By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, March 2013
In late March 2013, FishbowlLA tracked a substantial entertainment-news scoop: Deadline.com’s Nellie Andreeva — the site’s TV editor — had been first to report that Barbara Walters was planning to retire.
Then
Barbara Walters was, by 2013, one of the most-significant figures in the history of American television news — a career spanning the Today show, the ABC Evening News, her decades of celebrity-and-newsmaker interview specials, and her creation of The View.
Nellie Andreeva getting the scoop for Deadline was a marker of the site’s reach — Deadline, under Nikki Finke’s editorship, had built a substantial scoop-cadence operation.
Now
Barbara Walters formally retired from regular television appearances in 2014 and died in December 2022 at 93.
Nellie Andreeva has continued at Deadline.com — she is now Co-Editor-in-Chief of the site (with Mike Fleming), having risen through the TV-editor role the 2013 piece described.
The 2013 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the Deadline scoop operation working at strength.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.