Latest posts
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Has Nikki Finke gone soft? Patrick Goldstein asks
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011 In May 2011 FishbowlLA flagged a Patrick Goldstein column asking whether Deadline’s Nikki Finke had lost her edge after being acquired. Then The LA Times’s Patrick Goldstein — by then sharing his beat with colleague James Rainey and writing for…
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THR pulls Joseph Kapsch from Zap2it — the 2011 hire and the open-web era
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In May 2011 The Hollywood Reporter announced it had hired Joseph Kapsch — the editorial director at Tribune-owned Zap2it.com — as its new website editor, replacing Bryan Alexander, who had decamped for USA Today. The hire was a clean signal of…
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Jerry Bruckheimer’s 2011 THR Facebook takeover — when guest-editing a Facebook page was a thing
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In mid-May 2011 The Hollywood Reporter handed its Facebook fan page over to Jerry Bruckheimer for a day — timed to coincide with the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The publication’s first guest editor was the man…
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The LA Business Journal does the math on Janice Min’s glossy Hollywood Reporter
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011 A year into Janice Min’s reinvention of The Hollywood Reporter as a glossy weekly, the LA Business Journal ran the numbers — and FishbowlLA passed along the ones that mattered. Then The piece was written by Greg Hernandez, a former…
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The Hollywood Reporter’s owner denies a New York Post sale story
By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011 In March 2011 The Hollywood Reporter’s parent company moved to quash a story that one of its backers wanted out — a denial that the following years would complicate. Then A New York Post story by Claire Atkinson reported that,…
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Finke vs THR over a Summit cover — what the 2011 access trade looked like
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In March 2011, Nikki Finke published a Deadline.com item alleging that The Hollywood Reporter had pulled material from an Alex Ben Block business story about Summit Entertainment in exchange for a Jodie Foster interview tied to The Beaver. The accusation was…
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Roger Friedman’s 2011 Showbiz 411 ‘thievery’ trifecta — Deadline, People, and TVLine
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In mid-January 2011, New York-based showbiz columnist Roger Friedman did something he was already known for at his Showbiz 411 site: name and shame three competitors who he said had picked up his scoops without proper attribution. The “thievery trifecta” called…
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Roger Friedman points the thievery finger at Deadline
By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011 Aggregation without credit was a running sore in early-2010s online journalism. In January 2011 FishbowlLA caught columnist Roger Friedman naming names. Then Roger Friedman, the New York-based showbiz columnist behind Showbiz 411, had never been shy about calling out outlets…
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When Nikki Finke replied to THR’s lawyers — and the trade war went legal
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In the fall of 2011 the Variety / Deadline / Hollywood Reporter rivalry stopped being a column-mention skirmish and became a federal lawsuit. The opening salvo of the public phase was Nikki Finke posting her unredacted email response to Prometheus Global…
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When Deadline launched a Facebook game with Paramount — a 2011 cross-promo curio
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2011) · Wayback archive → In July 2011 Deadline.com partnered with Paramount Digital Entertainment and Liquid Entertainment to launch a Facebook game letting players experience the equivalent of running a Hollywood studio. Then The pitch was a Facebook-platform game built around the studio-mogul fantasy genre —…