Nicholas Sokic
Nicholas Sokic is news editor at Realscreen, covering the global unscripted film and television industry with a focus on documentary projects, factual series and the business decisions behind them. His coverage centres on how broadcasters, streamers and festivals shape the non-fiction screen landscape, tracking new commissions, acquisitions, premieres and executive moves. He combines fast-turn news writing with interviews and festival reporting, making him a consistent reference point for developments in documentary and factual entertainment.
Unscripted documentaries and streamer deals
Sokic’s day-to-day Realscreen work is built around unscripted projects, especially documentaries and factual series announced by broadcasters and streaming platforms.
His pieces regularly detail new commissions and branded content initiatives, such as Channel 4’s branded three-part documentary project with presenter Lorraine Kelly. He covers premium documentary output from major players, including projects from HBO Documentary Films, where he has reported on new films built around significant real-world cases.
Music-focused non-fiction sits in his remit as well: he has reported on Mubi’s decision to stream a documentary on UK band Pulp directed by filmmaker Garth Jennings, framing the deal within the broader trend of streamers acquiring culturally resonant music docs.
Across these stories, Sokic tends to foreground who is financing and distributing the work, which partners are involved, and how projects fit into a platform’s wider unscripted slate. His articles generally break down key creative talent, production companies and commissioning executives while keeping the emphasis on the strategic moves of broadcasters and streamers rather than on celebrity or gossip.
This gives his coverage a clear industry lens, positioning each documentary or factual title in terms of market positioning, branding and audience strategy.
Festival, lineup and awards reporting
A substantial portion of Sokic’s beat involves documentary festivals and their programming decisions, where he tracks lineups, competitions and special strands.
He has reported on the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA), covering short documentary competition lineups as well as selections for sections such as Signed, Best of Fest and Paradocs. In related coverage, he has written about A&E’s unscripted programming, including the premiere of one-off projects like Bully Hunter, tying broadcast premieres to festival activity and industry calendars.
His reporting often notes guest-of-honor appointments and other curatorial choices, showing how festivals spotlight particular filmmakers or themes.
Sokic also covers major North American documentary events such as Hot Docs, where he has interviewed newly appointed leaders about their plans for keeping the festival relevant and resilient.
In these pieces he blends news of executive hires and promotions with forward-looking questions about international strategy, audience development and the role of festivals in the broader factual ecosystem. His festival reporting therefore spans both program announcements and leadership perspectives, making his work useful when the story intersects with lineups, premieres or institutional shifts in the doc festival circuit.
Industry trends and the business of factual TV
Beyond individual projects and festivals, Sokic covers structural trends and challenges in the unscripted sector. At Realscreen he has written on topics such as mergers and acquisitions and the rise of vertical series, examining how these dynamics affect opportunities and constraints for factual producers and commissioners in 2026.
His archive includes People/Biz coverage, indicating a sustained focus on corporate moves, partnerships and strategic initiatives across the non-fiction television and film landscape. In these articles he connects company-level decisions to their impact on pipeline, production models and global market positioning in unscripted.
Interviews with key industry figures form another part of this business-facing lens. Sokic has spoken with documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney about Musk, a four-hour film on Elon Musk, discussing the challenges behind mounting a high-profile investigative documentary and the pressures that come with tackling powerful subjects. He has also interviewed festival executives such as Mara Gourd-Mercado and Diana Sanchez about governance, international outreach and organizational resilience at Hot Docs.
These conversations sit alongside his regular news pieces, giving his body of work a blend of quick-turn deal reporting and deeper, person-led insight into how decision-makers think about the future of factual entertainment.
Broader experience across finance, sustainability, real estate and cannabis
Outside Realscreen, Sokic has built a portfolio across business, finance and specialist industry beats, which informs the way he approaches entertainment stories. His professional profiles and contributor pages show that he has written on personal finance, business, sustainability, crypto and music for outlets including Money.ca, the Toronto Star, Yahoo Finance Canada, Electric Autonomy Canada, Financial Post, NEXT, This and Exclaim. He has covered sustainability efforts of businesses and the real estate sector, including reporting for SustainableBiz and its sister site Real Estate News Exchange on topics such as investment partnerships and multifamily property redevelopment.
In parallel, he has reported extensively on the cannabis industry for Mugglehead Investment Magazine, including multi-part coverage of the Cannabis Act industry-led review and the challenges facing legal cannabis businesses and patients.
This breadth of experience across regulated industries, finance and sustainability strengthens the business focus of his entertainment reporting. When he writes about unscripted film and TV, he brings an understanding of how regulation, capital flows and market structure shape opportunities for producers, distributors and festivals. His track record across different sectors also signals comfort with stories that sit at the intersection of culture and commerce, whether the subject is a documentary deal, a festival strategy shift or an industry review process.
4 more entertainment journalists.
Ama Sechere
Ama Sechere is an entertainment publicist at Bell Media who maps Crave’s streaming slate across Crave, HBO, Starz, and related specialty channels. Her main work is the recurring Crave Streaming Overview series, published monthly from at least December 2021 through July 2026 and in weekly editions. These releases track feature films, returning series, premieres, finales, special events, and new acquisitions by date, format, and platform. She also handles campaign-style announcements for priority titles, including the short-form original comedy series MY DEAD MOM. Sechere focuses on streaming and television publicity, with more than a decade of experience in national and multi-platform campaigns. She reports through structured schedules, concise loglines, highlight notes, premiere details, and clear cross-brand labels. Her work supports media planning rather than criticism or review.
Amaris Encinas
Amaris Encinas tracks how viral culture, celebrity news and brand-driven moments move across platforms and into everyday life for USA TODAY’s national trending desk. She covers celebrities, athletes, entertainment headlines, consumer news, viral food culture, internet trends, nostalgia and technology. Her work includes stories on Simone Biles, Jimmy Kimmel, Dolly Parton, Sophie Cunningham, Taco Bell’s Pink Baja Blast, viral food hacks, Cartoon Network Flash games and Apple launches. She also reports on recalls, retail policy, public safety and representation, including a profile of Revista Étnica’s founder. Encinas writes quick-turn, news-driven pieces that explain why incidents, products and trends are capturing attention. She connects online activity to real-world effects and grounds stories in clear facts, timelines and stakes. Before USA TODAY, she covered breaking news, arts and life for regional outlets.
Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson covers the modern wrestling business through interview-led news and detailed event reports across major promotions. He writes for Fightful and POST Wrestling, focusing on clear, news-first stories built from wrestler quotations, promotional announcements and match results. Since 2017, his beat has spanned WWE, AEW, NJPW, MLW and other companies, documenting plans, deals and career moves through his own interviews and conversations. He files chronological recaps from major WWE cards and weekly shows, tracking match outcomes, title changes, segments and announced bouts with wrestling-specific detail. His cross-promotion coverage and appearances discussing events like AEW All In add context on how talent, stories and major cards move between companies. Beyond articles, he runs the “Andrew Thompson Interviews” video series and appears as a podcaster, keeping the emphasis on direct questions, sourced quotes and concrete developments.
Angelina Mazza
Angelina Mazza is a romance scholar and cultural critic who treats love stories, celebrity narratives, and pop entertainment as serious subjects, tracing how they shape contemporary culture. She writes for outlets including Vulture, Slate, Literary Hub, Salon, and other magazines and journals. At Vulture she covers romance fiction and celebrity stories, using list-driven guides and essays to analyze genre tropes, fandoms, and how romance moves from niche communities into mainstream culture. Her work extends to television, music, poetry, internet culture, and the history of music television, examining programming choices, character types, and images as texts that encode identity, desire, gender, and audience. She also writes about digital culture and campus television comedies, and works as a fact-checker, bringing precise detail and careful sourcing to her reported and critical pieces.