In Contention

Tag: Nikki Finke

  • Finke taps Hammond for Oscar coverage

    UPDATE (9:37am): Here is the officail release at Deadlin.

    EARLIER: Notorious Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke has scooped up longtime Oscarologist Pete Hammond for awards reporting duties at Deadline.com for the upcoming Oscar season.

    Hammond — who as of late has been writing a seasonal column for the LA Times — knows his stuff, has plenty of resources at his disposal and offers a unique insider’s point of view, fitting right into Finke’s industry-focused wheelhouse.  I imagine the work will be very similar to the man-about-town stuff we’ve been reading at The Envelope for the last few years.

    Meanwhile, I’m told a deal has been struck whereby all of Hammond’s material that runs at Deadline will also run at Movieline.com, so make that two outlets getting into the Oscar game in a big way this year.  The reason, if one couldn’t guess, is simple: dollars and cents.

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  • 7/17 Web Round-up

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt• Judd Apatow’s risky departure from formula with “Funny People.” [Wall Street Journal]

    • Denise Martin talks to “(500) Days of Summer” star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [Los Angeles Times]

    • PODCAST: Yours truly talks the Oscar’s move to 10, the “Let the Right One In” remake and more with John Campea et al. [The Movie Blog]

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  • Important

    Since it’s a level-headed assessment of another journalist’s work and not the bitching and shouting that has come to color similar exchanges, I think it is important to pass along two links: Bill Wyman calls foul on Nikki Finke’s re-editing of a story that got the facts wrong, and Patrick Goldstein links to same, giving more from his side of the story and giving Finke the chance to comment.

  • Filmmaker publicly sticks it to Nikki Finke…finally

    Rod LurieOkay, it should be noted at the top that director Rod Lurie’s op-ed against the more-in-the-news-than-ever Nikki Finke is running on Sharon Waxman’s website, The Wrap, and that Waxman and Finke have been at each other’s throats, it seems, for a while now.  The dust on that journalist cat fight was kicked up once again last week, following a media back-and-forth that I briefly recounted here.

    What Lurie’s piece does signify, however, is one of if not the first public shot across Finke’s bow from someone on the other side of the line, a working filmmaker in the business, albeit a former journalist who recognizes the danger of Finke and her deplorable practices.  I really hope there will be more.

    Lurie starts out thusly:

    Right now there seems to be a new kind of insidious power in journalism: the independent reporter/blogger. In many cases, these are people who purport to run news items, “scoops,” as they call them, in a shoot-first-and-do-the-interview-later kind of way.

    Alright.  Nothing new, nothing old.  But then it gets a little personal for him:

    The wannabe Murrows have become the de facto McCarthys — carelessly lobbing accusations and innuendoes against unsuspecting victims.

    This all really struck me the other day when a friend alerted me to the fact that Nikki Finke — who is one of the most-read bloggers in our entertainment community — had taken a shot at me in her column.

    “Endeavor just signed its 3rd WMA client this month — director Rod Lurie. I can’t fathom why any agency would be interested in this nasty piece of work who keeps hopscotching reps.”

    Okay, the “nasty” part is her opinion and God bless. However, before the day this was posted, I think I had spoken to Ms. Finke once in my life on the phone. It was a short and cordial conversation as I recall.

    Lurie then goes on to convey his side of things on the Endeavor/William Morris matter, then present another case of Finke’s sloppy reporting when it came to a story involving his work on television’s “Commander in Chief.”  He also digs in with the expected thoughts (thoughts not simplified in print often enough, to be honest) that Finke is “emblematic of a true danger that now exists in journalism: the unchecked reporter.”

    Like I said, I hope others in the industry take Lurie’s lead and speak out on this.  Right now it’s journalist versus journalist for the most part in a battle that can’t help but seem competitive more so than righteous.

  • Blah, blah, blah

    UPDATE: I’ve been on a plane and then in a bed for the last however many hours, so I’ve come to the table late on this.  But Finke has responded in full and dropped the bomb that Variety wanted to buy Deadline Hollywood Daily, takes some cheap shots at Anne Thompson, etc.  No more posts on this from my end because it’s all so…pathetic.

    EARLIER: This is going to be going on for a while, but you might as well stay up to date.

    After the trinity attack on blogdom (and Nikki Finke specifically), David Poland finds irony in Variety’s anemic ad revenue while Kim Masters can’t contain the estrogen (nor pass up the chance to promote one of her old books) in a recent Daily Beast article.  Poland then lands this money shot on Masters today:

    Masters , like Finke before her blog, is without full employment as a journalist and is writing this piece as a freelancer for another blog that aspires to trafficking in gossip as “breaking news.” Slamming Variety instead of reporting on whether the accusations are factual fits the profile of the person she is defending.

    Patrick Goldstein, by the way, has responded to the weekend’s pieces at The Big Picture.  Like I said, it’s going to get ugly.  Let’s hope we can make it about the movies again real soon.

  • Waiting on the blog-o-rage

    BloggingI’ve been kinda, sorta keeping up with some Twittered reactions to the recent blogger smack downs by Cynthia Littleton, Michael Fleming and editor-in-chief Peter Bart, but curiously, no reaction from the peanut gallery…yet.  It’s a lazy Sunday, after all.

    In a nutshell, it seems with this trinity Variety has called for us all to get along.  The usual names are brought up in connection to incessant, unbearable cyber-squabbling: Jeff Wells, David Poland, Nikki Finke, Patrick Goldstein.  Sharon Waxman’s name is tossed into the hat as well, but why can’t anyone just say it?  Finke and the traffic she has generated as a result of questionable (and certainly grating) practices has put the fear into industry professionals and competetive journalists.  She is the 21st Century bad apple and she’s spoiling the bunch.

    Sadly, some smart people seem to consistently be taking her lead when it comes to sand box tactics.  If smart, longtime journalists like Goldstein and Waxman are being pulled down to her level, what can we expect of other naturally competitive and snarky writers?

    I’m in no position to stand on a soap box so I won’t.  I’ve been in my fair share of online spats and felt stupid afterwards.  Usually my bone of contention will stem from a beef on a writer’s representation of a film, hardly a fight for it’s own sake or a competitive drive to amp up the hits.  But I do hate what Finke is and has been doing and it should be brought up in a certain light.

    All of that said, I think Variety is putting itself in a precarious position by unleashing three editorials on this issue in the same day, one of them from an old media type who is widely (and wrongly) known as “hating” bloggers.  So far, no reaction, but I expect it to come soon.  And I don’t think it’ll be pretty.

    (A few greatest hits from the three pieces after the jump.  And click the pic for a larger version, by the way.)

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