By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, June 2011
In mid-June 2011, FishbowlLA tracked a public clash between Movie City News writer David Poland and Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke. Finke had published a lengthy post slamming outgoing media executive Lynne Segall, accusing her of an assortment of unethical behavior — including the serious charge that Segall had attempted to blur the line between advertising and editorial.
Then
The June 2011 episode was one installment in the long-running David Poland-vs-Nikki Finke trade-press antagonism. Poland — the longtime Movie City News and The Hot Button columnist — had been one of Finke’s most persistent public critics across the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Lynne Segall was a senior media-sales-and-business executive whose career had spanned multiple major entertainment-trade and media operations. The substantive media-criticism point was that Finke’s posts attacking industry figures needed to be weighed against her own documented accuracy record.
Now
The David Poland-vs-Nikki Finke antagonism continued until Finke’s 2013 departure from Deadline. Finke died in October 2022 at 68.
David Poland has continued at Movie City News and across multiple subsequent entertainment-press platforms.
Lynne Segall’s career continued in senior media-business roles, including a substantial subsequent tenure as a senior executive at The Hollywood Reporter.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the trade-press internal-antagonism culture of the Finke era.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.