In May 2011 Tim Adler stepped down as editor of Deadline London. Multiple anonymous sources told FishbowlLA that Adler had quit because he got tired of Nikki Finke calling him 20 times a day. Finke’s version was that Adler was leaving to finish a book and would continue contributing freelance.
Then
Adler had taken the editor post at Deadline London in January 2010 and ran the U.K. operation for about 16 months. He was an accomplished entertainment-business journalist with credentials from before Deadline — a published author on the Hollywood-Mafia history beat and on independent film. The original FishbowlLA framing was that the published reason for departure (Finke’s pace, allegedly) sounded less plausible than something more complicated; a phone-call barrage by itself rarely makes a working editor quit, even if it can wear one down.
Finke told FishbowlLA on the record: “Tim is continuing to write for Deadline London while finishing a book and planning to work on other book projects. Meanwhile, I’m about to start looking for an international editor. I am proud of the fact that Deadline continues to have a remarkably stable work force of staff and freelancers.” Adler did not respond to FBLA’s request for comment, though Pandora Young got a photo for the post.
Now
Tim Adler did continue his book-writing work after leaving the Deadline London editor role. His subsequent books and continued contributions to entertainment-business writing in the U.K. press have kept him active across the 2010s and into the 2020s, including coverage of independent film and the U.K. production industry for outlets including Forbes, the Daily Beast, and various trade publications.
The Deadline London operation continued under subsequent international editors, including Nancy Tartaglione, who has been a long-tenured presence in the role and is now Co-Editor-in-Chief, International at Deadline. The “remarkably stable work force” Finke described in 2011 didn’t quite hold across her own subsequent departure from Deadline in 2013, but the international desk specifically did stabilize and became a substantial part of Deadline’s competitive position against THR and Variety internationally — a position that matters more in the streaming era than it did when Adler was running the London office.
Nikki Finke died in October 2023. The phone-volume reporting style she ran with from 2010 to 2013, which the original Adler-departure rumor was nodding to, is now part of the documented historical record of how Deadline’s early scoop culture actually operated.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: May 2011 snapshot