Why is tmz blocked in the uk

Followers 0. Prev 1 2 3 Next Page 3 of 3. Recommended Posts. Bhav Posted January 3, Posted January 3, Unable to view the site here, using Sky Broadband Easynet or whatever it is. Update: Well it's true folks. TMZ got back to me and confirm the site is no longer available in the UK due to legal restrictions. No elaboration. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options Doesn't work for me on Virgin, whats tmz anyway?

It's working fine here. Zumiiiiii Posted January 3, O2 and opendns is fine. Levin was intelligent, but more importantly, he was telegenic, with the smooth talk of the most practiced lawyer and the charisma of a television star. In , Extra had already been on the air for more than a decade, amassing a trove of old footage of celebrities, all ready to be recycled and exploited on the cheap.

Which is exactly what Paratore would have Levin do. But the two companies had very different corporate climates, and struggled to foster the originally imagined cross-platform synergies. Paratore regaled him with stories of thousands of hours of unused Extra footage — the perfect candidate for an AOL collaboration. Multiple sources confirm that even today, he still uses an AOL email address, and all tweets from his Twitter account are automatically generated.

Plus, following the historic summer of , gossip was percolating at an alarming rate. Constantly updated, dynamic, with a strong authorial voice; snarky, immediate, and originating outside the carefully cultivated celebrity sphere. These bloggers were defined by their outsider status — and their very lack of access — but that outsider status and lack of capital also proved problematic. Hilton, for example, was sued multiple times — more than once for copyright infringement.

What these bloggers lacked was infrastructure and capital to expand and bolster their operations, all while keeping the same all-important outsider ethic. Which is precisely what an operation housed at Telepictures, with the larger launching pad of AOL which, in , still boasted an amplifying power of 22 million subscribers , could achieve. Rosenblum is son of former Warner Bros. The official staff eventually numbered a grand total of seven. The name needed to be catchy, different, and, most importantly, short, so as to better facilitate views via the burgeoning mobile market.

The only problem? The guy jumped at the offer, but Levin, according to a source, also knew that if he showed up with the cash in his Porsche, the URL owner would immediately up the asking price. The URL — and the brand — was theirs. On Nov. It was a splashy debut, bearing the hallmarks video footage, celebrity shaming, prodding the Los Angeles Police Department that would make TMZ famous — even if no one knew what TMZ meant. But it was a start.

The aesthetics that would go on to define the site are visible even then, albeit in slightly altered form: At first, yellow was the contrast color of choice, and would gradually transition to red, white, and black. In these ways, TMZ bore a resemblance to another ideologically disruptive publication: Confidential magazine, which, over the course of the s, exploited and amplified the anxieties of an American society very much in transition.

No reputable company would advertise in it. But by , it broke the record for single-issue sales, selling 3. Confidential succeeded because it offered something novel, dirty, and unspeakably sexy: the truth, or at least some rhapsodic version thereof. And it was able to — at least in the case of the most prominent and visible subjects — because of a significant change in the way that Hollywood managed its stars and their behavior.

In the s, a series of star-related scandals threatened to expose the industry to government-imposed censorship; to avoid that fate, the studios and the press that covered them agreed to a symbiotic relationship in which one would provide a constant stream of material about the stars and advertising dollars in exchange for the implicit understanding that the magazines would not print anything that contradicted the studio line of stars as moral exemplars.

What happened in the s, then, and what Confidential was able to exploit, was a disintegration of that system. The government-issued Paramount Decrees of forced the studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, effectively cutting off one of the major sources of income at the same time that the suburbs and television dramatically decreased the movie-going audience.

The studios began to downsize, severely cutting the number of stars on contract. Many quickly co-opted agents and press agents to perform the image and career maintenance previously performed by the studios, but the system of image management was in flux and primed for a magazine to come and exploit its vulnerability.

The aesthetic was all primary colors — bold, in-your-face — the exact opposite of the genteel, appealing aesthetic of the fan magazines to which he offered such a clear alternative in style, tone, and purpose. Which is all to say that TMZ has precedent and, more important, its tactics are nothing new. Harrison and Levin both developed a publication around their personalities and attempted to imprint their sensibilities as broadly as possible. Both were incredibly savvy about the law and the way to wield it in their favor; both relied heavily on the seemingly human impulse to trade secrets for money; both understood that secrets about race and sexuality, especially female sexuality, are the most effective ways to draw an audience.

He wanted tip-offs from them. A tit for a tat; a secret kept for a secret told. It was dubious moral algebra, but it was ruthlessly effective and presaged the way TMZ has maintained power.

The stars were contained, they went wild, and then they were contained again — until, that is, the internet and digital technologies sprung leaks in the once air-tight system of image management. All of which was beginning to percolate in —, both on the various independent gossip blogs and the nascent form of TMZ, which was beginning, ever so gradually, to develop a voice. When Knowles then called AOL, it also blew him off. According to multiple sources, the only coverage TMZ steered clear of was anyone, like Ellen DeGeneres, involved in Telepictures productions; other Time Warner properties were, however, fair game.

TMZ had the freedom of an independent operation, the savvy of decades of investigative reporting, the connections of more than 20 years in the Los Angeles court system, and the backing of a major conglomerate.

Because this was all before July 28, , when Mel Gibson was pulled over in the early morning hours for driving under the influence. As former staffers recalled, at 11 a. Gibson's booking photo after being pulled over in the early morning hours for driving under the influence on July 28, Four years later, RadarOnline ran damning audio of him seething about wanting "Jew blood on my hands" — essentially scooping TMZ on threats purportedly directed toward Levin and snuffing out a potential comeback.

It was because the police attempted to cover it up. According to several of his staffers at the time, Levin was driven to tirelessly pursue these scoops by a desire to dismantle the unspoken but elaborate system that exempted the high-powered and beautiful of Hollywood from the rules to which the rest of the world were held. Levin had spent nearly 30 years observing the system — cops, judges, prosecutors, juries — allow the beautiful, wealthy, and powerful to misbehave, sometimes with total impunity.

TMZ was his opportunity to right those wrongs. And it does, in some ways more superficial than others, remain the guiding ethos of the TMZ operation today. There were subsequent scoops, but the site had to run content all day, every day.

Over the course of the fall of , reader preferences measured via clicks helped hone the pointy, aggressive tone that characterizes the site today. The more vanilla, People -esque coverage of celebrity goings-on began to disappear. In its place: exclamation marks, puns, and dirty jokes. If before, TMZ had adopted the flat, journalistic tone of The Smoking Gun , then, over the course of , it adopted the tone of a tabloid — especially when covering its own exclusives.

A sampling of headlines: From Oct. That voice coalesced via multiple channels. Headlines began to feature more puns, exclamation marks, and innuendo; content became incrementally harsher, meaner, crueler.

This shift had easily anticipated effects: First, several of those brought in to launch the site began to find the requisite compromise of their integrity increasingly troublesome.

As the site grew, so too did the imperative to produce original scoop ideas. June brought the site its biggest scoop yet, breaking the news of Michael Jackson's death, much to the horror of traditional news outlets. Every employee was responsible for one; if someone took your idea before you did, you were screwed; after enough screwups, you were done.

In the early years of the site, the work day was punishing — staff was expected to be up and at a computer for East Coast hours 6 a. PT and work well into the night; hour days were the norm. It was a highly alienating form of journalistic labor, and the turnover rate was high: Even a quick search of LinkedIn shows dozens of employees who stayed with TMZ for under a year; one source explained that dozens more would come for a one-week tryout and flame out immediately.