Gossip Cop

» see gossipcop.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Gossip Cop went up on 29 July 2009 with a job description nobody had written down before: take the celebrity stories the tabloids ran that week and publish a number saying how much of each one was real. Michael Lewittes, a working entertainment journalist, ran the desk. Dan Abrams, the legal analyst whose small media group also owned Mediaite, put up the other half of the operation.

The output was relentless and small. A headline claimed a couple had split, or that some feud was back on, and within hours Gossip Cop had a post under it with a rating attached. There was no essay. The site existed to close one loop, over and over, at the speed the tabloid cycle moved, which by 2009 meant several times a day.

The American tabloid economy this was built to police never had a version I could see from here. Turkey has magazin, its own celebrity press with its own long-running feuds, but nobody in Ankara was reading Us Weekly and nobody needed a website to tell them whether In Touch had invented a pregnancy. Gossip Cop was a correction layer on a specific set of American supermarket magazines, and if you were not already reading those magazines it had nothing to correct.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ten point scale ~

Zero meant fabricated. Ten meant accurate. Everything in between was a judgment about how much of a story had survived contact with the people it was about, and the number sat at the top of every post in a colored badge, which made the site scannable in a way a written verdict would not have been.

It worked well enough that mainstream outlets started citing it, and in November 2017 Elle described Gossip Cop as the Robert Mueller of the celebrity news world, which was the high point of its reputation and also the year the questions started.

~ three paparazzi photographs ~

BWP Media USA sued Gossip Cop Media in the Southern District of New York over three paparazzi photographs and a video the site had used without a license. Gossip Cop's defense was that it was in the commentary business, so the images were fair use. The court accepted the general principle and rejected it on these facts: the photographs were reproduced whole and unaltered, and were being used for exactly the purpose BWP licensed them for, which is to show what a celebrity looked like. BWP paid for its pictures. Gossip Cop took them.

After a bench trial on 6 June 2016 the court found the infringement willful and awarded $17,945. It is a small judgment and a strange footnote for a site whose entire premise was other people's sloppiness with the truth.

~ twenty one days in september ~

Lewittes sold in August 2019 to a company then called Gateway Blend, later Quillt Media, which owned a general lifestyle site named Suggest. For two years the two ran alongside each other. Then in September 2021 the merger became literal: gossipcop.com stopped serving its own pages and started forwarding to suggest.com. The archive shows the last working Gossip Cop homepage on 29 August 2021 and the first redirect on 20 September, with no captures in between, so the switch happened somewhere inside those three weeks and nobody wrote it up.

Suggest kept debunking tabloid stories under its own name for about a year and stopped in September 2022. That is the actual end of the practice Gossip Cop invented, a year after the brand that invented it had already been retired.

gossipcop.com is still registered and still answers. What it serves is 114 bytes: an empty page carrying one script whose only instruction is to send the visitor to a lander.

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