Harvey Levin - FishbowlLA

Tony Ortega Puts the Skids on Tom Cruise TMZ Item

Richard Horgan — Sat, 25 May 2013 10:05:19 +0000

Here’s a suggestion for TMZ. When the next need-for-verification Church of Scientology-tinged item comes along, like this Friday afternoon EXCLUSIVE speculating that a pair of wee-hour motorcycle riders were Tom Cruise and girlfriend, check with Tony Ortega first.

The former Village Voice editor-in-chief works tirelessly at the helm of his must-read Scientology blog The Underground Bunker. No one knows more about CoS celebrity members past, present and near future-than this guy. If TMZ had checked with Ortega, they could have easily avoided this Saturday morning admonition:

This isn’t the first time that ex-Scientologist Tiziano Lugli has been mistaken for Tom Cruise zipping around Hollywood on his Ducati motorcycle.

But TMZ? You’d think Harvey Levin’s outfit would want a bit more confirmation before deciding that a video of Tiziano and his wife Jamie is Tom Cruise and his “Rebound Chick.”

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Alan Citron Moves Over to Yahoo

Richard Horgan — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:30:04 +0000

LinkedIn remains a very handy tool. Per a FishbowlLA tipster, it does indeed appear that Alan Citron is newly installed as a business lead with Yahoo Entertainment.

Citron, one of the genuinely nicest guys in town, has had a long, illustrious career, one many journalists today would pine for. After working for more than a decade as a reporter and editor at the LA Times, he segued to Ticketmaster Online and MusicNet.

Most recently with BuzzMedia (a.k.a. SpinMedia), Citron was instrumental as founding GM in helping the late Jim Paratore and Harvey Levin build out TMZ. His fellow TMZ-er at Buzz-Spin, Gillian Sheldon Heckendorf, previously left for Berman Braun.

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Howard Bragman Chats with Magic Johnson’s Outed Son

Richard Horgan — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 07:00:16 +0000

On the latest edition of the YouTube interview show GWISSUES, Earvin Johnson III (a.k.a. EJ) says that the person shown on TMZ TV walking with him hand-in-hand on the Sunset Strip was not actually a boyfriend but rather his best friend. Nevertheless, the April 2 report led to Magic’s son being outed in the media and EJ’s dad doing a subsequent interview with Harvey Levin.

Johnson tells host Howard Bragman that in addition to his current focus on an event planning and hospitality degree at NYU, he has a personal passion for media and journalism. One day, he tells the former uber-publicist, he hopes to host his own TV talk show.

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Variety Film Editor Josh Dickey Heading to TMZ.com

Richard Horgan — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 16:20:04 +0000

Big news this afternoon on the Hollywood trades front. And it’s Nikki Finke once again letting the Variety cat out of the bag.

Film editor Josh Dickey, who recently lost his pit bull reporter Jeff Sneider, has accepted a job with TMZ.com. He will be the site’s new managing editor. From Finke’s brief dispatch:

Dickey will become TMZ’s managing editor after giving his notice at Variety where he was film editor. Variety’s New York editor Jill Goldsmith was let go on March 8th as was Variety’s creative director Paula Taylor more recently.

This is a huge score for Harvey Levin. Dickey, formerly of TheWrap, is leaving the trade quadrangle for a site that sometimes spends a little bit too much time in the sensational gutter. Hopefully, he can temper that. For example, TMZ.com recently got a lot of flack from the family of a Hollywood nightclub shooting victim for airing full cell phone video footage of the crime.

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Harvey Levin Seeking SXSW Job Candidates

Richard Horgan — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:00:52 +0000

There’s a ton of new job ads today on Mediabistro, including one that has us tipping our hat to TMZ. The managing editor search starts off with a delightful setting of the newsroom scene:

No need to have experience in Celebrity News – it’s not brain surgery.

Excepting perhaps future coverage of a famous person admitted to Cedars-Sinai for treatment of a serious head injury, that is absolutely correct. Then comes the cool kicker. Site founder Harvey Levin is going to be traveling to Austin for SXSW and is more than willing to make time for worthy candidates while there:

Harvey will be at South by Southwest on Saturday and Sunday, March 9th and 10th. He’d welcome meeting qualified candidates.

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Business Insider Gets to the Bottom of Splash News-Princess Diana Movie Partnership

Richard Horgan — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:45:49 +0000

Here’s a good example of how to take “hat/tip journalism” to the next level. It comes from Aly Weisman, editor of Business Insider’s entertainment vertical.

Picking up on a brief September Hollywood Reporter item, USC grad Weisman went ahead and contacted Splash News CEO Gary Morgan. To find out exactly why the makers of 2013 biopic Diana starring Naomi Watts would partner with an entity most such productions normally work hard to keep at bay:

“Traditionally, the production company will hire an on-set photographer,” explained Morgan. “And that photographer will take pictures that they want to release over time for the production, to draw attention to it. And they will then take these pictures and give it to a PR company who will then place that picture in what they think are high traffic or important magazines or newspapers. These PR companies are usually territory-based and don’t deal with a mass audience on a day-to-day basis. They’ll deal with the top-tier, like People magazine, or Entertainment Tonight, or someone like that.”

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National Enquirer Loses Three Reporters*

Richard Horgan — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 09:45:10 +0000

Here’s a question for all those inquiring minds out there: How do you put out a competitive celebrity gossip weekly when you’ve got a diminishing number of full-time reporters on the ground?

FishbowlLA is hearing that the National Enquirer has laid off Los Angeles staffers Sarah Cordes and Jon Boon.* It’s not clear whether they are being replaced or their responsibilities amalgamated. In a possibly related move, British born veteran New York Enquirer staffer Alexander Hitchen has reportedly chosen to move on to the greener pastures of the New York Daily News.

It’s hard not to think of the letters T-M-Z in this context. The Enquirer, once the cock of the celebrity gossip walk, has been overrun by Harvey Levin’s tour buses, TMZ Live, TMZ syndicated show and poll-tastic website.

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Baldwin, Cooper and Republican Strategist Blaze July Media Trail

Richard Horgan — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 10:00:44 +0000

In the space of just a few hours today, all media hell has broken loose. On what was supposed to be a lazy holiday-week Monday.

Via Daily Beast email-share exclusive, Andrew Sullivan has officially confirmed CNN newsman Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation. In a tease for their August issue interview cover story by Todd S. Purdum, Vanity Fair dangles a hellacious quote from Alec Baldwin about TMZ’s Harvey Levin. And on the front page of the LA Times, Republican TV ad guru Fred Davis reveals to reporter Mark Barabak that Obama regrets, he’s had a few.

Add in the Cruise-Holmes mess and this is about the wackiest July media kickoff in recent memory. Without even counting New York-based Susan Candiotti’s weekend CNN bomshell about some apparent Penn State, e-mail cover-up orchestration.

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TMZ Disputes KABC’s Lindsay Lohan Report

Marcus Vanderberg — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 12:16:28 +0000

According to KABC, Lindsay Lohan was rushed to the hospital after she was reportedly found unconscious in the penthouse of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey Friday morning.

But leave it to TMZ to one-up traditional media outlets once again as Harvey Levin‘s team says Lohan not only never went to the hospital but she’s back on the set of her Lifetime movie:

We’re told someone became alarmed because they could not wake her up and the person called 911.

Paramedics responded, and determined nothing was wrong with Lindsay. They left without transporting her to the hospital.

Lindsay is back on set shooting her Lifetime movie, “Liz and Dick.”

As far as we know, Lindsay did not go to the hospital herself.

TMZ: 1, KABC: 0.

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TMZ Founder Jim Paratore Dead at 58

Marcus Vanderberg — Tue, 29 May 2012 15:49:32 +0000

Television executive and TMZ founder Jim Paratore died Tuesday of a heart attack during a cycling trip in France.

Paratore, 58, spent most of his professional career working for Warner Bros. He was responsible for not only starting the wildly popular entertainment website and TV show, but was the mastermind behind The Rosie O’Donnell Show, The Bachelor and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

“The Warner Bros. Television family has lost an incredibly talented and creative friend and colleague in Jim,” said Bruce Rosenblum, president, Warner Bros. Television Group. “He has left an indelible mark not only on our company’s success but on each of us who worked with him during the past 26 years. Jim had a passion for life, both inside and outside the entertainment industry, and he will truly be missed.” continued…

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Dylan Howard Takes Over as Celebuzz.com Editor-in-Chief

Richard Horgan — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:30:44 +0000

This is definitely one of the funnier ways we have found out about a major shift in the ranks of top-tier entertainment journalists.

A little earlier today, we posted an item about the new Chevy Chase audio released on celebuzz.com. We were a little confused, as the byline was that of Dylan Howard (pictured), for the past two and a half years the senior executive editor of Star Magazine and Radar Online. Thankfully, Howard has set us straight via email:

I joined BUZZMEDIA as editor-in-chief of Celebuzz just a few weeks ago. My appointment is part of an original content effort that is intended to make Celebuzz the leading celebrity news source.

We have an exciting opportunity to create the definitive celebrity editorial experience — where readers will find showbiz content that is authoritative, comprehensive and engaging. It isn’t just about breaking news reporting — it is a contextual editorial experience in categories such as television, film, style. We’re also building state-of-the-art video studios in both our Los Angeles and New York offices and intend on producing quality live programming, each day.

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INTERVIEW: Michael Lewittes on Becoming a Gossip Cop

Richard Horgan — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:00:23 +0000

Long before e-mail bulletins, tweets and Drudge Report siren headlines, there were alpha-numeric pagers and pay phones. As veteran east coast journalist Michael Lewittes recalls, these now antiquated devices played a key role in one of his earliest moments of reporter triumph.

“One night I was out to dinner and drinks with New York’s police commissioner and deputy commissioner,” Lewittes (pictured) tells FishbowlLA. “Across the pagers came the message that Tupac Shakur has been shot (not when he was murdered, but a previous shooting).”

“I got the scoop,” he continues. “I had to drop a quarter in a pay phone to call the desk at the New York Daily News. Just a few hours later, I was on the subway — en route to work — and the riders were reading the Daily News and our rivals, the New York Post. But only the Daily News had the Tupac exclusive that he had been shot outside of a recording studio on the West Side in New York. And it remained a Daily News exclusive all day long on the radio and news broadcasts.”

“Naturally, today that story would have been picked up in a split second, spread across the globe, and no one would have known it was broken by the Daily News.”

The era of “hat tip” entertainment journalism is replete with theft, cacophonous forward-momentum and miraculously scrubbed errant reports. Which for Lewittes, who moved on from the Daily News to Cosmopolitan, the Post, US Weekly and Access Hollywood, frames his latest gig. Since 2009, he has been calling out bad entertainment reporting on his well-respected website gossipcop.com. And he has, in part, Perez Hilton to thank for this.

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TMZ Live Coming to Fox 11

Marcus Vanderberg — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 22:00:52 +0000

Starting March 12 at 3 p.m., Fox 11 will test TMZ Live, a new spinoff of the nightly gossip news show.

Regular visitors of TMZ.com are probably familiar with the concept of TMZ Live, the weekday online show that gives fans a look inside the often hectic West Hollywood newsroom. Sirius XM picked up the show last year and now the one-hour broadcast hopes to find further success on TV.

“On TMZ Live, we invite people into this newsroom for an hour a day to see how we break stories and see the debates that go on,” TMZ founder Harvey Levin told Broadcasting & Cable. ”We talk with the celebrities who are involved in some of these stories. It’s not a structured talk show where everyone is on a stage; it’s being part of this room. Everyone has a voice in the room, so it’s very loose in that sense. There’s a free-flowing debate going on all the time. Viewers feel like they are part of this room and they see how TMZ works.”

TMZ Live replaces The Jeremy Kyle Show, which is moving to KCOP My13.

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TMZ Tracks Down Randall of ‘Honey Badger’ Fame

Matthew Fleischer — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:54:57 +0000

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Randall, the anonymous narrator of the viral YouTube “Honey Badger Doesn’t Give a Shit” meme, is anonymous no more. TMZ tracked him down in LA this week while hocking his new book Honey Badger Don’t Care: Randalls Guide to Crazy, Nastyass Animals.

He’s a little camera shy, but still manages to give a rather eloquent discourse on the social relevance of the honey badger, while simultaneously giving Harvey Levin a shoutout.

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Harvey Levin Lunches at the National Press Club

Richard Horgan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:00:04 +0000

Although Harvey Levin may not have yet launched satellite arm TMZ DC, he was at the National Press Club today as the organization’s luncheon keynote speaker. On the dais, Levin was joined by reporters from AP, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal and more.

Levin decided to change up what he had planned on speaking about, because of an earlier speech today to “depressed” media students at George Washington University. He noted that there had been a debate among professors as to whether Levin should even be invited to the college:

“It’s not the subject matter that’s covered, it’s how it’s covered. TMZ is a news operation that uses the same skills and standards that I used as a working journalist at various news operations… I want to talk about the delivery system. Because that’s what’s relevant, that’s what’s important.”

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