TMZ: It's Just Like Us!
As gossip site TMZ's syndicated television show approaches its initial air date of September 10—and in advance of what will no doubt be a busy day tomorrow with Paris Hilton's release from jail—the New York Times takes a look at the Associated Press of breaking vagflash news and finds that not only is it profitable ("one of the few remnants of the AOL-Time Warner merger that has resulted in some cross-platform success"), it's not much different from every other gossip-gathering organization. It pays for stories (er, "collateral materials") and thrives on the fear of celebrity flacks, who know they need to fill the TMZ tip jars with publishable material if they want to stay in the game.
But it can be helpful as well! As Isaiah Washington's publicist (rough year, huh?) says:
Compared to many of the other outlets, they're 1,000 percent 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 said. "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. I've certainly done that.
No doubt! How does the man in charge of it all see things? "We work as hard at breaking a Britney Spears story as NBC would work on breaking a President Bush piece," says TMZ managing editor Harry Levin, who "may represent the future of celebrity journalism." If it's possible to feel both revulsion and empathy simultaneously, we're doing it now.
