CAUSTIC HOLLYWOOD CHRONICLER, FOUNDER OF WEBSITE DEADLINE

•1953-2022

Nikki Finke, the acerbic, widely read entertainment reporter and blogger who broke Hollywood news, antagonized moguls and in 2006 founded the website Deadline Hollywood Daily, now known simply as Deadline, died Oct. 9 in Boca Raton, Fla. She was 68.

Madelyn Hammond, a spokeswoman for her family, announced her death, saying only that it resulted from a long illness.

After working for a time as a staff assistant in the Washington office of Rep. Ed Koch, the New York Democrat who would later become mayor of New York City, Finke joined The Associated Press as a reporter in 1975. By the early 1980s she had moved to The Dallas Morning News, and then joined Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and other outlets before starting a column called Deadline Hollywood in LA Weekly in 2002.

There, and on the Deadline website, she mixed reportage and gossip in a lively style that took no prisoners, whether scooping the world on who would host the Oscars, detailing the dealings among stars and agents or scrutinizing the dealmaking of top executives.

“Ms. Finke is the queen of the ritual sacrifice,” David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2013, “having roasted industry leaders like Marc Shmuger of Universal and Ben Silverman of NBC until they caught fire and ended up out of their jobs.”

That was fine by her. “If there's an open wound, I'm going to pour salt in it,” she told Jon Friedman of Marketwatch in 2006 for an article that carried the headline “In-your-face Finke Keeps Hollywood Honest.”

Finke was the antithesis of entertainment journalists who show up at every redcarpet event and jostle for sound-bite quotes. She was often described as reclusive, so much so that in 2009 the website Gawker offered $1,000 for a recent photograph of her.

Nikki Jean Finke was born on Dec. 16, 1953, in Manhattan to Robert and Doris Finke.

Growing up in Sands Point, on the North Shore of Long Island, she “ran in an Upper East Side social stratum,” as she put it in a 2005 essay in the Times.

Starting Deadline was something of a leap of faith, coming at a time when the business model for independent online publishing ventures was unclear.

But the site succeeded, and in 2009 she sold it to the Jay Penske company, now known as Penske Media Corp.

She remained as editorin-chief but clashed frequently with Penske, and in 2013 they parted ways.

A legal clash with Penske resulted in an agreement that effectively barred her from practicing entertainment journalism.