I love this so.

The ultimate in entertainment journalism ouroboros…

In this corner, the madwoman who threatens everyone she talks to with excluding them from her site’s increasingly deep in minutiae, uninteresting coverage of the industry, thus gaining her “exclusives” of anywhere from as much as 6 hours to as little as 3 minutes.

In the other corner, one of the least well regarded journalists ever to cover the movie business beat, she does steal content, though she passionately defends the behavior as “the way it is” like her idol, Arianna. But primarily, that acquisitiveness comes from bigger outlets than Deadline.

It’s hard to know who to root for. Nikki is right on some level. But Nikki’s definition of EXCLUSIVE is self-serving and to so degree, absurd.

You have to respect the game as it was set up decades and decades ago. The person with the relationships that get them the first sniff of the press release posing as news gets the Exclusive. People have earned a lot of money for having those relationships, Michael Fleming right up at the front of that line. But we’re not a two trade, no interest in reporting town anymore.

Almost nothing printed on Deadline is “news” as the front page of a newspaper would define it. Someone wants the word out. They give it to the person who is the best strategic fit. It can be about that outlet being the best one for the news to come from or it can be, as noted above, that they are feeling threatened by a “journalist” and they’d rather protect themselves than risk a fight that can go right to the top of the studio. There is no bigger context developed by reporting, as a rule. it’s just today’s press releases and who gets handed what.

Nikki has done a brilliant, horrible job of taking control of this game. There is no question that she dominates. But she dominates with fear-based manipulation, not journalism. In hiring some of the best liked writers out there, she has both kept herself at a distance. But her rage still drives her mythology.

The irony of this cease & desist remains… people give information to Deadline to get it disseminated, not so Nikki can rage on about exclusives and toldjas. They want Sharon and everyone else with a website to “steal” the story and spread it. More often than not, every potentially interested journalist’s phone or e-mail inbox rings with the “news” within an hour of Deadline (or LAT… or NYT… or whomever…) running it.

It’s comedic that anyone would try to use the Hot News Doctrine to maintain control of entertainment news. Seriously. It is to laugh.

Not as funny as, “It often can take weeks of working our deep sources to report and write our posts,” however. Yeah… holding a story for weeks because your source wants you to or has negotiated with you to do so is not “working deep sources for weeks” in my journalistic book. Nor should it for you readers.

And with all due respect, how does Nikki or anyone else know what Sharon and her minions are reporting and what they are stealing? This is the part I am excited to see, hoping a lawsuit develops.

This is the problem with most of the lawsuits – including the ones threatened against me and never C&Ded… feeling left out – Nikki conjures up. She’s have to prove that Waxman is not reporting these stories. Cue the line up of Nikki Whisperers, for all of Hollywood to see and the owners of the corporations to see. Her sources would have to stick up for her in court. I want to see Ron Meyer on the witness stand explaining how he gave information to Nikki and refused it to Sharon or Variety or LAT… and why.

Of course, the real question about all of this legal wrangling is, “Why now?” Is the answer the photo of Nikki that Sharon published? Is it competitive anger over the Motion Picture Home story? Was the award season, the advertising part of which basically ended yesterday, not quite what Nikki hoped? Does Nikki see a chance to kill off The Wrap once and for all? Or could this all be a conspiracy to get Bill Condon to make Sharon a character on The Nikki Show?

Of course, Sharon and her backers are not Deadweird Hollywood. Not quite as easy to take down. But The Wrap could be teetering. And this could scare away another round of funding. And then, I think Sharon’s suit against Nikki would be more fun!

Is Nikki forgetting that the first rule of Source Club is not talking about Source Club? Could it backfire hard on her?

All I have to do is sit back and watch. I don’t really read either site much anymore. Deadline is mostly the parts of the trades I never read even back when they were The Trades and The Wrap has occasional moments of being interesting… but few and far between. I like Steve Pond and for a guy who has hated on me, Jeff Snieder does it in a funny way. So I’ll have to see the battle light up on my RSS feed.

“EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned 2-time Oscar winner and Academy favorite Tom Hanks will be the first presenter and name winners in both the Art Direction and Cinematography categories right off the bat. ”

WOW… that’s important news worth suing over, Pete Hammond! Bring on the lawyers!!!

LMAO.

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