By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive →
On the Thanksgiving Day afternoon of November 24, 2011, Nikki Finke teased “two important staff additions” at Deadline. Kinsey Lowe and Nancy Tartaglione — both from the HollywoodWiretap.com newsletter operation — were the named hires. The Tartaglione part of the announcement turned out to be one of the most durable trade-press hires of the decade.
Then
The Thanksgiving timing was a Finke pattern — using holiday slow news cycles to land Deadline staff announcements when the trade-press attention was elsewhere. Kinsey Lowe came in as Deadline’s nighttime managing editor. Nancy Tartaglione came in as international editor — the post that had been open since Tim Adler’s May 2011 exit from Deadline London. The original FishbowlLA framing flagged the strategic pattern: Deadline was systematically poaching senior editorial talent from competitor publications.
Now
Nancy Tartaglione is now Co-Editor-in-Chief, International at Deadline — a fifteen-year run in increasingly senior roles at the publication. Her international coverage has been one of Deadline’s structural competitive advantages, particularly across the streaming-era expansion when Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, and the broader global content-rights market made international entertainment-business reporting a core trade-press category. The 2011 Thanksgiving Day hire was one of the most strategically valuable single moves PMC made during the Finke era.
Kinsey Lowe continued at Deadline for years after the 2011 hire. HollywoodWiretap as a property eventually wound down. Nikki Finke left Deadline in November 2013, almost exactly two years after the Thanksgiving 2011 hires.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.