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Stephen Brook on how gossip site TMZ.com has become a media giant. The Guardian (UK):

TMZ.com is now the hottest Hollywood celebrity gossip website on the planet. So hot, in fact, that when it broke the news of Michael Jackson's death last week, its world exclusive popped up online six minutes before the singer actually died.

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, at 2.26pm Los Angeles time last Thursday, one of the site's sources within the corridors of the UCLA Medical Centre (it has a vast network that blankets the city) had already tipped it off.

Michael Jackson dead was the scoop of a lifetime for any media outlet..

Really?

This is an odd story that seems to ask all the wrong questions and value the trivial, perhaps because the author is Australian and really doesn't get American journalism:

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 Associated Press.

Actually, mainstream journalists outside L.A. had probably never heard of TMZ ("A Web site reported it?") They trusted the L.A. Times and AP to confirm the facts, not just pass on the tip of a hospital employee, and official confirmation wasn't forthcoming. The hourlong wait for another source to report Jackson's death independently didn't help, and is partly explained by the fact that he hadn't been pronounced dead when TMZ reported it. It's customary here to inform family members before making a public announcement. (No further information on the unnamed hospital tipster, or on efforts TMZ may have made to confirm the facts, are offered.)

Brook seems surprised -- because both companies are owned by Time Warner -- that CNN wouldn't report "TMZ's claim," or trust its network of paid informers who'll drop a dime to make a buck in the starstruck 30-mile-zone around L.A. that gives TMZ its name. Celebrities are sitting ducks for the serfs who serve and tattle on them. Loosening lips, ethical constraints and loyalties with cash, TMZ is shooting fish in a barrel.

Scooping the coroner really isn't any news organization's finest hour.

 Tags  Michael Jackson TMZ

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