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Just Lucky? Jackson scoop has TMZ on news-gathering high
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Published: July 4, 2009
LOS ANGELES - TMZ.com, the scrappy entertainment-news Web site, has scooped up some pretty big fish in its four years of existence, but last week it hauled in the celebrity equivalent of Moby-Dick.
Almost as soon as an ambulance pulled up to the gate of Michael Jackson's rented estate in Holmby Hills, TMZ was posting the news to the world under one of its bright-red "exclusive" banners.
When Jackson, 50, died in cardiac arrest not long thereafter, TMZ had that, too -- beating not just the rest of the news media but the Los Angeles coroner's announcement.
The scoops, and subsequent red-framed "exclusives" about Jackson's tangled personal and professional affairs, have brought not only massive attention to the site but also a journalistic reassessment as well.
The question is: Did TMZ just get lucky with its Jackson coverage -- a right-place, right-time lightning strike -- or has TMZ built a smarter new-media organization that could teach the rest of the pack how to get it done?
Harvey Levin, the confident and energetic founder of the site and its companion TV program, has no doubt about how to answer that one.
"If you look at the site since we launched, you'll see thousands of stories we've broken," Levin says, rattling off scoops about Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic rant and Anna Nicole Smith's and Heath Ledger's overdose deaths.
"This is a news operation. All we have done is applied the traditional skills of news reporting. Honest to god, it's that simple."
It's a little more complicated than that. For all its solid reporting, TMZ -- the name refers to the exclusionary "30-mile zone" that determines whether a studio must pay travel expenses and per diems -- also ferrets out salacious items that most mainstream news outlets won't touch. The site seems squarely in the grand tradition of gossip columnists Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and the Kenneth Anger expose book Hollywood Babylon: a combination of the tawdry, the dishy and the stunning, always with a suggestion of intimacies revealed. Its many "exclusives" fall into two categories: dead-on, journalistically accurate accounts and eyebrow-raising but uncheckable sensation.
The problem is, it's often hard to tell which is which. That is why some journalists have tended to view TMZ's reporting warily. Even though TMZ nailed the Jackson story, CNN, among other news outlets, waited for the Los Angeles Times to confirm the account before going with the story.
"When we were starting out, we told people we were the anti-TMZ," says Sharon Waxman, a former Washington Post and New York Times reporter who five months ago founded the entertainment-industry news site TheWrap.com.
"We're not rumor- or scandalmongers. We check our facts. They've come to connote scandalmongering."
But other journalists take a measured view. "This is not a couple of guys sitting in a coffee shop making things up," says Kevin Roderick, a Los Angeles Times reporter for 25 years who founded the LA Observed Web site in 2003. "It's a journalistic organization with some stylistic excesses. But they're concerned about their reputation for accuracy."
Levin, 58, a lawyer and former TV reporter for two stations in Los Angeles, bristles when TMZ's reporting is questioned. "We have sources everywhere," he says. "We've developed relationships with people over the years -- people who trust us and want to talk with us. We say to them, ‘Try us one time.' If we screwed people over, we'd be out of business."
Levin won't reveal a few things about his own operation and journalistic methods.
Ask him how many people work in TMZ's newsroom, and he won't say ("We don't want to give away our business model"), though he acknowledges that the staff is young and can be glimpsed, almost in total, during the "story-meeting" segments of the TV show.
He will talk about, in general terms, one unusual journalistic practice that TMZ employs: paying sources for "news tips." Mainstream news organizations refuse to pay for information, fearing that it will elicit tainted information and compromise the integrity of the news.
But TMZ has no such objections. It seeds sources with cash, sometimes as little as $50, according to Levin, to deliver useful nuggets. TMZ also pays for paparazzi photos and videos, although that practice is followed in the celebrity media.
"We might pay for the tip," Levin says, "but we go out and get the story ourselves. We check it, source it and report it."
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