L.A. Confidential 2007

HOW RENEGADE BLOGGERS AND FEARLESS PAPARAZZI HAVE REINVENTED THE WORLD OF HOLLYWOOD GOSSIP

n a Friday night last November Michael Richards was

performing stand-up at the Laugh Factory in Los An­geles. A group of young black men in the cheap seats started heckling the comedian, who looked very much like Kramer, the character he played in Seinfeld. But then, sud­denly, the kooky guy from across the hall lost it.

"Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass," Richards screamed at the heck­lers. One of the young men had already started filming the tirade. Richards continued, "You can talk, you can talk, you can talk. You're brave now, motherfucker. Throw his ass out. He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger; look, there's a nigger!"

The guy with the camera happened to have a friend at TMZ.com, an entertainment-news website named for

the "30-mile zone" around Hollywood, a show-business

moniker for the concept that anything important to the industry occurs there. The footage was live on the site by 8:30 a.m. the following Monday. The next day the story was all over the newspapers, even commanding the tab­loid covers. But by then anyone with an insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip had already gotten the goods.

The Richards rant was the top video of 2006 for TMZ, a year-old site owned partially by America Online-clocking in at a staggering 4 million streams. "Seeing is absolutely believing," says Harvey Levin, TMZ's fast-talking, perma-tanned managing editor, who oversees a staff of 25 in Clendale, California. "Now we do it only if what we know we're getting is true, and that has changed the game."

Thanks to TMZ and a growing handful of other sites

devoted to posting footage of celebrities misbehaving in the YouTube era, the gossip game has dramatically changed. Gone are the days of name-brand gossip columnists hobnobbing with socialites and celebrities for scoops in gilded dining rooms and at red-carpet premieres. Cone is the gravi-tas of columns conjecturing about which boldfaced name may be getting drunk, divorced or dissed. What use is conjecture when you can watch hard-partying oil heir Brandon Davis talk trash about Lindsay Lohan's "firecrotch" or read the police report of Mel Gibson getting arrested for drunk driving while spewing anti-Semitic slurs—practically in real time?

"I think it's the Wild West out there," says venerable publicist Ken Sunshine, who represents tabloid mascots Justin Timberlake and Leonardo DiCaprio. "It has certainly dramatically changed the nature of the way celebrities get covered, and I don't know if that's for better or worse."

Now it's a game of getting the gossip on­line quickly and with empirical evidence on sites like TMZ and The Smoking Gun and having those reports instantly dissected on gossip sites, including Gawker, Defamer, Fleshbot, Jossip, Hollywood Tuna, Pink Is the New Blog, Perez Hilton and dozens of others. The new need for speed means that when Paris Hilton backs into a car or Britney Spears flashes her perfectly waxed crotch, you are there. The image spreads across the world in mere seconds and forces mainstream media to cover scandals that would once have been deemed too poten-

tially libelous for publication. "Traditional media are embracing these stories more than ever before because people like read­ing them and they know they're legit," says Levin, also a lawyer, a former TV newsman and the onetime executive producer of the syndicated entertainment show Celebrity justice. Sunshine, along with most other celebrity publicists, thinks this is perhaps the worst thing about the new-media gossip era: "Legitimate news outlets that cover celebrities will now just pick up what's posted on these sites and think they're covered legally."

Even if mainstream media won't cover a celebrity scandal that breaks online, the scandal lives forever in a hyperlinked inter­national network of blogs. Just over a week

after the Richards rant, Britney flashe her vagina to the paparazzi while exit­ing a car. Fleshbot ran the picture and expressed disappointment that the shot wasn't more revealing: "You can't see a goddamn thing; there's not even the barest hint of a peach cleft or land­ing strip to indicate that you are, in fact, looking &±-at actual female pu­denda and not the glossy, rounded surface of a life-size Barbie-doll crotch." A day later Britney flashed the photographers a much more sat- j isfying X-rated shot while exit- ¦=^ ing Paris's car. It was almost === as if Britney had hiked up her short dress (sans under- '^j— wear) for the cameras. You could see everything-even the C-section scar-on Fleshbot and the numerous sites that subse­quently linked to it.

A month later the incident was still hot in the blogosphere. Gawker, which is owned by Nick Denton (the same New York-based publisher of Defamer and Fleshbot), ran a post / titled "Britney's Vagflash: The | Breakdown" with an accorrtDanv- B

ing pie chart. Pre-"vagflash, 59 percent of Britney's press reports mentioned her divorce. After the flash, 44 percent of her press reports mentioned the vag, usually in the headline or first paragraph.

Cawker associate editor DoreeShafrir, a 29-year-old Columbia Journalism School gradu­ate, says she was inundated with responses to her posts about the vagflash. In a meta-moment Shafrir also posted an interview with Levin of TMZ and an unnamed photog­rapher about the provenance of this crotch shot. "The role of a gossip blogger is to offer fresh insight and perspective." says Shafrir. "No one cares if you're first anymore."

Instead of being first, blogs now try to get hits for fresh commentary and have that commentary linked on other blogs to drive traffic and increase ad revenue. "It's not that Lindsay Lohan fell down and broke her wrist," says

avid Hauslaib,

the cherub-faced

editorial director

of lossip, which

gets about

50,000 hits a

day. "It's how

Lindsay's pub-

L licist is trying

to SDin it." The

commentary doesn't even have to be par­ticularly juicy. Levin says a seven-second video posted on TMZ of Britney walking down a hotel lobby corridor commands an insane number of hits. "People want to know if she's gained weight or if she looks happy. Has she changed her hair?" Many paparazzi videos featured on sites like TMZ and X17online.com are equally boring-endless shots of celebrities in bad lighting, waiting outside a club for the valet to bring their car. But for many readers it's almost like being there. Even network TV is impressed: Fox is creating a TMZ-based TV show for the fall.

Shafrir works part-time at the Cawker headquarters in SoHo, in a street-level loft where about 25 people under the age of 35 sit in front of Mac laptops and Dell desktops all day, surfing the Net. On a re­cent Thursday afternoon the bloggers are silently working while Bob Dylan plays from someone's computer. There is intermittent giggling as they stumble upon something funny in the biogosphere and presumably link to it. Book galleys, magazines and newspapers cover most of the shiny black desk surfaces. By five p.m. they are clearing out after a long day. Shafrir and her cohort, Emily Could, head to the unofficial Silicon Alley canteen, Balthazar, for a drink. Nei­ther has plans to hit any industry events to network and forage for gossip that night— highly unusual for two new hires under 30 in a high-profile media job.

I should know. Back when I was the gossip columnist for New York magazine, I would usually hit at least two events a night, and it almost always paid off with sources, quotes and items. It was a mandatory part of the job-cabs could be expensed. It was fine to show up at

the office around noon the next day if I had gotten good gossip the night before. Could, however, starts her day at the of­fice before eight a.m.

"We're certainly not on Nadine John­son's list," says Shafrir. She is referring to the invite roster of a powerful New York publicist who represents the nightclub Bungalow 8 and hotelier Andre Balazs, among other chic clients who host hot-ticket events. Johnson was once married to longtime New York Post Page Six gossip editor Richard Johnson, and it's hardly a coincidence that her clients are often men­tioned favorably in his column. (The couple has kids together.) "Some people see us as the enemy," adds Could, a dewy 25-year-old wearing a white sweater, tall white leather boots and jeans, "and some people see us as a frenemy-because we are."

Unlike the old guard of gossip colum­nists (see Liz Smith and Cindy Adams), the new Cawker gals are not interested in making friends with the rich and famous. They could care less about lunching at a media hangout like Michael's or dining at a glitterati clubhouse like the Waverly Inn. Not only do they shun the spotlight, they feel uncomfortable if it's pointed in their direction. Could's personal blog was recently hacked into, an experience she found extremely unsettling. It's hard to imagine she could muster the courage to try to interview a notoriously press-averse celebrity like Robert De Niro.

"We aren't starstruck like Perez Hilton," says Shafrir, referring to blogger Mario Lavandeira, who two years ago started a site named for his favorite celebutante. He's known for editorializing on paparazzi shots and recently wrote (in what looks like Wite-Out) the words tragic, mess and trash

across pictures of a bloated-looking Britney heading to a nightclub days before Page Six reported she was going to a "spa" to recover from a spate of intense partying. He also draws what he calls coke boogers coming out of celebrity nostrils and semen com­ing out of their mouths. He has dismissed some famous actresses as sluts and obses­sively speculates on which celebrities may be gay; he has been at least partly respon­sible for Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris publicly announcing their homosexuality. Despite all this, Perez Hilton gets major advertising from NBC, VH1 and the ABC Family channel-mainstream media out­lets eager to reach his 4 million daily hits. "If ABC Family is down with Perez Hilton," Lavandeira says, "my ad sales people are doing something right."

A larger-than-life character with black-framed glasses and hair color that changes weekly, (continued on page 136)

LA Confidential

(continued from page 74)

Lavandeira often gets photos by being invited to a party and posing with celebri­ties. He has become an Internet celebrity himself, complete with a failed reality-television show that never made it onto the air and lawsuits by paparazzi who claim he steals the photos on his site. "I'm on the Z-list," he says of his party invites. "Maybe one day I'll be on the S-list." Still, he counts Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson and Courtney Love among his friends and says about 50 percent of publicists get the joke. Tara Reid, however, once tried to get him kicked out of a party. (A recent post mentioned her "porn-star hair" and ridiculed the company that paid $100,000 for her to make an appearance.) He certainly has enough friends to keep getting big scoops. In Janu­ary he broke the news of Britney spending the night at the YV hotel in VVestwood, Cal­ifornia with a new guy. later identified as model Isaac Cohen. The next day People's and Us Weekly's websites followed Lavan-deira's scoop; Gawker did too but didn't credit him. "Gawker hates me because I threaten its existence," he says.

Lavandeira may be branding himself as the Paris Hilton of gossip bloggers, but Levin ofTMZ thinks bloggers shouldn't be stars. "I don't think people are into the personality of who gives them infor­mation," says Levin. "They're into the information." That's a far cry from what was once true of the Hedda Hoppers and Walter Winchells of the world, who leveraged their colorful personalities and exclusive perches to break news. The decreasing importance of having a bold­faced name writing a gossip column has also made the job less enticing. It used to be easy for Page Six to hire fresh tal­ent willing to work cheap for experience, exposure and endless invitations.

When I started my writing career at The New York Observer, in 1999, most of the big publications in town had big gos­sip and society columnists. W magazine, the Observer, Nnv York magazine, Us Weekly and the Times had a boldfaced-name col­umnist chronicling the rich and famous. Now most of them have abolished their gossip sections entirely. Only the fiercely competitive Daily News and Post still have established columnists cranking out daily copy—often lifted from websites. "Gos­sip blogs have certainly undermined lazy columnists," says Gawker found­ing editor Elizabeth Spiers, who now edits Dealbreaker, a Wall Street gossip blog. "Gossip blogs are threatening to traditional columns inasmuch as they can break news or have access to their celebrity subjects. And some of them do. If you're used to writing what's basically

a fluffy society column and you're not really breaking anything, it's going to be increasingly hard for you to compete because there are far more people who can and want to scoop you."

Lavandeira may get into some parties, but his presence is hardly coveted the way that of print gossip columnists has been in the past. For decades publicists have sucked up to those columnists enough for them to start feeling as if they're celebri­ties too. If you've ever read about a celeb­rity working out with a certain trainer, you'd better believe that trainer is also whipping the gossip columnist into shape. A random sighting of a celebrity at a store you never heard of? Not an act of char­ity. A table of B-list celebrities mentioned as dining at a mediocre restaurant? That came with a free meal—or five.

I wrote the gossip column for New York for two years, and I still get bins of invitations to exclusive events, even from publicists who would call me on publi­cation day to scream about an unflatter­ing item I'd written. During those two years I don't think I ever waited for one minute outside a red velvet rope or paid for a drink at a new club. One event planner sent an orchid every time I ran a picture from one of his movie screen­ings, so I usually had a fresh supply of flowers on my desk. A venerable publicist once called to beg—"I'm on my hands and knees!" she shrieked—for me to include a picture from her event, and I did because I liked attending her movie screenings and she could be a useful source. We all needed each other, and I was pretty popular—until 1 wasn't. But we'll get back to that.

Blogs have made it hard for publicists to play nice and get what they want. It has never been easy for a publicist to kill an unflattering item about a client, but there are ways. The best tactic is to Hade: offer something better, preferably about a com­petitor. This works well with the romantic lives of starlets, since someone is always hooking up or breaking up in a big soap opera that warrants endless coverage. (See Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan.) Another old strategy is to an­nounce something sensitive on a holiday when the public is too distracted to care, the big columnists are on vacation and most magazines are closed. Mike Myers announced his divorce on Christmas Eve, and Jessica Simpson announced her separation around Thanksgiving. Publi­cists also like to release exclusive photos of their clients looking perfect exiting a store or working on a set.

But it all went bust with the blogs.

"Enough of these staged photos with perfect hair and perfect makeup." says Levin, who has provoked the ire of paparazzi agencies for hiring his own pho­tographers. "It's not real. We show celebri­ties in real life. People are into that."

And if the celebrities aren't into that, they're in for even more trouble. When Woody Harrelson choked one of TMZ's photographers, the video image of the assault was immediately posted online. His publicist couldn't use the traditional tactic of refusing ever to give TMZ an exclusive interview with Harrelson or any of her other clients—a risk most glossy magazines can't afford to take. Blogs, however, don't need any gilded access. "My feeling is the rules have changed," says Levin. "It used to be publicists could bludgeon the traditional media, but I don't give a shit about get­ting a sit-down interview. They don't have that bargain with us."

Sunshine wishes bloggers would regu­larly call more for comment, confirma­tion or denial—as is protocol for most old-media gossip columnists with whom he has worked for decades. "The prob­lem is they often put stuff up with no basis of fact-checking," he says. "We may not tell them what they want and we may not answer their questions, but we can be guides about whether or not it's true. The amount of untruth is kind of unbelievable."

Instead of tips from publicists and celebrity friends, new-media gossip sites thrive on intelligence from loyal readers. Gawker gets about 500 e-mails a day from readers, many anonymous, though only 10 percent of those end up being useful. However, readers love writing in about celebrity sightings for the Gawker Stalker feature and even use old gossip-column lingo, such as "canoodling" for a couple making out. "Now everyone is a self-appointed jour­nalist," says Gould. (Back when I was a gossip columnist. I rarely got anything but spam and press releases e-mailed to the address printed at the bottom of my column. Only crazies called in tips.)

Bloggers also have the luxury of hurl­ing a rumor into cyberspace and seeing if it sticks. They can often figure out if it's true based on readers' e-mailed comments. II it's bullshit, there's often silence—never a good thing. In contrast, at New York magazine, I had to get each item I wrote fact-checked, confirmed by two sources and reviewed by a lawyer before going to press. I often had a hot tip I couldn't use because I couldn't gel it through all that red tape, and I increas­ingly saw it pop up on the blogs. The result was a fairly boring, albeit accurate column of about six items a week. Gould, meanwhile, writes 12 posts a day.

Besides getting tips via e-mail, blog­gers can instantly correct something if they get it wrong. Print columns, how­ever, have to wait at least a day before

running a correction. Kven worse, when a glossy screws up, the gaffe is on news­stands for a week. Last August Us Weekly ran a cover story about Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn getting engaged, and the magazine's editor touted the "exclu­sive" on the Today show. Aniston quickly rebuffed the engagement claim to gold-standard People magazine (which along with every other celebrity title has beefed up its website in the past year). Bloggers, however, just update their mistakes, mak­ing them part of the commentary—which brings us back to my brush with unpopu­larity in the gossip industry.

Last spring Random House pub­lished my first novel, 4% Famous. It's a fictional account of my experiences as a gossip columnist, and it didn't win me any friends in the industry. Right before it was published, Jared Paul Stern was fired from his longtime gig at Page Six for his alleged shakedown of super­market tycoon Ron Burkle, which had been caught on videotape. The fedora-sporting Stern allegedly proposed a deal with the much-covered billionaire: Burkle would invest in Stern's clothing line in exchange for friendlier coverage in the Post. As soon as the scandal broke online, almost all the major television networks and newspapers started calling me for commentary. (They didn't want to interview anyone at the Daily News or the Post, and not many other gossip colum­nists were left, for the aforementioned reasons.) I told pretty much anyone who asked that I thought Stern, whom 1 had known socially for years, was guilty of unethical behavior. I also said some bitchy stuff about how Page Six reporters think they're invincible—stuff I probably shouldn't have said out of professional courtesy to my former peers. "Anytime you want to stop trashing me is fine by me,' Stern e-mailed me. I considered it a fair enough request and told him I would heed it. Needless to say he didn't show up for my press lunch at Le Bernardin. Stern got the last laugh in January when, for lack of evidence, the government refused to press charges.

The Los Angeles Times incorrectly referred to me as a "former Page Six reporter" in a story about the scandal because 1 had worked in the features department at the Post for a year before going to New York, during which time I wrote about a dozen Page Six items. This perceived capitalizing on the Page Six reputation to promote my book pro­voked the ire of a Page Six reporter with whom I had been off-and-on friendly for years. (I'll call her Jane because if I use her real name she'll probably kill me.) We have a history of miscommu-nication, competition and fighting, a particularly volatile cocktail considering our profession.

Predictably, it didn't take long for our fight to hit the blogs, and it wasn't pretty.

11 all started when Jane sent me a slew

of threatening e-mails accusing me of mis­representing my ties to Page Six and call­ing me pathetic and shameless. She had always been tough-talking, but 1 found her tone particularly terrifying and even lost sleep over it. I forwarded the messages to the Post's publicist, who happened to be an old friend, and to Jane's editor, who knew about our rocky relationship. Jane didn't like that much, either. "May your climb up the social ladder of New York not have you shed so many friends—or 'frenemies' as you so proudly call most everyone—as this opportunistic stunt did," Jane e-mailed me.

Soon after, a reporter from Women's Wear Daily's media column called to get the scoop and wanted the e-mails, too. 1 wouldn't give them up. but he ran an item about the spat anyway. He men­tioned I had taken a catty swipe at Jane regarding her book deal a year earlier and how it may have been a kickback for Page Six's favorable coverage of the pub­lisher. Did I really say that? Yes. Was it wise? No. Karma's a bitch.

I gave WWD a quote saying I felt com­passion (a word I learned in yoga) for Jane because she had a lot of anger and jealousy. Jane thought I had planted that item, but I hadn't. I also hadn't given her threatening e-mails to Gawker, even though Denton had repeatedly asked me to. I thought it was time to act like a lady and let it die down. But of course it didn't. Jane declared me her archenemy, which I have to admit I consider a bit of an honor, considering her long and illustrious list of enemies.

It got only more dramatic. Last June I organized a "Gossip Lit" reading with other former gossip columnists at a downtown bar. A publishing gossip site, GalleyCat (part ofMediabistro.com), ran an item about how one of the writers, whose book party Jane was hosting, had pulled out. GalleyCat remarked that jane's "anti-Schoenemania is perhaps the worst-kept secret in Newr York." Fair enough. But then it got weird.

Early the next morning Gawker posted an item about how I hadn't shown up for the reading. I quickly e-mailed to say that item—which had already been linked on Jossip—was false: I had read from my book to about 100 people. Instead of deleting the item, the site ran an update: "Contrary to linkage below and elsewhere, Deborah e-mails to clarify that she did not cancel but actually read in front of a large crowd last night."

It was hardly a coincidence that Jane was friendly with a previous Gawker edi­tor who had written that post, as well as with Hauslaib of Jossip. I e-mailed Haus-laib, and he called me back right away. He alluded to Jane's hostility toward me being at the root of his nasty coverage of me and also posted an update about the reading. Still, it didn't stop him from taking a swipe at me months later in an e-mail about the swanky launch party for

Culture & Travel magazine. "We under­stand Deborah Schoeneman RSVPs to Diet Coke bottles opening," he wrote in a post blasted out to his entire mailing list. I e-mailed Hauslaib in protest (I went as a friend's plus one!), and he responded right away, saying it wasn't personal. Kiiight. He didn't change a word.

I decided to meet with him to ask about his tactics and was surprised at how sweet he seemed. At 23, he's the baby of the blogger group, having started his site while studying journalism at Syra­cuse University. "If someone is going to lake the effort to reach out to me, I'm more than happy to hear their case," said Hauslaib over snacks near his downtown apartment. "If we did something wrong, I'll own up to it." But still, his nasty items about me (and there are a bunch) pop up at the top of a Google search of my name. Thanks, Jossip.

We didn't speak about Jane at all, but

she was clearly on both our minds, and I suspect she remains one of his best sources. "At the end of the day," he said, sipping a Diet Coke, "I'm a firm believer that all press is good press. I understand what I do for a living. If you dish it out, you have to be able to take it."

Hauslaib broke the news about con­troversial book publisher Judith Regan being fired at the end of last year after the failed launch of O.J. Simpson's book // / Did It. He was heading home around seven p.m. on a Friday (the tabloid gossip columns for Saturday, Sunday and Monday had already been written) when a source e-mailed the information to Hauslaib's BlackBerry, perhaps the most important tool for any blogger. He quickly posted the news from his computer. "It was the timing," he said, shrugging. "I got lucky." He claimed it as an exclusive, but soon after his post the Times ran a

more thorough story. In the next week the news was constantly updated and dissected—pure blog candy.

In the tradition of print gossip colum­nist feuding, Gawker's Shafrir is quick to discredit Hauslaib's big Regan break. 'Jossip claims exclusives, but it's just an exclusive for 10 seconds." Shafrir says. "We don't want to claim anything as an exclusive," adds Gould. Unlike print col­umns, however, blogs need each other. One of the biggest pains of writing a weekly column is getting scooped by a daily one. "Readership and ad dollars don't rise and fall if another gossip blog has a big break." Hauslaib says. "When it comes to a blog, it's more crucial to have a distinct voice."

One link Jossip didn't pick up was a recent Gawker post about Jane. She had introduced a reading of famous authors on the topic of sex with a diatribe about her dismal dating history. "A concerned member of the community" transcribed Jane's candid speech and e-mailed Gawker the next morning. I read it with train-wreck fascination, feeling simultane­ously giddy and guilty. "You know it's not going well,' she said, "when 14 minutes into dinner you ask your date, who's a well-known Wall Streeter—you all know him: I just can't say his name—who's been going on and on about homosexuality, 'Excuse me, are you homosexual?' and he looks at you and goes, 'Not right now."' The dating dispatches got worse. "It's also not going well when you notice your boy­friend of several months—a well-known TV personality—can only get oil if he's having sex with you from behind while watching himself on TV. It's kind of like getting spit-roasted by the same guy."

After I read the post first thing in the morning, I went to yoga. On the walk back home I was gossiping about jane's dating diatribe with another media friend on my cell phone. I was just gabbing away, talking trash with my Iriend as if we were in Mean Girls. I stopped on a street corner, waiting for the light to turn. That's when I noticed Jane walking her dog on the other side of the street. I quickly hung up the phone—when I looked back up, she was gone. Part of me wanted lo run and catch her, to say I would help her get that post taken down. I wanted to ask why she hadn't responded to my two e-mails ask­ing her out for drinks to try to smooth things over. I wanted to assure her we would both fall in love one day, despite our checkered past romances with ego­centric men who wanted to date a gossip columnist. I wanted to say we weren't really all that different. Maybe there wasn't room in this big city for the two of us back when we were both gossip colum­nists, but I had moved on. I was out of her way. The nature of the beast had changed, and it would never be the same.

I wanted to say I'm sorry.

TMZ,.com's managing editor, Harvey Levin (above left), and favorite target. Paris Hilton (right). "Seeing is absolutely.believing." says Levin. He's about'to start a TMZ TV show for Fox.

Bloggers feariessly attacked Mel Gibson (above) and others in ways real journalists never imagined, raising the stakes and lowering standards for mainstream media.

"The problem is they often put stuff up with no fact-checking. The amount of untruth is unbelievable."