In July 2012, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student and Cultural Learnings/A.V. Club TV critic Myles McNutt published an Antenna piece arguing that Deadline.com’s AwardsLine supplement and Entertainment Weekly’s For-Your-Consideration coverage had functionally become extensions of studio campaign promotion rather than independent journalism. FishbowlLA wondered, gently, whether Nikki Finke would be calling him.
Then
McNutt’s piece walked through the structural problem with the Emmy For-Your-Consideration (FYC) campaign cycle as it had evolved by 2012. Studios bought ad space across Deadline’s AwardsLine supplement and EW’s Emmy issues; the publications then ran editorial coverage of those same campaigns; the distinction between ad and editorial got progressively harder to maintain. McNutt’s case was that this “mainstreaming” of awards-campaign coverage — moving FYC discourse from trade-press niche into general-audience entertainment journalism — had effectively normalized a kind of paid editorial that wouldn’t have been tolerated in other beats.
The original FishbowlLA framing was both admiring of the critique and skeptical that anyone in Hollywood was going to engage with it. McNutt was a graduate student writing on an academic media-studies blog; AwardsLine was a multimillion-dollar revenue line for PMC at Deadline. Whether Finke would respond at all — by ignoring, by attacking, or by inviting McNutt to write for Deadline — was the kind of open question FBLA was good at flagging without resolving.
Now
Myles McNutt completed his PhD and has been an academic in media studies, with a long-running presence as a TV critic at The A.V. Club and other outlets across the 2010s and into the 2020s. His Antenna piece was prescient — the trend he identified continued and accelerated through the rest of the decade. AwardsLine grew into one of Deadline’s most-profitable verticals; Entertainment Weekly’s FYC coverage continued in similar form before EW itself transitioned from print to digital-only in 2019 under Meredith ownership.
The structural problem McNutt named — that awards coverage and awards advertising at the trade-press level had merged operationally — has not really been resolved. PMC now owns Deadline, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter; all three run substantial FYC supplements; all three derive significant Q4-Q1 revenue from studio campaign spending. The newsletter ecosystem — The Ankler, Puck, The InSneider — has, partly in reaction, built audiences around the framing that newsletter writers are not on the studios’ payroll in the same way trade-press awards desks are.
Nikki Finke never publicly responded to McNutt’s piece, as far as the historical record shows. She left Deadline in 2013 and died in October 2023. The AwardsLine franchise she built has continued to grow inside Deadline and has been an enduring fixture of the trade’s calendar through the rest of the decade.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2012 snapshot