Finke posted embedded video of a small portion of Winfrey's remarks at 9:45 a.m. California time, roughly an hour and forty-five minutes after Winfrey announced on her show that she was calling it quits after next season. She also posted a much fuller transcript of Winfrey's speech. Winfrey's show doesn't air until 3 p.m. in Los Angeles, so where did she get it?

From the Chicago Tribune, which posted the transcript at 10:19 a.m. Central time, or just 20 minutes after Winfrey's announcement. How do we know? Because, a tipster points out, the transcript Finke posted features the same bracketed commentary—"[Her voice grows thick with emotion]"—and typographical irregularities, like double quotes within double quotes. Finke didn't cite the Tribune or—more important—link back to the paper's Watcher blog, which actually did the transcribing. She just copied and pasted without attribution.

Of course, Winfrey's words aren't proprietary to the Tribune. She said them on television. But someone actually did sit down and replayed the speech over and over while actually typing out what Winfrey said. A link wouldn't kill you, Nikki.

Saturday Update: Finke has emailed to explain that she had no idea where the transcript came from before she posted it on her blog, which she says is a somewhat regular occurence. And somewhat bizarrely she accused the Tribune's Watcher blog of lifting it from some other source. She has still not given The Watcher a credit or link. Here is her email:

I actually wound up receiving it several times in my email from a bunch of different emailers. (Again, how do we know it was ONLY the Tribune's?) I did my best to authenticate it. Yes, every so often I get something from another publication sent to me without any labeling. And when I put it up, the writer or company tells me and I credit them unless they want me to take it down. Happens most often with photos.
But I actually credit a LOT (whereas Variety and the LA Times rarely do...)
This was really a cheap shot by John.

• 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

• Despite threats of a hipster/anti-hipster backlash, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are won the weekend box office, taking in 32.5 million dollars. Attendance patterns suggest that, however, that contrary to expectations, the drama appealed to grown-up audiences much more than kids; only 27 percent of attendees were families. Law Abiding Citizen took second place with a very respectable 21.3 million, and the expanding Paranormal Activity grabbed the #3 slot, taking in $20 million on a mere 760 screens, a stat which Box Office Mojo says earns it the distinction of being "the fourth highest-grossing weekend for a movie playing at under 1,000 sites." [Box Office Mojo, Variety]

• Dan, We Hardly Knew Ye. MPAA Chairman Dan Glickman announced he will step down from his post when his contract ends in September of last year, ending the tradition of MPAA Chief serving forever established by his predecessor Jack Valenti. [Variety]

• TV mega-producers apparently don't take "cancelled" for an answer. John Wells told members of his cast that he is searching for a new home for Southland, the cop show on which NBC recently pulled the plug. [Hollywood Reporter]

• SAG has appointed David White its new chief negotiator. Nikki Finke Toldja you! Do not pretend that you knew David White was going to be SAG's new chief negotiator before you heard it from Nikki. You knew nothing about David White. She invented the idea of reporting on David White being SAG's chief negotiator. You never even thought to imagine such a world could exist until you heard it from her. She Toldja you and you're gonna stay toldja'd this time Hollywood if it kills you. [Deadline]

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.

But other than that, Tad Friend's long-awaited profile of Nikki Finke, the proprietress of Deadline Hollywood, sadly missed the mark. We feel bad for Friend, because after having endured the exhausting emotional odyssey that is writing about Nikki Finke, whose limitless capacity for outrage and rhetorical combat are well-known to anyone who's been saddled with the task of profiling her (as are her perverse charm and cultivated vulnerability), he came up with what Finke accurately described as a "clip-job." After all the endless conversations and quarrelsome e-mails—some cc'd to attorneys—from Finke to Friend and his boss, New Yorker editor David Remnick, we'd hoped Friend would have come up with something meatier.

The story of Nikki Finke, it seems to us, is summed up in this paragraph from Friend's profile:

She has noticed a recent reduction in mendacity, perhaps because of her zero-tolerance policy: "I tell them, ‘If you care so little about what my site has to say, then you won't care what I have to say about this.' You call it bullying, I call it promising." Seeking coöperation, Finke has called potential sources "morons," banged the phone down, or e-mailed them to say, "I'll have to publicly humiliate you" or "WHO IS IN CHARGE OF THIS STUFF? Who's in charge? Because I'm about to explode." Asked about the name-calling, Finke says, "And how do you know they weren't acting like morons?" When I mentioned a few other examples, Finke responded, "Oh, boohoo! They're calling that bullying? What, it's a playground, where I'm taking away their milk and cookies?"

Well, what about those other examples, then? What, precisely, does Finke mean when she threatens to "say something" about "this"? The reason Sweet Smell of Success was a good movie was that there were knives, and people got stabbed with them. There's much wringing of hands about Finke's tactics in Friend's tale, but he doesn't really get the goods on the actual tactics themselves. Lets hear about those "promises." Let's hear about what stories Finke has gotten by threatening to "publicly humiliate" sources that refused to cooperate (or "coöperate," in the New Yorker's paleo-Germanic rendering of the English language.)

If Nikki Finke is running around Hollywood blackmailing people for information, then let's have it. The anecdotes that Friend brings to the table about how Finke got certain stories are interesting, but say more about Finke's usefulness to the moguls who are capable of positioning her "eight to twelve per cent above the facts, a little window dressing of protection, of delay, of shading, or of burying something" than her own little tricks for convincing people to say what she would like them to say.

We don't know for sure what those tricks are, or if Finke does in fact use them. But we know that there are things about her—or allegations about her—that she successfully kept out of the story, because she told us so: "I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick, whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process." It's of course cosmically and beautifully appropriate that Finke triumphantly boasts about successfully deploying the sort of smokescreen that she bemoans as wheedling spin when her subjects try it on her. It's also cosmically and beautifully appropriate that Finke writes that the way to school the New Yorker is to "act like a cunt and treat Remnick like a putz and don't give a fuck" just a few characters after detailing the "months and weeks and hours" of her time she spent on participating in the story and attempting to control its outcome. Trust us: Nikki Finke gives a fuck.

The most striking line in the story, from our perspective, was this one: "One top studio executive says, 'Nikki's blog you have to check, and the others you have to delete from your in-box.'" A top studio executive thinks he has blogs in his in-box? These people are idiots, and they deserve—the truly powerful ones, at least—the worst Nikki Finke has to offer them.

"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.

To be clear, we don't know if the two deals are connected, and certainly don't have any info to suggest there was anything untoward about them. But given Rattner's history of greasing deals—recall that he bought Chooch, a low-budget film by the brother of the chief investment officer of New York state's pension fund, shortly after the fund invested $100 million in Rattner's Quadrangle Group—we thought we'd throw it out there.

Here's what we know:

In September 2008, Quadrangle Capital Partners—part of Quadrangle Group—invested $35 million in Mail.com, Jay Penske's would-be online empire. The money was for "selective acquisitions and new management hires," which means hiring Nikki Finke and Bonnie Fuller. Two of Quadrangle's partners got seats on Mail.com's board. Mail.com had little to recommend it at the time as a hot pick for internet supremacy, and the investment came shortly before Quadrangle would wind down its media-focused hedge fund amid 25% losses, but who knows? Maybe it'll turn out to be a rocket.

Four months later, in January, Rattner's name started getting bandied about as Obama's pick for "car czar," and six weeks after that Rattner left Quadrangle to join the Treasury Department with the goal of saving the auto industry.

One way to do that is to keep Saturn, with its 13,000 employees, alive. General Motors made clear that it couldn't keep Saturn going, so it went on the block. And in June, none other than Roger Penske, the billionaire car mogul who happens to be Jay's father—and perhaps the provider of seed capital to Mail.com?—emerged as a buyer. The terms of the deal haven't been disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal says Saturn's service and parts operation alone has been valued at $100 million.

And then last month, Rattner stepped down amid chatter that Quadrangle, and perhaps Rattner himself, was getting drawn further into the pay-to-play pension scandal that gave us Chooch.

Here's what we don't know:

Was Penske doing Rattner a favor in swooping in as Saturn's savior, or did Rattner hand it to Penske on a platter? Without knowing the terms of the deal, it's impossible to know. But the news of the deal sure made Rattner look like a hyper-competent technocrat calmly steering an industry in crisis. If Saturn had simply been liquidated, it would have been seen as a disastrous signal. On the other hand, according to the New York Times, the brand had attracted "16 potential bidders," so maybe Penske was the one looking for an edge, and maybe Rattner helped him find it. Or maybe Penske was the most rational buyer for Saturn, and it's a coincidence that the guy who was essentially running GM when it was sold happened to own a piece of Penske's son's business.

Given the timeline, it's virtually impossible that the Mail.com deal itself was some kind of sweetener—coming as it did in September, Rattner would have to have had the foresight to know that Congress would bail out the auto industry, and that Obama would win, and that Obama would hire a car czar, and that Rattner himself could land the gig, and that Saturn would need to be off-loaded from G.M. Only under those circumstances would a relationship with Penske's son be something worth having in your back pocket, and Rattner would be a much richer man if he had that sort of vision. (Cf. Maxim.)

So is there any more connective tissue out there that might make render the above datapoints more sensible? Let us know.

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!

Laurel Touby became a middle class millionaire after selling Mediabistro for $23 million two years ago today; now, she's officially free of the corporate yoke. She's a consultant (for Mediabistro). Despite everything we've ever said, Laurel Touby is clearly smarter than all of us.

A Boston Globe update! Haven't had one of those in a while. Newsroom union members are voting on their new package of cutbacks on Monday, after rejecting it last time, then deciding that wasn't so great after all. The alternative is the current 23% pay cut. But the outcome of the vote still seems unpredictable. Oh, Boston Globe. We don't envy you.

David Carr's profile of crazy-but-connected Hollywood blog supremo Nikki Finke makes the front page of the New York Times today, but not even the paper of record can turn up a new photo of Nikki. "Why is there only one Nikki Finke photo?" is Hollywood's greatest mystery.

Oh look some sort of cable news 'ad war' thing: CNN is running ads that say it's ""No. 1, with more viewers than Fox and MSNBC."

This came as a news flash to Fox and MSNBC, considering that both top CNN in the ratings. During the second quarter, Fox News — which has been handily beating CNN since January 2002 — more than doubled CNN's audience in prime time and for the entire day. Even MSNBC, a onetime also-ran in the cable news wars, topped CNN in weekday prime-time ratings for the first time in the second quarter.

At issue is the metric that CNN is using in the advertisement to back its claim. The cable news channel is attributing its No. 1 status to a cumulative number that reflects anyone who watched CNN for six minutes in a given month, a tidbit it chose not to disclose in the ad.

Why not just say you are less fucking stupid than the competition, CNN?