When the controversial celebrity gossip website TMZ.com breaks news, the world’s media cannot help but follow.
Yesterday the Hollywood-based website had the celebrity scoop of the decade, breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s suspected heart attack at about 1.30pm, Los Angeles time (9.30pm London time), then being the first to report the King of Pop’s death just over an hour later.
TMZ did this at lightning speed. Jackson died at 2.26pm, LA time. At 2.44pm, TMZ informed the world of his death.
But in the US and overseas, many media outlets, put off by TMZ’s use of paparazzi pictures and tabloid agenda, preferred to wait until the more sober and trusted Los Angeles Times bannered Jackson’s death on its website at 2.51pm.
“That’s typical,” TMZ founder Harvey Levin told the Los Angeles Times, speaking about rivals’ reluctance to credit the site for the Jackson story. “No matter what they say, people know we broke the story. That’s how competitors handle it. There’s no issue about our credibility,” he added.
“Today I made 100 phone calls, and everyone else made 100 calls,” Levin said of TMZ’s reporters. “Everyone blanketed the city.”
Levin said the site was inundated with calls from other media asking if they were sure the story was true. “That’s such an odd question. We would not have published it if it were not true.”
TMZ is not an independent blog like Matt Drudge or Perez Hilton, but a news site backed by a global media company, Time Warner. The site, launched in December 2005 as “a Hollywood and entertainment-centric news site”, is a joint venture between Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros, and AOL, which are both divisions of Time Warner.
The name stands for “thirty mile zone”, a 1960s Hollywood studio reference to location filming that has come to mean the area of LA most thickly populated with celebrities.
The British media got a taste of TMZ’s speed and accuracy when it provided up-to-the minute coverage of actor Natasha Richardson’s skiing accident, brain swelling and subsequent death in March.
This was just the latest of many scoops. TMZ has become the site celebrities fear. In February it ran a harrowing image of pop star Rihanna after she was beaten up by her boyfriend, Chris Brown, who was sentenced to probation for five years.
Through a police report it broke news of Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade, exposed Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s racist rant in a comedy club, broadcast the tape of the angry phone rant Alec Baldwin left his daughter, and published a photograph of Anna Nicole Smith’s refrigerator filled with methadone and Slim-Fast.
In many ways the site is a throwback to old-fashioned journalism that doesn’t rely on controlling publicists and gatekeepers demanding copy approval from glossy magazines in exchange for access.
Instead, the site gains scoops from people on the ground, who provide TMZ with documents, videos, paparazzi shots, and the inside track on the latest celebrity misadventures from LA’s police, courthouse clerks, paramedics and nurses.
The success of the site is down to founder Levin, a former investigative reporter for local LA TV station KCBS-TV, who covered the OJ Simpson trial. Levin created and was executive producer of the TV programme Celebrity Justice.
He compares TMZ to a wire service. “We’ve become like The Associated Press in the world we cover,” he told the New York Times.
TMZ has achieved success not from being friendly with publicists but through thorough, old-fashioned reporting. The site’s first two reports about Jackson variously quoted a cardiologist at UCLA, a source inside the hospital where the stricken star was taken, a Jackson family member, and Jackson’s father, Joe.
TMZ has been credited with helping to change the tone of entertainment coverage from deferential to contemptuous, sometimes even scathing. Publicists recognise its influence and use it to disseminate news about their clients. Some of its scoops are, in fact, supplied by publicists.
But TMZ has also been given free rein to expose celebrity bad behaviour, even if that might sometimes cause conflict with parent company Time Warner.
Two years after it launched, TMZ created its own eponymously titled syndicated celebrity news television show. Within a month, it was the top-rated new show in syndication with about 2 million viewers and was more popular with a younger audience than long-established rival Entertainment Tonight.
British audiences are used to a diet of tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines, but in America TMZ is attacked for its use of paparazzi images and paying tip fees for stories. Levin admits paying for tips but says its only runs stories it has independently verified.
“We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as NBC would work on breaking a President Bush piece,” he told the New York Times.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/26/michael-jackson-tmz-scoop