TMZ

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:23pm on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

TMZ Exec Comments On JFK-Photo-That-Wasn't, The New York Times reported on December 28, 2009:

“We’re not happy about it, but this is part of journalism,” Harvey Levin, TMZ’s executive producer, said in an interview Monday afternoon.

So how did the site mistake a Playboy magazine photo spread for a compromising photo of a former president? Mr. Levin said TMZ obtained a photo about a week ago that showed a man lounging on a boat alongside several naked women.

Mr. Levin said his site conducted “due diligence,” consulting with two forensics experts and two John F. Kennedy biographers who all believed that the picture showed the former president. “We did a whole lot of work to feel comfortable with it,” he said."

The full story:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/harvey-levin-comments-on-tmz-mistake/

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 7:36am on Monday, December 28th, 2009

TMZ Looking To Expand Into Sports, The New York Times reported on December 27, 2009:

"Between alerting the world to Michael Jackson’s death and focusing attention on Tiger Woods’s off-course activities, the Web site TMZ cemented its position this year as the celebrity news site to beat.

“Exhausting” is how TMZ’s executive producer, Harvey Levin, described it.

Next year does not look any less hectic. For the first time, the Web site will answer to only one branch of Time Warner. It was owned by Warner Brothers and AOL until this month, when AOL was spun off from Time Warner. AOL’s exit is expected to make it easier for Mr. Levin to introduce another idea, TMZ Sports, and brings a new phase for TMZ’s advertising sales, which have not kept up with the site’s popularity."

The full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/media/28tmz.html

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:35pm on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Writing in the Washington Post on July 1, 2009, Paul Farhi applauds the success of TMZ in the celebrity death and disaster watch.

Farhi asked Harvey Levin, the founder of the site, if TMZ "just got lucky" in being first to report the death of Michael Jackson. Levin said:

"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. (TMZ was also the first to carry surreptitiously recorded tirades by actors Alec Baldwin and Christian Bale.) "This is a news operation. All we have done is applied the traditional skills of news reporting. Honest to god, it's that simple."

The full story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063004200.html

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 8:34pm on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Celebrity website TMZ, which broke the news of Michael Jackson's death, has reported that the entertainer was not the biological father of his three children and that his ex-wife, Debbie Rowe, was not the genetic mother of the eldest two, Michael Jr. and Paris.

The full story:
http://www.tmz.com/2009/06/30/michael-jackson-debbie-rowe-surrogate-children-in-vitro/