TMZis a tabloid news organization owned by Fox Corporation. It made its debut on November 8, 2005, originally as a collaboration between AOL and Telepictures, a division of Warner Bros., until Time Warner divested AOL in 2009. On September 13, 2021, Fox Corporation acquired TMZ from WarnerMedia for $50 million.
The name TMZ is derived from the acronym for thirty-mile zone that was historically used in the film and television industry to refer to the so-called "studio zone"—an area with a 30-mile (48 km) radius centered on the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. It was called the studio zone because of the number of film and television studios within it.
TMZ's managing editor is Harvey Levin, a lawyer-turned-journalist who was previously a legal expert for the Los Angeles television station KCBS-TV. While the TMZ website claims that it does not pay writers for stories or interviews, Levin has acknowledged that TMZ does "sometimes pay sources for leads on stories".
