WHILE THE TV networks tussled over which one would land the first interview with hotel heiress Paris Hilton after her release from jail, the upstart website TMZ.com was breaking most of the news. On 3 June, TMZ.
com was the only media outlet to capture on video Hilton’s surrender at the Los Angeles central jail for men, while other outlets waited outside the Lynwood women’s jail for her to arrive there. When Hilton was released early by the LA County sheriff, Lee Baca, and when Judge Michael T Sauer ordered the sheriff to take her back to court, TMZ.com was first to report that Baca had initially refused to follow the judge’s order.
TMZ.com has so dominated the coverage on Hilton – who spent 23 days in jail last month for drink-driving offences – that Larry King, who interviewed her on CNN, turned over a subsequent one-hour show to TMZ.com’s anchor and managing editor, Harvey Levin, the man who may represent the future of celebrity journalism.
In the past, coverage of celebs often hinged on the promotional agenda of studios and publicists. Under Levin, a former lawyer and investigative reporter, and Jim Paratore, an executive consultant to the site, TMZ has quickly gained an audience by posting news articles garnered from documents, unofficial videotapes, exclusive paparazzi shots and other sources, such as law enforcement officials and courthouse clerks. (The name stands for “thirty mile zone”, referring to the area around Los Angeles populated by celebs).
“We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as NBC would work on breaking a President Bush piece,” Levin says. As a result, TMZ has become the celebrity handler’s worst nightmare. The site has had a series of damaging celebrity scoops, including the police report detailing Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic tirade, Michael Richards’ (Kramer from Seinfeld) racist rant against black hecklers in a comedy club, a tape of the angry phone message Alec Baldwin left for his daughter and a photograph of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s refrigerator filled with methadone and Slim-Fast.
But the TMZ reach extends well beyond the approximately nine million people who visit the website each month. The site has now become a reliable source for the mainstream media, which have dropped their former reluctance to report every detail of celebrity peccadilloes, according to Hilary Estey McLoughlin, the president of Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Brothers, which co-owns the TMZ site with AOL. Both Warner Brothers and AOL are divisions of Time Warner.
“There are times, like with the Paris Hilton story, where we’ve set the agenda for what local news and national news are covering,” McLoughlin says. Last week, for example, TMZ posted excerpts of OJ Simpson’s unpublished book, If I Did It. Although it wasn’t the first website to have excerpts, TMZ’s involvement helped make the book again a national story.
Levin likens the influence of TMZ to a wire service. “We’ve become like The Associated Press in the world we cover,” he says. That influence has also made him a feared figure in Hollywood.
One publicist who declined to speak on the record because of fear of retaliation against his clients likened Levin’s power to that of the gossip columnists of the 1940s and 1950s, such as Walter Winchell. “If you have something you know they will like, you tip them to it,” the publicist says. “It’s kind of the old way you dealt with the old-time gossip columnists.
You have to occasionally feed them an item. You have to be in the game with them. If you’re a publicist and the only time you call up is to complain about an item, they’ll laugh at you.
” Even Hollywood criminal lawyers say that dealing with TMZ has become part of their legal strategy. Shawn Chapman Holley, who represents Nicole Richie, acknowledges that TMZ’s ability to get information has affected strategic decisions in Richie’s drunk-driving case. “When we approach the bench, what we know and when TMZ will know it is a factor discussed with the judge,” said Holley.
“Miss Richie’s case would be set for a particular day and to throw off TMZ, I would go in a day before. Unfortunately, TMZ figured out my strategy and were there when I arrived. So now I’m trying to figure out some other strategy.
” In some respects, TMZ, which launched in December 2005, represented a throwback to earlier journalism, when many reporters relied on documents rather than arranged interviews to break news. “We had a seminal moment in the first month with the Paris Hilton car crash with her boyfriend,” recalls Paratore. “She was pulled over by police, and we caught the whole thing on camera, and it got picked up a lot.
We could see people were really attracted to content like that.” Initially, Levin was wary of creating a celebrity website. He had spent more than a decade as an investigative reporter for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles.
He had also created and produced the now-cancelled TV magazine show Celebrity Justice and covered many high-profile trials, including the OJ Simpson case. But eventually, he found that the 24-hour news cycle appealed to his competitive metabolism. “I started seeing that if you don’t have time periods and publishing cycles, you can publish on demand and beat everybody,” says Levin.
TMZ.com has been ranked the top Hollywood news site for nine months, ahead of well-known brands like Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com, People.
com and E! Online. Time Warner does not reveal revenue figures for TMZ, but sources say the site is profitable.
Beginning this month, TMZ’s 25 staff will work out of offices in West Hollywood and one reporter will continue to work from New York. The site’s success has drawn criticism not only from the stars it covers, but also from competitors who claim it pays for articles. Levin responds that the site has never paid for a story, although it does pay for videotapes and photographs.
“We have a budget for that,” says Paratore. “But the budget is nowhere near the numbers being thrown around for the Paris Hilton interview.” Along with turning celebrity stories into dramas that unfold in real time, TMZ has also contributed to the different tone of much entertainment coverage.
“Five years ago there was so much reverence in the discussion,” says Janice Min, editor-in-chief of Us Weekly. “I’ve seen a shift in the tone,” she continues. “It’s now equal parts reverence and contempt, and TMZ has been able to capitalise on that contemptuous feeling.
TMZ pokes fun at celebrity – sometimes gentle, sometimes quite harsh – and to millions of people, that’s more engaging than reading a canned interview.” Min admits she’s often competing with TMZ to break news. “But it’s great to have them out there,” she says.
“It’s like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet where you never get full.” Inevitably, however, TMZ comes to rely on a symbiosis with the people it covers. “We supply them with news all the time because it goes around the world in 12 seconds,” says Stan Rosenfield, George Clooney’s publicist.
Howard Bragman, a publicist who owns the firm Fifteen Minutes, which represents talk show hosts Ricki Lake and Leeza Gibbons, as well as Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington, has also found there are benefits to dealing with TMZ. “Compared to many of the other outlets, they’re 1,000 per cent better. If you have a good relationship with them, they’ll change an occasional word or swap an occasional picture, but that’s just for friends of the family,” he says.
“And since it goes around the world in seconds, you can leak something to them without fingerprints and it looks like somebody else did it. Still, given that TMZ is a part of Time Warner, doesn’t the site’s goal of exposing the bad behaviour of celebs potentially come into conflict with the larger interests of the parent company that employs some of those same stars? Paratore says that issues about the site’s relationship to Time Warner were dealt with before TMZ’s introduction.
“Everybody understands what it means to be in this business,” he says. “There have always been stories in Time magazine, People and Entertainment Weekly that have not always been flattering to other divisions within the company, and everybody understands that you can’t control it, and they don’t try.” Indeed, in some ways, TMZ is one of the few remnants of the AOL-Time Warner merger that has resulted in some cross-platform success.
There are even rumours that TMZ is set to open a bureau in Washington. With TMZ’s daily television show going on air on 10 September, he reckons he’s got enough on his plate for the time being. WHILE THE TV networks tussled over which one would land the first interview with hotel heiress Paris Hilton after her release from jail, the upstart website TMZ.
com was breaking most of the news.
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