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 Media’s lawyers, on her boss Jay Penske’s say-so, on Deadline.com.
Then
The September 9, 2011 post that triggered the FishbowlLA write-up appeared on Deadline under the headline “The Hollywood Reporter vs. the Truth.” It was Finke’s reply to a letter from Prometheus Global Media’s outside counsel — Prometheus being THR’s parent company at the time — accusing her of “conduct extra-unbecoming,” in the formal lawyer phrasing that always sounds Edwardian when applied to a digital trade publication.
The email began and ended with an expletive. In between, Finke alleged that four different Prometheus-THR executives had slandered her, compared the two trades to “the Economist and the National Enquirer” in disfavor of THR, and asserted — without naming names — that THR staffers were calling Deadline asking for jobs because they were worried about THR’s future, while THR was simultaneously offering “blank checks” to lure contracted Deadline staffers across the line.
The post hit, the Hollywood Reporter responded by publishing the full text of the Prometheus lawyers’ letter on THR-Esq and labeling Finke’s account a “false item,” and Richard Horgan’s coverage captured what everyone in the trades was actually talking about that week: a reader had asked Finke if she would deliver THR’s eulogy. The mood of the trade rivalry by the end of 2011 was that pointed.
The legal substance was real. PMC had been preparing claims of copyright infringement against THR for months — Finke had been “working on a big THR exposé piece” in parallel, per the original FBLA reporting — and the lawsuit landed five days later.
Now
The 2011 PMC-Prometheus lawsuit was the rivalry’s high-water mark. The two trades remained competitors for the rest of the decade, and then in 2020 they stopped being competitors at all: PMC closed its acquisition of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard from Eldridge in May of that year. THR is now a PMC title, in the same office bracket as Variety and Deadline. The eulogy reader had the trajectory roughly right, just not about which entity it was for — Prometheus Global Media as a corporate entity wound down and its core titles ended up at PMC.
Nikki Finke left Deadline in 2013 after years of contractual friction with Penske, ran her own short-lived NikkiFinke.com newsletter, and died in October 2023 of complications related to cancer. Her obituaries across the entertainment press uniformly acknowledged that even by the standards of Hollywood reporting, the rivalry she ran with THR in the 2010-2012 window was a one-of-one event — the kind of bare-knuckle public-correspondence trade journalism that today’s much-more-corporate trade landscape doesn’t produce anymore, partly by temperament and partly because everyone now answers to the same CFO.
Jay Penske continues to run PMC, which expanded through the rest of the decade to include Rolling Stone, Vibe, IndieWire, SportTechie, Dick Clark Productions, and a significant minority interest from the Saudi PIF. The man who urged Finke to post the email is now publisher of the publication that letter was attacking.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: September 2011 snapshot