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The Battalion
Page 3 • Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Diggin’ up celebrity dirt
Stars’ dark secrets exposed on the Smoking Gun Web site
By Michelle Megna
KRT CAMPUS
NEW YORK —William Bastone and Daniel Green, co
founders of www.thesmokinggun.com, are guys who don’t round
things off. Ask how many visitors their expose Web site had in
February, and they’ll tell you: 4,756,767.
It’s all in the details.
Consider the difference between reading in the newspaper that,
according to court documents, Michael Jackson allegedly molested
a young boy, or reading a graphic account of a sexual act from the
13-year-old’s 1993 deposition, which was posted on the Web site.
“It’s a much more compelling narrative,” Bastone says, dryly.
Remember Rick (Restraining Order) Rockwell of “Who Wants
to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”
What about bondage babe Sarah Kozer of “Joe Millionaire”?
The Smoking Gun broke those stories by posting the restraining
order against Rockwell, as well as stills from the Kozer videos. It
also busted Busta Rhymes’ contract request for ribbed condoms
backstage at concerts.
In fact, concert riders are such a hit with visitors to the site that
Bastone and Green created a “Backstage” section that currently
features 134 acts. There you’ll discover that J.Lo must have
designer candles, white drapes, white furniture and white lilies in
her dressing room.
But it’s not just sensational tidbits that make the site so suc
cessful. In addition to exposing celebrity foibles, it posts docu
ments such as prison, police and medical examiner’s records (such
as those relating to the death of Malcolm X). A flight manual
investigators believe was used by the Sept. 11 terrorists was also
posted.
“You will always find something at our site that you can’t find
anywhere else,” says Bastone.
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz believes that
“The Smoking Gun has become a journalistic gold mine because it
produces the one thing —raw documents— that every reporter
needs to nail down a story. Journalists get hundreds of tips and
mmors to check out, (and they don’t) always have the time to go
through dusty files to find supporting documents (such as memos
and letters) for their stories.”
Kurtz refers to the period in 2001 when a number of prominent
journalists wrote “embarrassing suck-up letters to (Unabomber)
Ted Kaczynski” in an effort to get an exclusive interview.
Kaczynski ultimately donated the pitch letters to the University of
Michigan, which turned them over to The Smoking Gun. “That
story never would have seen the light of day without the Gun site,”
says Kurtz.
Larry Pryor, professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg
School for Communication and executive editor of Online
Journalism Review, says that print
and broadcast media, constrained
by space, time and advertisers’
sensibilities, can miss the essence
of a story by glossing over the
details.
“I saw TV reporters who start
ed to read the Jackson document,
(but) because it was too graphic,
they paraphrased (it) with ambigu
ous language,” Pryor says. “What
works really well in online jour
nalism is documents. The
Smoking Gun had the whole dep
osition, made under oath. It’s sen
sational, but it isn’t gossip, and it
leads the public to think we have a
right to prosecution. Where’s the
DA?” (A civil suit by the boy’s
family was settled out of court.)
Before creating their niche in
cyberspace, Bastone and Green
worked in print: Bastone was a
crime reporter for The Village
Voice, and Green worked as a
freelance magazine writer. As
investigative journalists, the two
accumulated a collection of FBI
reports, court affidavits and
memos.
They realized the powerful effect raw documents can have on
readers —seeing an FBI “confidential” stamp makes you feel like
you’re in on the discovery, part of the gumshoe game. In 1997,
they first posted their collection on the Web, never expecting their
project to become a full-time occupation.
“They’re good at fact-gathering and have a good sense of tim
ing,” says Pryor. “They’re topical. And they’re focused on a spe
cialized beat. That’s one reason why they’re capable of beating
large organizations that have to focus on the bigger picture.”
Another plus is that it often takes less than 20 minutes from the
time a document is discovered to confirm and post it, says
Bastone, giving the site what amounts to a journalistic fast break.
Armed with little more than the Freedom of Information Act,
help from two other reporters (Joseph Jesselli and Andrew
Goldberg), computers and scanners, Bastone and Green work in an
office in the East 30s that was once Court TV’s mailroom. “We
follow leads for months. We check court dockets, municipal
records, things like that,” says Green.
Scott Pansky, president of the Entertainment Publicists
Professional Society, disagrees. He thinks the site is more about
Andrew savulich • KRT CAMPUS
Smoking Gum’s founders Daniel Green, front left, and William Bastone, front right, work with reporters Andrew
Goldberg, left rear, and Joseph Jesselli to dig up newsworthy documents.
digging up dirt than uncovering compelling facts. “They’re taking
advantage of people in the limelight, and of the sensationalism of
being a celebrity,” he says.
As for the site’s greatest hits, Bastone says, “Anything bad
that’s related to a reality TV show came out of this office. We sort
of lump all those together as our best stuff. It just never ends.”
It’s not just PR reps who have been unhappy about The
Smoking Gun’s popularity, though. Consider Jim Weir, a graphics
designer in San Francisco.
His Web-design business, called Smoking Gun, resides at
www.smokinggun.com (no “the”). This makes Weir the digital
equivalent of the family with the phone number one digit off the
local pizza parlor’s.
Thanks to millions of people looking for The Smoking Gun,
traffic to Weir’s site has risen so much that his service provider is
charging him extra.
And after getting some 3,376,831 visitors on Feb. 11, Weir
posted his own memo: “There are no documents on Joe
Millionaire, Michael Jackson or anyone else at this Web site.
There never were. Don’t e-mail asking where they are.”
“He’s called a few times to speak with us,” Bastone says with a
chuckle. “Maybe we should let him call collect.”
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