would have a tough time finding anyone to pay $15 million for The Hollywood Reporter these days.

The deal was announced this morning via a press release that did not disclose the terms. But sometime this afternoon, PaidContent started the ball rolling with a report that Finke's deal was worth around $1 million, which even then was hedged. Citing just "sources," Rafat Ali wrote, "the sale amount was in 'seven figures' and there are some other incentive triggers built in. My bet is it is in very low seven figures." Though even that number was pretty jaw-dropping, it's pretty easy to imagine that there are incentives — Penske guarantees some salary to Finke and bonuses based on revenues or traffic — that could theoretically push the value of the deal up to seven figures.

But pretty soon, another zero was added. Jeff Bercovici got ahold of "a source with knowledge of the details" who put the pricetag at $10 million. He qualified that by noting that included "a long-term contract for Finke's services" — again suggesting that there is no way that Penske cut a big check to Finke today — but still struck a gobsmacked tone: "Who says you can't get rich blogging? Showbiz reporter extraordinaire Nikki Finke did — to the tune of eight figures."

Then Finke's arch-nemesis Sharon Waxman, who's got her own startup The Wrap to run, took up the story. Waxman said Finke "would not comment on the purchase price" and couldn't get ahold of Penske (a classic journo tell), but she got the scoop: Deadline Hollywood was sold for $14 million. And we weren't done yet. The Financial Times, without citing anyone, just stated flat-out that the deal is "worth about $15m."

Do I know that it's Finke spreading this absurd number around? No. She didn't reply to my email, which in my state of shock after seeing Waxman's story was, in its entirety "$14M? Really?" And when I told Waxman "I simply do not believe the $14M number" she stood by her report as the "real deal" and added a qualification that "the number is paid out in chunks, over years. And she has something like a 10-year contract." Her story, however, was a less explicit: "The individual knowledgeable about the purchase price said it would be paid out over several years. Normally such deals are tied to traffic or to revenue projections. Nonetheless, it is an exceedingly high price for a relatively small website."

And then she noted the most important part of why these ludicrous values are being tossed around the Internet: because it suits everyone's purposes to think that an industry gossip blog is worth major bucks. As Waxman noted: "It is a crazy-stupid number, in my opinion, but I'm very happy about it — I'm all for people paying stupid money for websites."

Finke no doubt received a nice little pay-day in her deal with Penske, but I would be willing to bet $15 million that whatever check he wrote today wasn't for anything close to $15 million.

Age: 30

Residence: The tony Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air.

Childhood: Born in New York, Penske went to high school in the Detroit suburbs, where he made the All-American Lacrosse team.

Family wealth: Father Roger Penske, a race car driver, owns Penske Corporation, which owns auto dealerships, leases trucks and makes various auto parts.

Love life: Has dated actresses Lara Flynn Boyle, Gina Gershon, Jordana Brewster (left) and Devon Aoki (with Penske, top of this post)

Personality: Says an associate, "He comes across as hugely elegant, massively sophisticated then as you get to know him, you see this slightly skeevy side, heavy drinker likes to party."

Business: Penske's Mail.com Media Corporation took a $35 million investment from Steve Rattner's Quadrangle Group in September; but we hear he's been having trouble finding properties to buy.

Sites: MMC runs Mail.com, an also-ran email portal whose heyday was in the 1990s; OnCars.com; our former Defamer colleagues' Movieline.com, celebrity news site HollywoodLife (he shut down HollywoodLife the magazine earlier this year) and now Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. It also provides private-label sites to large organizations like sports teams and universities.

Dragon fetish: Penske also runs Dragon Books, a vanity boutique book store he runs a little Bel Air shopping center. Its placeholder website has been under "redesign" for more than two years. Then there's the Luczo Dragon Racing team, which he co-owns with the chairman of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.

Flops: Started Firefly Mobile, selling cell phones for kids, in 2002; by 2006 the company needed a restart.

So how much did he pay for Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood?: Seven figures, supposedly. PaidContent's Rafat Ali reports that his company had been in talks with Finke at a lower number. We heard from Finke's editor at the LA Weekly, Jill Stewart, that Finke was talking as if she was looking at "so much money" while she pondered the deal. Seven-figures sounds mighty high for DHD, but if Penske was having trouble making deals, maybe he was willing to overpay.

Aspirations: Penske is said desperately seeking entree to the fashion world, part of a broader quest for elegance. The same associate:

He wants to be a modern day Si Newhouse, he wants to have a glamourous publishing company.

We hope, then, he reconsiders the name Mail.com Media Corp. as the name of his flagship.

The sale amount hasn't been disclosed. Penske, the son of car-racer-businessman Roger Penske, fancies himself an emerging new-media mogul—his company MMC recently revived Movieline.com and also owns Hollywoodlife.com and OnCars.com. With Finke added to his stable, he now has three partially overlapping entertainment-oriented sites as part of his "large and rapidly growing portal."

Penske was the co-founder of Firefly Mobile, which markets cell phones to kids. He also runs a rare and used bookstore, Dragon Books, and has followed in dad's footsteps with a racing team he co-owns with Seagate Technologies chairman Steve Luczo.

Finke told All Things D's Peter Kafka that she hadn't been looking to sell the site, which had been run by LA Weekly:

"I was not anxious to sell. I was not looking to sell," she says. "This was sort of a process where various people kind of wore me down…I'm very pleased with what happened. What wound up happening was nothing like the offers I was getting a year ago."

How demure! We wonder, though, why someone who wasn't looking to sell their web site would say she can't discuss Variety's attempt to purchase said web site "because of non-disclosure agreements I have with other interested parties," as she put it in March. And Jill Stewart, her editor at the LA Weekly, said Finke had been discussing the deal with Penske for at least two months. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but Stewart says Finke characterized it as "so much money" while she was deciding whether to make the jump.

In any case, more power to Finke for capitalizing on something she's worked extremely hard on over the years. And for keeping control of the site during her tenure at Village Voice Media's LA Weekly, which ought to be apoplectic over the fact that it let her develop a sale-able online property while she was in their employ without, it would seem, owning a piece of it.

Finke will have some new colleagues now in the MMC empire, including MovieLine's Stu VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan, neither of whom she seems to like very much. When the pair was at Gawker Media's Defamer, Finke took them to task for allegedly repeating bullshit rumors. When Gawker Media folded Defamer into Gawker and they decamped for MovieLine, she wrote, sympathetically: "Neither of those guys are journalists."

We wish Finke the best in this new phase of her career, and look forward to her expansion into her old stomping ground, New York. As for any potential complications that may arise from her new role as a general manager and editor in chief of a web site with staffers other than herself, we'll just quote Kafka, who approached the matter with just the right amount of delicacy:

That will be a tricky expansion to navigate: Recent history shows that blogs produced by dedicated/obsessive proprietors often stumble when they expand, in part because dedicated/obsessive proprietors may not be the best managers, and in part because it's tough to find people who want to, or are able to, work for dedicated/obsessive proprietors.

The Wall Street Journal and LA Times confirmed a story Nikki Finke had hints of earlier this week: that The Weinstein Company has brought on financial advising firm Miller Buckfire & Co to play with their cash and figure out how to cover the holes in their reportedly massive debt while covering costs to keep the shop open. Notes a Finke source:

"You don't hire Miller Buckfire to raise money. You hire Miller Buckfire because they are one of top restructuring experts in the country. They currently represent several top institutions going through bankruptcy."

And who are some of those institutions? Well, the recently tanked GM, for one. The cash-crunched Readers Digest, too. And Magna Entertainment, a bankrupt company who holds a bunch of horce-racing tracks and investments in the sport. Which, interestingly enough, was founded by an auto-parts guy. Sure, the company's flack issued some ridiculous denial about "always working with financial institutions," but this one's a no-brainer: they're hurting.

Finke notes that she's also since heard that Harvey - probably with the intention of increasing commercial potential - managed to pressure Quentin Tarantino into cutting down his upcoming WWII Nazi-killing epic, Inglorious Basterds, down from its current three-hour run time. Weinstein's always been pretty hands off with Tarantino, so this comes as a slight surprise, but not really, because the film received a pretty mixed reception at Cannes: not what they wanted or needed.

At least they're still hiring assistants. A recent job posting from the once coveted, semi-secretive (now: ubiquitous) UTA job list notes that someone over there - maybe the Harv, by the job description - needs a new minion to harass:

Seeking executive assistant in NYC. Ideal candidate must have excellent communication skills, and superb gate-keeping skills. Must be available on nights, weekends, expect to spend long hours in the office, be able to travel on a moments notice and stay away for uncertain amounts of time. Must have expansive knowledge of film, the industry and minimum 2-3 years experience assisting another top-level executive. Send cover letter, resume, and list of references to: hrjobs@weinsteinco.com

"Stay away for uncertain amounts of time," eh? Sound ominous. The Harv's supposedly curbed his eating and smoking problems, but a new "fuckface" to digest and regurgitate in a period of unmitigated rage is probably an well-portioned expense the company will - thankfully, but maybe fatefully - never write off.

The Weinstein Company To Restructure [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Weinstein Co. Hires Firm to Explore Restructuring [Wall Street Journal]
Weinstein Co. hires consulting firm to restructure its debt and raise funds [LA Times]