Paula Mejia

My name's Paula Mejia.

I am a writer and editor living in Los Angeles, and I cover culture, cultural phenomena, and arts for various magazines and other digital publications.

TMZ is a celebrity tabloid that is not print.

It's always been online.

And they have a reputation for being very aggressive in their tactics.

They like to get in people's faces and ask them questions.

They will go up to a crime scene.

They will publish photos that no one else will touch.

TMZ has drawn massive outrage after the tabloid published pictures of the late Liam Payne's body after the One Direction singer tragically fell to his death from the roof of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

They also have a controversial practice of paying sources for videos, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, depending on how juicy it is.

And they've been around for a little over two decades, yeah.

And just telling us all about the celebrity dirt for better and worse, so.

There is quite a degree of skepticism when it comes to TMZ, even though they do have a track record for breaking huge news.

Like they were the first outlet to report and confirm that Michael Jackson had died, for instance.

Michael Jackson, the coroner's report has come out.

So there's this kind of begrudging sense that they are able to get scoops very quickly, but there needs to be an additional layer of confirmation in order to be able to go forward with that news.

Where did the impulse to cover Washington, to cover politics come from?

So Harvey grew up in the San Fernando Valley here in Los Angeles County, and his father owned a liquor store in the area.

And when he was young, he...

saw that his father apparently was visited repeatedly by authorities who claimed that he was selling to underage patrons.