Nikki Finke: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: I thought I’d seen it all in trade journalism, but the piranha-like frenzy on Kathleen Kennedy and the successor speculation that followed Matt Belloni’s Puck report that Disney was putting her out to pasture is a new one on me. Belloni for years has been beating on Kennedy like she owes him money, and this week he reported Kennedy was retiring. I recall he essentially did the same thing more than a year ago, and yet here she still is, producing The Mandalorian movie and prepping the Shawn Levy-directed film that Ryan Gosling is circling, as well as numerous other film and streaming projects with A-list participants.

The last time WGA picket lines formed in 2007, writers didn’t have an efficient way to communicate with fellow strikers about group meet-ups, illegal productions, and all those clever placards. The only place they could turn to for regular information was this very space, in which the late Nikki Finke would post regular missives about strike action, the broken-off negotiations and the financial impact of the 100-day work stoppage.

. The site was dedicated to Finke’s firsthand accounts of how she saw the entertainment business.  Deadline was founded in 2006, and later purchased by Penske in 2009.

Deadline Nikki Finke has died at age 68.According to her family, Finke died in Boca Raton, Fla. on Sunday morning after a prolonged illness, as confirmed by Deadline.Finke grew up in Sands Point on Long Island before graduating from Wellesley College.

As Hurricane Ian roared through Florida last week, I was thinking of Nikki Finke, who had moved to the state four years ago but now was living under hospice care in Boca Raton, the result of a long and involved illness that finally took her life in the early hours of Sunday at the age of 68.

Nikki Finke, the veteran entertainment journalist who founded Deadline in 2006 and helped grow it into a major player among Hollywood trades, died Sunday morning in Boca Raton, FL after a prolonged illness. She was 68.

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer Nikki Finke, a tenacious journalist who revolutionized entertainment reporting with what became the Hollywood trade website Deadline, died Sunday morning in Boca Raton, Flor. after a prolonged illness. She was 68. After spending the beginning of her career reporting on everything from Moscow (for the Associated Press) to Washington, D.C. (for Newsweek), in 2002, Finke started a column for L.A. Weekly called Deadline Hollywood, which she took online in March 2006 as Deadline Hollywood Daily in an effort to better cover up-to-the-minute news. Rather than focus on celebrity or content, Finke placed a singularly unforgiving spotlight on the studio executives and high-powered agents who make the industry run. She was unafraid to call out what she believed to be ill-conceived or substandard decision-making in the bluntest possible terms, and her take-no-prisoners approach made her site a must-read in a media ecosystem Finke saw as excessively fawning and credulous.