Kids Are Funny

The old TV show, “Kids Say the Darndest Things” is true. Whether said to Bill Cosby, who by the way is NOT dead, or Art Linkletter, who by the way IS dead, the TV show was a hit.

I even get my kids to say funny things. Noah’s flying joke anyone?

And kids used to re-enact things shows the absurdity of the show.

Case in point, the kids from Babelgum.com

I don’t watch MTV’s Jersey Shore, but I know enough about the show to find this one funny.

I’ve talked about my obsession with TMZ before, so this one is funny for me. I really like the Grover appearance. Also check out the camera height of the paps.

The first time I came across this site was because of the kids re-enacting the first Thanksgiving.

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show used to use kids to read Fox News Reports.

And if you poke around Babelgum you’ll come across this link to the Jewell undercover karaoke performance. Great stuff from the FunnyOrDie.com guys. The same ones that pitted Wil Farrell against Ruth the Landlord.

The Landlord from Will Ferrell

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?

TMZ and JFK

This is very weird that I write this note.

Just Saturday I had a conversation with family about TMZ and JFK.

I said, the world may be different if TMZ was around when JFK was in the Senate and when he running for president and then was president. I know I’m not the first one to say it and the statement was met with confirmation of, yup, no way JFK is elected if it were today.

There were always whispers about side dishes with JFK. But was there any concrete proof?

If the media hadn’t looked the other way, would he have been elected president? Did the media look the other way?

Who says its just now that you can’t let it all hang out now with everyone having a cell phone camera?

Apparently, JFK did let it hang out and now there’s a picture that TMZ says is authentic. Check out this story with a picture from 1956 (which we now know is from a Playboy photo shoot).

You decide when you click here to look at the TMZ story.

–UPDATE–
According to the Drudge Report, who’s citing The Smoking Gun website, the TMZ-JFK picture is a hoax.

But it still starts the discussion, IF TMZ were around during JFK’s time, would he have been elected president?

–Update from the Past–
I did do a couple of posts about TMZ in the last few days.
One was on how TMZ is changing reporting.
And Production Innovations is here.
And here are the comments.

TMZ Comments

Here are the comments posted to my Facebook page about the TMZ articles. I may add some commentary to them as well if warranted. Thanks for the great postings.

The first set of comments comes from the posting on how TMZ is leading the way on many stories, or breaking them more than other competitors.

Erik Maitland writes:

I, too, have realized how many times they have “broken”! they must be well connected!

Being connected is fundamental to reporting and not waiting for a press release to cross your desk.

Steph Boeding wrote:

I’m guessing they have “well-paid correspondents” on the staffs at all the hospitals in L.A…. I don’t know if I would call it “journalism,” but it sure gets them a lot of attention, and it pays the bills.

And Steph also wrote later in the comments section about the paying the bills part of the equation. Many operations are not paying the bills right now.

Mike Colon submitted two comments. Here’s the first one.

And its not just stories of drunken celebs outside clubs. They make some good points, too. There was a discussion on the show the other day about “why was it okay for Barbra Walters NOT to show Adam Lambert kissing a guy, but ten minutes later to totally show Lady Gaga kissing all kinds of chicks.”

The way TMZ started or how people think of them is drunk celebs, or just walking celebs with a few cameras in front of their face. I seem to remember Iowa’s golden girl Shawn Johnson having the TMZ treatment during her “Dancing with the Stars” days.

Michael Peterson writes about old school and how the new guard may be knocking on the door.

I’m afraid TMZ is part of a growing trend. Tabloid stories are now legitimate news stories. Call me old school, but I just don’t like the direction TMZ is taking broadcast journalism!

TMZ is telling stories that have gone on for years but usually never told. Many news organizations would look the other way on some of the drunken actors, bed hopping starlets and other issues that may have existed.

Actors and wannabe celebrities also subscribe to the school of thought that says a little publicity may help them get the next role or TV show or extend their careers a bit further.

Mr. Colon goes back to fundamentals of reporting. And he brings up a former co-worker of ours who was old-school and taught us much.

But it’s still journalism: you have to know what’s going on, know who to talk to, know where to be to get the story. Maybe they work on comission, but they still have to do the leg work to make the story happen. Ed Lewis (obit) (Paul knows who that was) lamented the lack of shoe-leather reporting; pounding the pavement to get the story instead of waiting to be handed one’s assignment. It might be obnoxious, and meaningless in the big picture; but what TMZ is doing is gathering the info that people want to know.

If you read that first article about TMZ in the NY Times, Harvey Levin, the editor of TMZ says traffic to the site shoots up when Brittney Spears is on the site.

Its like that old discussion, is it life imitating art, or is art imitating life? If the public wasn’t so darn interested in the news, they wouldn’t report it.

Emily Erickson adds a good consumer point of view.

Very disturbing – top news is Tiger sleeping around? As I said, disturbing…

When you are the highest paid golf athlete, if not the highest overall, you draw some attention to yourself and your life. When you drive TV ratings like Tiger does when he’s on TV or ticket sales at any golf tournament he plays in, you draw some attention.

But when the story reaches new heights that it has with Tiger, wow, you’ve got an oil gusher.

Now on to the next post on TMZ on their production and news gathering efforts in the field.

This post came from Tuesday’s post and this comment was left on my Facebook page by Zlatko Filipovic.

Yes, the news media is 5000 years behind TMZ. Of course there are ways to instantly upload video, images, you name it, to the internet. I cannot wait until the day I’m working with some forward-looking people in the media industry. This is ridiculous. Our computers in the newsroom are running on Windows 98.

For other comments, check out the comments section on both posts. Good stuff. Thanks for reading.

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?

Is TMZ changing reporting?

A young actress named Brittney Murphy died this weekend. Where did I learn about it first? The TMZ app on my iPhone. And it’s not the first time that app has given me the most current information and many times, is the first to tell me about it.

Regardless of what you think of their product, TMZ is a reporting force. They proved it again with the Tiger Woods story. They smelled something was up and kept digging. We now know they struck oil. Or several oil fields.

They dig up contracts, lawsuits, restraining orders, compromising photos. They know everyone involved and know how to find them when news is happening or as it’s happening.

Shoe leather. Sounds familiar.

This is not the first time that TMZ has been the leader in a big story.

Flash back to June and a lazy summer day when TMZ was the ONLY media outlet saying Michael Jackson was dead. There were several rounds of people on Twitter saying, “TMZ is the only one saying MJ is dead, if they’re wrong, ouch.” Well, as it turns out, they were right, they were first and they told the world the news.

After the MJ story kept going, the New York Times profiled the operation in a story. The article points out that TMZ has sources everywhere.

Sources. I’ve heard that term before.

They do pay for some things, photos, which all media outlets do, and will pay for tips, but stop at saying they don’t pay for stories.

From the New York Times:

Like many other media outlets, TMZ pays for photos. Harvey Levin, the site’s editor in chief, said in an interview that the site will pay “tip fees” that lead to stories, but not for stories outright. He refused to say whether he had paid any sources during the Jackson coverage but he denied that the site’s staffers paid police officials or nurses.

The upstart gossip blog is a gritty, some would say grimy, Web site that publishes celebrity news in real-time. It usually traffics in mug shots, rehab reports and other salacious tidbits about celebrities. TMZ first appeared in November 2005.

So I ask you, is TMZ a legitimate news organization to be modeled after? Or do you run away from it?

Tomorrow– TMZ is innovative when it comes to production of the show and gathering of information. So much so, it may put a few of us out of work.