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The Digital Dirt - How TMZ gets the videos and photos that celebrities want to hide.

It's a detailed look at TMZ including a profile of founder Harvey Levin, how they source their 'stories', what they pay, atmosphere in their newsroom, agents that they have tracking down scandals, the ethics of paying sources, the push/pull relationship that they have with celebrities and publicists, etc... They talk about some of the major stories they've been involved with over the years from Ray Rice to Mel Gibson, Bieber, and Michael Richards. It's a lot more interesting than I thought it'd be.

A few sections:

“How does TMZ get this stuff?” Kurtz asked.

“It’s so funny to me that people ask that question,” Levin replied. “We’re a news operation. I mean, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” Indeed, the site has built a deep network of sources, including entertainment lawyers, reality-television stars, adult-film brokers, and court officials, allowing Levin to knock down the walls that guard celebrity life. (He declined repeated requests for an interview.) TMZ has paid at least one mole inside B.L.S., a limousine service, to provide lists of celebrity customers, their planned routes, and the license-plate numbers of their vehicles. (In a 2015 e-mail, a TMZ employee asked colleagues if anyone had yet established a source at Uber.) Justin Kaplan, a former production associate at TMZ, recalls meeting a B.L.S. source—“a Hispanic gentleman”—at a gas station in Van Nuys, handing over an envelope filled with cash, and receiving in return a client list. The process had been so well honed, Kaplan told me, that “we barely said a word to each other.”

At least one employee of Delta Airlines supplies TMZ with the names and itineraries of celebrity passengers travelling through Los Angeles and New York. In an e-mail dated January 29, 2014, a TMZ manager informed her colleagues that the star of an ABC drama had been spotted sitting in first class, in seat 2A, on Delta Flight 1061, from Orlando to Los Angeles, when his plane was rerouted to Dallas—the result of a bomb threat issued on Twitter. Such information helps TMZ’s crew of a dozen or so paparazzi know when and where to “drop in on” a celebrity who is transiting through an airport. One day’s list, from June, 2010, included the flight details for Robert Redford and Jack Kevorkian; another one, two months later, had the itineraries of Julius Erving, Kathy Ireland, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner. “It’s not an accident the guy with a camera is waiting at the Delta check-in counter at 8 A.M.,” a former TMZ employee wrote, anonymously, on Defamer, a Hollywood site owned by Gawker.

TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons. In an e-mail from last year, a photographer reported having four airport sources for the day, including “Harold at Delta, Leon at Baggage service, Fred at hudson news, Lyle at Fruit and nut stand.” A former TMZ cameraman showed me expense reports that he had submitted in 2010, reflecting payments of forty or fifty dollars to various sources: to the counter girl at a Beverly Hills salon, for information on Goldie Hawn; to a valet, for Pete Sampras; to a shopkeeper, for Dwight Howard; and to a waiter, for Hayden Christensen. “Everybody rats everybody else out,” Simon Cardoza, a former cameraman for the site, told me. “That’s the beauty of TMZ.”

But Levin was not interested in managing a site that functioned as “another thing to puff up Hollywood,” Bankoff recalled. Instead, Levin proposed adapting the combative spirit of “Celebrity Justice” to the pace of the Web. “ ‘Urgency’—Harvey used that word all the time,” Jeff Rowe, another former AOL executive, told me. “He wanted a site that created a sense of urgency.”

The site needed a name, and “Feed the Beast,” “Frenzie,” and “Buzz Feed” were all considered, according to Rowe’s notes. Then, one day, a Telepictures executive suggested “Thirty Mile Zone.” It was an old movie-industry phrase, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, which designated the industry’s boundaries in Los Angeles. Levin suggested an abbreviated version: TMZ.

The domain name tmz.com, however, was owned by a man who built robots—the site’s initials stood for “Team Minus Zero”—and he showed little interest in selling. “We had the guy’s name, and we knew that he worked at a computer-parts company,” Rowe said. One day, Levin decided to go see the man, and he asked to borrow Rowe’s modest rental car, so that he wouldn’t appear to be wealthy. (Levin drove a Mercedes.) “Harvey called him up, went over, wrote him a check for five grand, and bought the URL,” Rowe said.

In November, 2005, TMZ began operations, on the second floor of an aging studio complex in Glendale. On one of the first nights, its lone cameraman caught Paris Hilton and her boyfriend leaving a club in her Bentley, crashing into a parked truck, and fleeing the scene. It was an auspicious start, and Web traffic soon soared to more than ten million unique visitors a month. (Last month, according to Quantcast, TMZ.com recorded more than seventeen million.) Levin has compared the launch to the opening of the Gap in Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union: “Everybody wore gray coats, and then the Gap came in and suddenly you saw blue coats and red coats and green coats. People had choices. When people have choices, you can’t sell that gray coat anymore.”

Last April, Levin gave a lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, titled “The New Journalistic Environment.” A few minutes after 7 P.M., he came onstage wearing a blue V-neck sweater, slip-on sneakers, and baggy stonewashed jeans.

In opening remarks, Sheila Sullivan, the acting executive director of the U.C.S.B. media center, which served as host for the event, described Levin’s reporting as “very powerful and impactful.” When she mentioned that Levin graduated from the University of Chicago, “one of the top five law schools in the nation,” Levin interjected, “Three.”

He spoke for thirty minutes, describing how TMZ had broken down the barriers once maintained by publicists. He discussed his plan to create another news show, and said he was in the midst of developing a game show. (The first episodes of the game show, “South of Wilshire,” recently aired.) He predicted the demise of cable television (and the Internet) and said that, in an age of digital disruption, media companies need to “evolve or we die.” At one point, he said, “When I first heard rap, I thought, That’s not gonna last. And it was really a stupid comment. . . . Ask me anything about rap now. Almost anything. Honestly, I go to a black barbershop now. I do. I’m into it.”

In a Q.-and-A. session after the talk, a student asked Levin how he had obtained the video of Solange attacking Jay Z in the elevator of the Standard. “I’m not gonna say,” Levin replied, emphasizing the importance of protecting sources.

Other hands went up. “I watch your show so much, read the Web site, like, all the time, so you’re just, like, my idol,” a young woman said. Levin replied, “Thank you. Wow. That’s sad.”

Another woman asked Levin what he thought went into making a successful journalist. “Good stories don’t come easy,” Levin said. “You get shut down all the time, and if somebody shuts the door you’ve got to find the way around the door.” He said that he told his staff, “Find twelve ways around the word ‘no.’ ”

Much more via the link.