Finke's WGA strike work

The New York Observer writes of Nikki Finke, calling her The Media Mensch of the Year:

The biggest entertainment story of the year has also turned into the biggest story of Ms. Finke’s career, and, possibly, the vehicle of her redemption for those who had written her off as merely a loudly buzzing fly in Hollywood’s ointment. She’s demonstrated that one determined reporter—with none of the support or backing of a media outfit, but also none of the entangling alliances—can, in fact, beat the big guys at their own game. She’s broken the news of almost all of the significant strike developments since the beginning and has offered insight into the inner workings of the negotiations that the more slow-footed publications on the strike beat—primarily, Variety, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times—simply can’t match. In hundreds of posts and thousands of contributors’ comments, she’s turned her site into not only a must-read, but a kind of online kaffe klatsch for information and discussion about the strike.

“I did not know I cared about Hollywood as much as I did,” Ms. Finke, who is 54, told The Observer the other day by telephone from her home in a Los Angeles suburb. “Everyone has always criticized me over the years—‘You hate Hollywood, you hate all the movies, you hate everybody.’ And I was O.K. being in that curmudgeon role!”

But with the strike, Ms. Finke said, everything changed.

“People came to me and said, ‘You have to bring you into this. You have to state your opinions.’ As a student of Hollywood, I don’t see the glamour. I don’t see any of that. That’s always been false to me. I understand the way Hollywood works. This is a town, the only place in the world, where conflicts of interest are not only allowed, but prized, at law firms. It’s a crazy system, but it works.

There are quotes from writers and from the producers' side.