Published: Friday, 17 Jul 2009 | 11:23 AM ET

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Right now, there’s a good chance a Hollywood executive is leaning into a colleague’s office and quietly asking, “Did you see what Nikki just wrote?”

Source: deadlinehollywooddaily.com

That would be Nikki Finke, a well-traveled newspaper reporter who has found her moment as a digital-age Walter Winchell.

In the three years since she started Deadline Hollywood Daily, a daily blog about the entertainment business, her combination of old-school skills — she is a relentless reporter — and new-media immediacy has made her a must-click look into the ragingly insecure id of Hollywood.

Among movie executives, the stories of Ms. Finke’s aggressiveness are legion, but they remain mostly unspoken because people fear being the target of one of her withering takedowns.

“I’d prefer not to ever deal with her,” said a senior communications executive at a studio who declined to be identified. Many others declined comment saying, variously, “she gave me a nervous breakdown,” “she terrifies me,” and “there’s no percentage in me saying anything to you about Nikki no matter what it is.”

But they all read her. In a town where people often secretly hope for the worst, Ms. Finke delivers wish fulfillment. During the recent merger of the William Morris and Endeavor agencies, she ridiculed William Morris executives to the point of distraction. She has published network schedules before many people at the network knew what was on them.

During the recent parting of the ways between Paramount Film Group and John Lesher, the former president, she ran a picture of Mr. Lesher with a big red X over his face and a series of breathless news breaks until he was out, finishing him off by quoting him (accurately) saying, “Nikki Finke knew about it before I did.”

In a telephone interview, Ms. Finke said the stories about her thuggish ways were just that. “I don’t bully and terrify people,” she said, cheerfully adding, “I’m not mean, I just write mean.”

She writes mean about business: celebrities don’t interest her. She isn’t always right and, as her critics have pointed out, she’s not above using the new-media prerogative of going into her archives and changing the bad call to a good one. But Ms. Finke’s relatively small audience includes most everyone who matters in Hollywood.

“I’d like to think that people read me because they find out things that are true and that they didn’t know,” she said. “If I was just some kind of car wreck who got all sorts of things wrong, I don’t think they’d be reading.”

Last month, it was announced (on Deadline Hollywood Daily, of course) that Mail.com Media, an Internet company controlled by Jay Penske, son of Roger Penske, the American automotive magnate, was buying her site. The site had been hosted by LA Weekly, but owned by Ms. Finke.

“She has one of the quickest minds I have ever seen and is one of the funniest people I have ever met,” Mr. Penske said.

Most people in Hollywood are not able to meet Ms. Finke, 55. Like another influential blogger, Matt Drudge, she is private to the point of hermitic, spending most of her time in front of a computer at her home in Westwood. Her site has gone dark several times when she has worked herself to exhaustion.

In a place built on appearances, she is never seen at the right premiere, the right lunch spot, the right address. Her presence in Hollywood is spectral — she has a single photo taken in 2006 that runs everywhere.

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“I just don’t go out to industry events, in part because it puts my sources in an awkward situation,” she said, adding that “the other thing about going out with these people is that when it comes time to cover something involving them, they say, ‘But, Nikki, we’re friends.’ I don’t want those kind of friends.”

A onetime debutante — an experience she wrote about for The New York Times in 2005 — Ms. Finke had a long career in journalism, including serving as a correspondent in Moscow for The Associated Press and covering Washington for Newsweek.

“I really don’t see covering Hollywood as all that different from covering the Kremlin or the federal government,” she said. “I’m always fascinated by closed societies that don’t want prying eyes.”

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