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 the paper less often — had a piece asking whether Finke had gone soft since Deadline’s purchase by Jay Penske’s Mail.com Media Corporation.
Finke dismissed the ‘soft’ framing but allowed that, with greater access to Hollywood executives, her writing might be ‘a little more nuanced.’ Goldstein had analyzed a month of her posts and found a marked drop in vitriol.
FishbowlLA quoted a high-level executive with the sharpest line in the piece: ‘This is about what happens when the renegade outsider becomes an institution.’ Deadline’s original appeal, the executive said, had been watching someone take down rivals; now it was a ticker tape, read without the old mixture of incredulousness and fear.
Now
The ‘renegade becomes an institution’ framing turned out to be the whole story in miniature. Deadline did become an institution — a core property of Penske Media, integrated alongside Variety as the company consolidated the trades.
Finke herself did not stay to see it. She left the site she founded in 2013 after a dispute with Penske over editorial control, and she died in 2014. The independent, adversarial Deadline of the executive’s description belonged to a specific, short-lived era.
Patrick Goldstein, who wrote the column, retired from the Los Angeles Times in 2012. The piece reads now as an early, accurate obituary for a moment in media — the brief window when a single combative blogger could make Hollywood genuinely afraid.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.