Generation Bubble

When asked to comment on the intention behind his masterwork, The Jungle, muckraking journalist turned novelist Upton Sinclair famously quipped, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit its stomach.”

TMZ.com, purveyor of the beau monde’s nasty bits, aims a bit lower — and, unlike Sinclair’s, its aim is true. The site’s uncanny ability to scoop all comers has left the latter scratching their heads.

Being first with news of Michael Jackson’s death is just the latest of TMZ’s many yellow-journalistic coups. It reaped ghoulish first fruits from Anna Nicole Smith and Heath Ledger’s Big-One bitings, as well as from Mel Gibson’s anti-Chosen explosion. So successful, in fact, has TMZ been in yellow reportage that many traditional journalists have come to regard TMZ as the standard bearer for 21st-century journalism generally. No less an organ than The Washington Post discusses the site in plangent tones:

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.

[...]

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?

A pressing question indeed. Surging site traffic, veritable golden fleece in these days of dwindling news readership, has made TMZ.com belle of the news-world’s ball.

Curious, yellow: TMZ informants schooled for scandal.

Other journalists — most notably those of CNN (which, like TMZ, is owned by Time Warner), but also hacks at competing sites — protest that, if TMZ’s methods represent the only way to bag Moby Dick, then call them Ishmael:

[S]ome 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. The network’s hesitance is particularly telling; CNN is owned by Time Warner, the same company that owns TMZ.

“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 an entertainment industry news site, TheWrap.com. “We’re not rumor- or scandal-mongers. We check our facts. They’ve come to connote scandal-mongering.”

Such negative sentiment only further attests to the immensity of TMZ’s influence, and the anxiety this influence produces. Keenly aware of the burgeoning interest in his site’s trade mysteries, TMZ.com founder Harvey Levin, whose tanned, leering countenance suggests more a periodontist a little too eager to anesthetize his patients than an attorney turned tattler, remains cagey:

Levin, 58, a lawyer and former TV reporter for two stations in Los Angeles, bristles when TMZ’s reporting is questioned. […]

[…]

But 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 toto, during the “story meeting” segments of the TV show.

Levin also won’t name his reporting stars (short postings are credited to “TMZ Staff”). He’ll go on with praise about a recent hire who has turned out some of the Jackson coverage but won’t say who he’s talking about (“We don’t want anyone to steal her away”). Nor will Levin reveal where TMZ’s offices are (vague answer: somewhere on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood).

Yet Levin does cop to that hoariest of yellow-journalistic practices — paying sources. His informants lurk everywhere throughout greater L.A., so many shoots of a decidedly dollar-bill green:

[Levin] will address, 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).

Levin certainly drives a hard bargain. Fifty bucks seems a miserly price to hang on bombshell revelations of celebrity death and dirty dealing. But Levin appears to have found the perfect informants, those of great enough leisure and small enough means to malinger around Hollywood, their weather eyes open for scandal.

Celebrities, beware the unemployed! For Harvey Levin has transformed them from capitalism’s casualties to its carrion crows.