TMZ legitimized by Jackson scoop?
LOS ANGELES - TMZ.com, the scrappy entertainment-news website, 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,’’ says Levin, 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. It’s that simple.’’
It’s a little more complicated than that. For all its solid reporting, TMZ 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 cold, CNN, among other news outlets, waited for the Los Angeles Times to confirm the account before going with the story.
Some 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 website 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 in Los Angeles, addresses the unusual journalistic practice of paying sources for “news tips.’’ TMZ seeds sources with cash, sometimes as little as $50, according to Levin, to deliver useful nuggets.
“We might pay for the tip,’’ Levin says, “but we go out and get the story ourselves.’’ 