A hoax for TMZ on JFK

Monday found the celebrity gossip site had an exclusive on JFK on a boat with topless women. Here’s my post on it from yesterday including the update.

Turns out, the photo was real, just not JFK on board, but was from a Playboy shoot.

Oops.

Some of the comments from my series of posts on TMZ found that not all think TMZ’s work is newsworthy. Do we care that a president, dead since 1963, may have been fooling around on his wife?

I was thinking about this type of story this morning after getting a note from my co-worker Steve Carns.

A different time Paul. You and I would have ignored this story 60 yrs ago, just like we would have ignored the personal lives of FDR and his wife.

Is that true? Did the media ignore it? Or did that type of reporting not happen.

You hear how our country has lost its morals somewhere since then as people are getting divorces, having children out of wedlock or just plain fooling around with everyone.

Did we?

Or did that happen and we just didn’t say anything, report on it, or even do stories on that type of behavior?

Did our politicians and people of power behave in a clean manner? Or did we just not report on their private lives?

Was it news?
Is it news?

Production innovation at TMZ

TMZ app on the iPhone

Recently, I looked at the information gathering of celebrity website and TV show, TMZ. The post drew some interesting comments. Many of them are posted on my Facebook page.

If you’ve got comments, post them to the end of this article. I may have to write another post about the comments received and if its truly a news site that the rest need to pay attention to. Clearly, they are doing something right, even if it is mostly celebrities. But, when you’re the highest paid golfer in the world, your life is a matter of celebrity.

Let’s now look at their TV show now. I don’t watch the show on a regular basis, but when I have seen parts of it, I’m intrigued in the set up of the show. They are taping their morning rundown meeting. Probably one of the most fun parts of a day in any newsroom. You pitch a story, make a joke and move on. TMZ will then see the pitch, run the video and then come back for some newsroom or manager comments and then go back to more parts of the story.

There’s no cheesy anchor, camera moves or over-lit studios, just the newsroom staff doing their job and being videotaped at the same time. Maybe there’s a little mugging going on for the camera, but its low-cost production and gets the job done.

The gathering of news in the field is also impressive. Broadcast Engineering looked at the technical side of the gathering but revealed a couple of interesting tidbits in this article.

This is what is amazing to me. Throw away some traditional multi-person crews. Hello one-man-band with camera, laptop and wifi card.

From the Broadcast Engineering article:

TMZ uses cutting-edge news-gathering techniques to air segments, sometimes within minutes of an event actually happening. A group of young new media professionals serve as producer, camera operator and editor, while adhering to fierce deadlines that lead right up to show time.

These one-man-band shooters, who formerly worked on the Web site, went through several weeks of training on how to use the video equipment. Some currently roam the field using backpacks holding a MacBook laptop and a lightweight Sony Z1U camcorder with camera-mounted Focus Enhancements FireStore hard drive recorders. This enables material to be immediately ingested as a QuickTime file and processed for both TV and the Internet. It also allows the producers to use the HDV tape for backup and as an archive media.

There’s a couple of long-standing news gathering traditions thrown out the window. They get more people in the field, but they get what they pay for in some of the questions from the not-so-well-trained media-gathers. I don’t know if they are journalists or not, but that can be debated at another time.

So I ask you, is TMZ the new-media formula for gathering, displaying and broadcasting their information?