Deadline Hollywood Daily vs. Women's Wear Daily

I've been checking Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily website off and on for a while now, waiting to see if she's going to answer questions about the brouhaha concerning the recent profile that Jacob Bernstein wrote about her for Women's Wear Daily. For those who don't know, the article (which, in my opinion, was interesting, but didn't contain anything that inflammatory about the controversial LA Weekly columnist/DHD blogger) was published on July 6th, and then later pulled from their website. At issue seems to be a question about if Finke gave Bernstein permission to tape all their conversations (or just one).

But the strange part of this isn't that Finke has a problem with what's been written/said about her (that's happened before and she's been profiled many times)--it's that she hasn't addressed the issue herself. My guess is that she won't because some sort of accord was reached between Finke and WWD--they would pull the story off their website and she wouldn't write anything about it on hers.

WWD issued their carefully-worded editor's note today about the situation and it doesn't do much to shed light on what actually went down. But as usual, the blogosphere is rife with rumor and speculation. My favorite post of the past couple days is from Luke Ford, who suggests a LA Times/NY Times conspiracy for dealing with Finke's high-level sources (now that's the stuff of movies!). If you're interested in reading the story, David Poland posts Bernstein's entire profile of Finke on his Hot Blog.