On The Finke for Sale Stuff
My first thought is sleepy.
My second thought is, put Nikki in charge of The Hollywood Reporter… two birds killed with one stone.
Third thought… Jay Penske’s best play right now would be to buy The Hollywood Reporter, not put Nikki in charge of anything but what she does, and to leverage the print aspect of the dying paper, because without it, he is never going to make a dollar of profit on the Finke/Fuller/Fool’s Gold Mail.com empire.
Ironically, print is the only thing that web sites do not do and cannot do as well or better than print. 15 Finke/Fleming blog-like (meaning none of these features where Nikki attempts to come up with a full thought) stories a week that are print exclusive to The Penske Reporter would make it a must-read again. Must-read means that the magazine is opened and sits in offices. That remains they can sell covers again.
Fourth thought… is there a single reason to think of any of this for more than a second other than the disposition of the existing trades? Is Sharon Waxman really so completely lacking in knowledge about her own business that she doesn’t get that the most significant source of Finke’s numbers is the Drudge Report, which delivers hundreds of thousands of views every single week? And why don’t people who are in a position to know realize that the best numbers ever reported are still not being translated into real money?
ADD, 4:10a MCDT – The denial of having made Crazy Nikki and offer from Richard Beckman, I have to say, reeks of a non-denial denial. The precision of the language – “there is no truth to the report that the site’s editor has been offered the job of editor-in-chief” – suggests that though Nikki may not have been offered the E-I-C job, she may well have been offered something else altogether… something even more lucrative. I don’t know a person on the face of the earth – aside from CN herself – who thinks Nikki can manage another human being without turning it into a CSI episode within weeks. Really, I don’t even think that Nikki thinks she is a manager.
Of course, this all gets batted around, with Waxman trying to prove she was right, Nikki pulling the kind of public stunt – making public claims about an offer – that shows why anyone choosing to be in business with her is as insane as she is, and The Hollywood Reporter trying not to look like it’s a joke.
Again, the key idea here that is lost is that Nikki is a single and singular voice… not a website beyond her own voice… and not a business model. If Sharon wants what Nikki has, she should shut down the site, lose the overhead, and start raking more muck. But she is not up to being Nikki – and anyone who is should be hospitalized – and so, she wants to be Variety As told By Arianna… but that is a delusion as the Variety she wanted to be no longer exists and Sharon’s husband is lovely, but not gay, not a billionaire, and not a means to a self-serving end.
Nikki is a grinder. Sharon is a dilettante.
After all these years, I have a lot more respect for the grinder. She is out of her f-ing mind and a truly hateful, pathetic individual… but as Ms. Summer sang, she works hard for the money… harder than anyone else. And no matter how vile the result, there is something honorable in being the object she has become after a career of self-imposed failure.
Right now, Nikki is the glow in the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. It makes people crazy because they think it can, somehow, fix their problems. It can’t.
Or maybe the better analogy is the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders… open it up and it melts your face… and we are all better served by it being lost in a warehouse.
Anyway… one last thought… whenever Nikki claims to be traveling or sick, it’s almost always something else going on in her land of high drama. Sometimes it is her trying to kill a story about her. Sometimes it is a business dance. But “travel in Europe” is likely code for “I’m going to the bunker.”
I will be happy when all of this goes away… and it will. But even though I am as bored with it as most of you, it is a part of the industry. So I feel compelled to keep writing on and around it.
My guess? Jay Penske/mail.com finally had enough of Nikki, enough of the personal days, enough of the non-existant journalism standards, enough of the missed news (can you name one story that she’s been ahead of since the WME merger, where she was used by Ari to stop traffic so he could throw Wiatt under an express bus), and decided that Mike Fleming’s talents were being wasted at a moribund Variety. So Penske hired him, I am sure to Nikki’s chagrin, and the site finally seems to have some semblance of legitimate reporting and authoritative, balanced writing.
Fleming and Finke hate each other. They have for years. He’s a good guy and a great reporter, and seems to genuinely have interest in the story and the industry. She is stuck on the story on the story, as it relates to Nikki Finke, and is more interested in playing out the psychodrama in her head. Not for all the money in the world would he leave Variety to report to her for anything longer than an introduction period before she could be marginalized or shown the door.
Look at the site since he’s gotten there. His reporting, from his home in Long Island, has consistently blown away Nikki’s cutting and pasting of press releases and half-hearted attempts to make sense of lines WME feeds her (the piece on Sharon Sheinwold was so convoluted and poorly written that I gave up after the fourth read trying to understand what she was trying to say).
She’s being pushed out. And Mike Fleming gets to headline a well trafficked blog with name recognition. Which he deserves. Hopefully she’ll land (with a thud) at THR and go back to cutting and pasting old articles around three sentence “scoops” to make longer pieces that look like she did something other than take dictation from Ari’s second assistant and Ron Meyer’s publicist’s assistant’s intern at Universal. And we can all forget about her.
my guess? moomber isn’t ‘guessing’ at all and is right on the money…..
David, you cannot start the “Glow In The Suitcase” analogy, take it to Raiders, and fail to mention KISS ME DEADLY.
That is all.
There are so many funny throwaway lines in this post. I guess it’s easy when you’re writing about a hypochondriac sociopath who’s also a really, really shitty reporter.