TMZ.com expanding to TV

LOS ANGELES – Greetings from groovy Ground Zero for the crazy new world of celebrity gossip, the spanking new offices of TMZ.com.

That’s right, just across Sunset Boulevard from the Laugh Factory – the West Hollywood comedy club where former “Seinfeld” star Michael Richards infamously unleashed a racist rant last November – you’ll find the home of America’s No. 1 smoking hot entertainment news Web site (and soon-to-be TV show).

It’s a couple of quick, sun-splashed escalator rides into a trendy, three-story urban mall that also houses a Virgin Mega store, an art house movie multiplex and a gym called Crunch, where the stars come to sweat.

But none of those other businesses can claim what TMZ.com mastermind Harvey Levin proudly features out front on a wall as you walk into his den of young Internet tabloid headline hustlers.

And that’s a framed, personalized, handwritten thank-you note from frequent TMZ.com cover girl Paris Hilton, scribbled from jail the night before she was released after her recent incarceration.

“Dear Harvey, I just wanted to thank you for your fair and unbiased reporting of the events in my case,” wrote Hilton. “I truly appreciate it. I think TMZ is a great Web site because of its reputation for accurately reporting the facts. Thank you, Paris Hilton.”

The note is accompanied by Hilton’s self-portrait drawing, wearing her L.A. County Jail togs, with a TV hanging from the ceiling featuring Levin being interviewed on “Larry King Live” over her left shoulder.

Some media critics think TMZ.com (the TMZ initials stands for the “30-mile zone” around Los Angeles heavily inhabited by Hollywood celebrities) is the latest sign of the journalistic apocalypse.

But Levin and partner Jim Paratore’s thriving news-and-information Web site, increasingly utilized by mainstream news media outlets, is known for nailing down the straightforward facts and almost always being first with an endless array of photo- and video-punctuated scoops.

Those have run the gamut from the aforementioned, career-derailing Michael Richards meltdown, to Mel Gibson’s drunken, anti-Semitic tirade after being arrested in July 2006, to the sad, bizarre soap opera of Anna Nicole Smith’s death earlier this year, to a relentless cornucopia of celebrity party misbehavior and lawbreaking updates on Paris, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Now TMZ.com is ultrabusy readying for its next big challenge: taking that sizzling brand name identity to television with “TMZ,” a syndicated weekday series premiering nationally Sept. 10.

“TMZ” sure won’t be some glossy clone of “Entertainment Tonight,” “Extra” or “Access Hollywood,” Levin says. And he is adamant that the TV show will follow the same gritty, no-nonsense reporting philosophy as TMZ.com.

“We don’t do red carpets, we don’t do junkets,” he says, “and ultimately publicists don’t control us the way they control traditional media. Because if you’re doing a traditional entertainment show and you want an interview with Tom Cruise, when the publicist calls you up and says, ‘If you do that story, we’re not going to give you Tom Cruise,’ it means something.

“We don’t want the interview with Tom Cruise. We’re going to be fair, but we’re not going to fear publicists.”

A onetime investigative reporter at KCBS-TV in Los Angeles who also served as executive producer of the syndicated series “Celebrity Justice,” Levin is the face of the TMZ.com brand.

He’ll be the main guy on camera when “TMZ” goes on the air with its guerilla video style. Just saying “no” to pretty anchor people and a glossy TV studio look, he’ll be reporting instead straight from TMZ.com newsroom offices, staffed mostly by an eager posse of young online news, information and gossip hounds in their 20s.

Despite the preponderance of naughty Hollywood celebrity news nuggets on TMZ.com, neither the Web site nor the “TMZ” TV show is restricted to La La Land topics.

“The 30-mile zone is a metaphor for famous people who are hot in the moment in time,” says partner Paratore, “and we’ll track those stories wherever they are. We’re in New York. We travel overseas. Wherever the story is, we’ll go, but right now a lot of it is breaking in L.A.”

Meanwhile, Levin is getting fed up with suggestions by some that TMZ.com is somehow contributing to the decline and fall of Western civilization.

“I think it’s totally not true. It’s bogus,” he says testily.

“I love watching sanctimonious anchors on cable saying, ‘Oh, I refuse to read this story.’ You know what? I don’t apologize for doing Paris Hilton. The fact is I think the world is like a magazine. It’s not like the front page of a newspaper.

“And people like important stuff. They like features. They like snarky things. They follow these celebrities, and they want to see what they look like when they’re not wax figures on a red carpet.”

Levin, Paratore and their colleagues insist that what TMZ is really doing is just old-school journalism – with rigorous research, fact-checking, sourcing and lawyering – in a modern online and soon-to-be TV environment.

“Oh, everything is lawyered,” says Levin. “I’m a lawyer, too, and I’m really tough on it. Accuracy I think is everything. If you lose accuracy, you’re dead.”