Starting a Celeb Site? Get Your Own Mel Gibson Racist Rant

Want to make millions online? Get your hands on a celebrity's racist rant and start a website. Doesn't have to be in that order.

Bonus points if it's Mel Gibson.

It's hard to believe that less than five years have passed since Harvey Levin gave his gift of TMZ to Hollywood, a venture he founded in partnership with AOL that, at its launch, was more than a little hard to stomach. Eight months later, Gibson made it impossible to avoid.

Mel's original drunken, anti-semitic spittlefest was captured only in a police transcript, but it was a huge scoop for the fledgling property -- and a watershed moment in American celebrity media culture. You remember where you were when you first read about it (and probably wondered, "what's 'TMZ'"?).

This time, Gibson's bile spewed from RadarOnline, TMZ's closest competitor, now deep into its second year of existence. You will remember where you were when you first heard about it (and clicked over to RadarOnline, possibly for the first time, to listen).

The web-only arm of American Media Inc. didn't come out of the blue here -- RadarOnline owned the Sandra Bullock/Jesse James meltdown this spring, a story that's more suited to its celebrity/lifestyles skin than TMZ's more confrontational, legal/criminal zone. And what seems like many scandals ago, RadarOnline also had a vapor lock on the Octomom story, forcing newsroom managers all across California and the U.S. to squirm and dither at deadline for months. (Is it coincidence that Nadia Suleman and Oksana Grigorieva bear some resemblance, by the way?)

RadarOnline's short run at TMZ has been impressive -- though, as my friend and colleague Dominic Patten reminded me this evening, American Media has deep, thirsty roots in tabloid journalism. While the brand is fairly new, this is not their first rodeo over there.

But Mel Gibson was no doubt RadarOnline's first big, national, irresistible splash. Once again, ol' Braveheart himself has put an online tabloid squarely on the map.

Read the rest of this post at TheWrap.com.

 

Follow Josh Dickey on Twitter: www.twitter.com/joshdickey

Comments

[3fingerbrown]

10:33 AM on 07/16/2010

Why isn't there any reporting on the only interesting aspects of this story: When did this woman get the idea to secretly tape Gibson? How long was she taping him? Did she go directly to Radar with the tapes, or did she try to start a bidding war between Radar and TMZ? How much did she get from Radar to put their slimy online scandal sheet on the map? Who did the editing, and what was edited out?

I think readers might enjoy knowing how the celebrity-tabloid scuz bucket is constantly replenished.

[pchrun]

09:50 AM on 07/15/2010

Read the transcript from what the Mel Gibson rant would have sounded like on an iPhone 4.

WICKED FUNNY

http://www.dailygoat.com/?p=1659