Deadline Hollywood Daily: Alternative news source or Hollywood power broker?

From yesterday's New York Times: When some striking members of the Writers Guild of America created a series of videos depicting speechless actors in support of the writers' cause, they did not post them on the guild's Web site or on YouTube. Instead, the videos made their premiere exclusively on Deadline Hollywood Daily, a Web site owned and operated by Nikki Finke, a columnist for the alternative newspaper LA Weekly.

Since she began the site in 2006, Ms. Finke's Web site has become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls.
But it has been the screenwriters' strike that may have finally solidified her position as a Hollywood power broker. For this article, more than a dozen executive producers, writers and agents offered to attest to her influence. But with those plaudits also come complaints -- only anonymous ones -- that Ms. Finke plays favorites.

"Like it or not, everyone in Hollywood reads her," said Brad Grey, the chief executive of Paramount and, like many executives, an occasional target of Ms. Finke's scathing reports. "You must respect her reach."

For many of her readers, Ms. Finke's Web site has supplanted traditional media as a primary source of strike news. Before the strike, Ms. Finke said Deadline Hollywood Daily averaged 350,000 page views a day. Since the beginning of the strike, she said the daily average had soared to about a million.

Read the whole NYT article HERE

Bloomberg News also covered Deadline Hollywood Daily. You can read the article HERE, but note that Ms. Finke has commented that there are some errors in this (although she doesn't provide details).