By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Kate Coe on FishbowlLA, July 2007
In mid-July 2007, FishbowlLA noticed something curious: a Jacob Bernstein profile of Nikki Finke in Women’s Wear Daily was suddenly being discussed across multiple LA-media blogs the same weekend. FBLA had received an email from a “high-powered PR type” alerting it to the piece; Luke Ford and LA Observed had simultaneously posted about it.
Then
Jacob Bernstein — the journalist and son of Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron — had written a profile of Nikki Finke for WWD that ran in the July 6, 2007 print edition. Finke was, in 2007, at a substantial peak of her industry influence.
The FBLA observation the original piece foregrounded was the publicity mechanics. The Bernstein profile had been hidden behind WWD’s subscription wall, yet within the same weekend FBLA had been emailed about it by a PR person, and both Luke Ford’s blog and Kevin Roderick’s LA Observed had run posts about it.
The synchronized pickup was, in Kate Coe’s framing, “surely not a coincidence” — a documented example of how the LA-media-blog ecosystem of 2007 could be substantially steered by interested publicity actors.
Now
Jacob Bernstein has continued in journalism across the years since 2007, including a substantial tenure at The New York Times’s Styles section.
Nikki Finke’s trajectory took her away from Deadline in 2013; she launched the fiction-focused Hollywood Dementia venture and died in October 2022 at 68.
The LA-media-blog ecosystem that the 2007 piece documented has substantially contracted. The broader publicity-mechanics observation the piece made has, if anything, become substantially more relevant in the social-media era.
The 2007 piece reads now as a small documented moment of media-criticism self-awareness — the LA-media-blog ecosystem catching itself being steered, and noting it.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.