TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. It is so hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of pop superstar Michael Jackson's death in June, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer was pronounced dead.
For its many critics this was confirmation that the website plays fast and loose with the truth but for TMZ, the explanation was simple. By the time Jackson was officially declared dead, one of the site's sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre had already tipped it off.
Jackson's demise was the biggest scoop and the apogee of the four-year-old celebrity-obsessed site that boasts its snippets are "even more fascinating than the hype". TMZ - the name stands for "thirty-mile zone", an area of central Los Angeles that is thickly populated with show-business personalities - has since become one of the world's most quoted sources of entertainment news.
Fans have Harvey Levin to thank. The 58-year-old managing editor of TMZ is now something of a celebrity himself, popping up on CNN's Larry King Live and a number of other news magazine shows that dip into celebrity content.
Blogging site Gawker describes Levin as a "schlocky managing editor of a thieving celebrity news conglomerate" and has accused him of filching stories from the website Courthouse News Service and passing them off as TMZ's own. Some rival media outlets so dislike and distrust TMZ that they didn't report Jackson was dead until it had been confirmed by the Los Angeles Times and wire agency Associated Press.
"That's typical," Levin says. "No matter what they say, people know we broke the story. That's how competitors handle it. There's no issue about our credibility."
Kevin Smith, co-founder of independent news and picture agency Splash News, says while many newspapers and magazines rely on celebrity content to get sales, at the same time filling their pages with everything from crosswords to horoscopes, TMZ has just cut down to the bone - celebrity is all it supplies. "It's very raw, it is crude, not polished, but it works. A lot of people look at them and think, `Why didn't we do that?'"
Levin - who gossip sites love to point out is happily partnered to his bodybuilder-turned-chiropractor boyfriend - trained as a lawyer, but found the lure of television irresistible. He passed his bar exam in 1975 and taught law before becoming a legal reporter for KCBS-TV in Los Angeles, where he covered the OJ Simpson trial. He later became a legal analyst on television show The People's Court before dreaming up his own concept, Celebrity Justice. But the show didn't last; a victim of poor time slots, it was axed after three years.
Undeterred, Levin launched TMZ.com modestly in December 2005 as "a Hollywood and entertainment-centric news site". It was a joint venture between AOL and Telepictures Productions, a division of Warner Bros. The site is said to cost about US$8 million a year to run and some have estimated that it could be worth up to US$400 million.
TMZ, which attracts about 10 million users a month online, created waves at Warner Bros in the early days with some of its scoops, according to Alan Citron, a former general manager of TMZ. "I think that there was some nervousness about that and there were times when people would go, 'Can't you move a bit to the middle?' but to their credit they never shut us down," says Citron.
There are two opposing schools of thought about TMZ's success. One, it is founded on good old-fashioned reporting, wearing out shoe leather in the finest tradition of Hollywood tip sheets. Two, it gets scoops because it pays people. "If you have a story and you want to get paid then you call TMZ," says Smith, whose Splash News is a major contributor to the site.
Most traditional US media find such an approach deeply troubling and refuse to pay for stories. Levin admits TMZ pays for pictures and will pay for story tips, but will not pay for unverified stories. Citron, defending TMZ's use of chequebook journalism, says: "As long as information is accurate I don't have a problem with that."
It is clear that even before the events surrounding the death of Jackson, TMZ had changed Hollywood and it is starting to change the way the world's media works. In times past, other outlets would attempt to confirm a story themselves before running big on it but with TMZ's Jackson scoop, Sky News in Britain gave it blanket coverage very quickly, even though for nearly an hour the website was the only media organisation claiming the superstar was dead. News companies that waited for confirmation, such as CNN and BBC, were roundly criticised. The old rules of double sourcing stories appeared to be being rewritten before the media industry's eyes.
"In many ways, publicists ran Hollywood before we came along," Levin has told trade magazine TelevisionWeek. "They would set the topics, they would set the agenda, they would tell these magazine shows what they could or couldn't do."
But who needs sit-down interviews with celebrities when you can run a harrowing image of pop star Rihanna's face after she has been beaten up, for which TMZ reportedly paid US$62,000.
Keith Kelly, the Media Ink columnist at the New York Post, is stumped to think of a major story TMZ has blown: "They have definitely had an impact. I don't think that Hollywood agents and the power structure particularly care for them."
Levin is certainly hard-working. He works website hours, arriving at the office sometimes as early as 6am, and has often hit the gym before that. He wears several hats, co-founder and editor-in-chief of TMZ.com and executive producer and host of TMZ on TV, the show spawned by the site. The offices of TMZ.com double as the set of the television programme.
The gossip site has also been aggressive in establishing a presence on other online platforms. It offers, for free, an iPhone program, streaming news feed to Google and Yahoo, and pages on social-networking sites Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, so fans won't miss any of its breaking news.
Smith is waiting to see whether TMZ can build on the success of its Jackson scoop.
"The problem is it's hard to maintain. The large majority of their stuff is just fluff. I don't have a problem with that because we are supplying most of that fluff," says Smith.
Guardian News & Media
For a behind-the-scenes look at the TMZ.com operation, watch TMZ on TV, which airs on HBO after the 9pm feature film every day except Monday.
