Levin's claims concerning the intensive vetting and verification of scoops are, by most accounts, true. TMZ, with the sizable and highly suable bank of Time Warner behind it, simply cannot afford to be wrong. Which is why TMZ relies so heavily on assets: tangible proof that something did happen, that someone did behave this way. It’s not libel, after all, if it’s true.

According to sources, TMZ writers go back and forth with in-house counsel several times a day, exchanging a word here, extracting another one there, in order for a headline or post to pass the standard for libel and defamation set forth by the landmark Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan. And it’s worked: At the time of this writing, TMZ has never been successfully sued for libel or defamation. (Which is not to say its reporting has been infallible: The site retracted a 2012 story about Janet Jackson slapping Paris Jackson and claimed that Lil Wayne was being read last rites after an overdose last year.)

The reluctance to sue, however, is also linked to “The Streisand Effect” — a term used to describe the way in which attempts to cover up a secret ultimately end up publicizing it even more. Put differently, going to the police to stop TMZ from using a video, photo, or other piece of information becomes tantamount to publicizing that activity.

According to this logic, a celebrity would rather be in thrall to TMZ than have certain revelations of their private lives made public — a notion substantiated by Justin Bieber's racist video. A look at TMZ’s extensive Justin Bieber archive reveals that on Jan. 24, 2011, the site published a year-old video of Bieber, taken at the approximately the same time as the racist joke video, phoning his mom to plead for permission to buy a helicopter. From that point forward, TMZ specialized in Bieber-related “exclusives”: on Feb. 6, an image of his Super Bowl cameo; on Feb. 21, Bieber phones into TMZ to talk about his much-anticipated haircut; on Feb. 22, TMZ publishes the first photos, heavily watermarked with the TMZ logo, of Bieber post-haircut. On May 13, exclusive details of his collaboration with President Obama to make a 9/11 orphan’s “dreams come true.” On July 11, exclusive video of Bieber and girlfriend Selena Gomez kissing during karaoke; on July 18, exclusive footage of them crashing a wedding; on Aug. 24, exclusive details of the “most romantic date ever” — a private dinner for two at Staples Center.

The list of exclusives extends for pages, suggesting a close collaboration between TMZ and Bieber’s management. According to TMZ, it chose not to post the video because Bieber “was 15” and “immediately told his friends what he did was stupid.” The statement does mesh with TMZ’s self-regulatory practices; as Harvey Levin put it in 2008, “Everybody has standards. That’s something that really matters to us and we deal with that every day. We turn down a lot of stories.” Maybe so. But as the trail of Bieber exclusives suggests, it might also get something in return.

TMZ also exploits a mostly untapped resource: the massive stream of court documents processed through the Los Angeles Court System. If you go to the ninth floor of the Los Angeles courthouse and know where to look, you’ll find the door to the “press room," dingy, with an overpowering smell of old flop sweat, and stuffed with dilapidated vinyl couches, cheap office furniture, and ancient computers.

There’s a line of computers with various “Reserved for” signs tacked above, a room for the Associated Press, and another for TMZ, where a group of staffers scan every docket that passes through the court system. It’s through these staffers' endless labor that TMZ is able to beat the rest of the industry to report who’s filed a restraining order, a name change, for divorce, or a suit against a star. This information isn’t hidden, and it’s not exclusive to TMZ — but the willingness to bankroll that labor ensures the branding status of “first.”

Owning the source — either by paying for it in the form of tips or paying the videographer who catches it — also sets TMZ apart from its competitors. Instead of relying on paparazzi — whom TMZ would have to pay on a sliding scale contingent on the quality/value of the material — with little, if any, sense of site loyalty, they hired their own paparazzi, some more professional than others. What mattered in the rough-and-tumble game of mid-2000s paparazzi, however, wasn’t skill so much as tenacity, which is why one of Levin’s hires purportedly came from the parking lot of a gas station, where he was hocking CDs with such persistence that Levin knew he’d make a perfect TMZ pap.

These paparazzi aren’t investigative reporters. Their only goal: Get celebrities on tape however you can without chasing them or breaking the law. They specialize not in photographs but video, no matter how unremarkable. In the early days, they’d set up shop at the hot clubs of the time (Pure, LAX) and simply wait for drunk celebrities to come out and engage them — which is exactly how TMZ nabbed the incendiary footage of oil and entertainment heir Brandon Davis calling Lindsay Lohan a “fire crotch.”

Back at the TMZ offices, an editor would be waiting to assemble the night’s footage into a sort of “greatest hits,” which would go up on the website in time for the East Coast sunrise. The “fire crotch” video was an anomaly — most footage was simply of celebrities walking, maybe stumbling, verbally (and not very cleverly) sparring with the videographer — but back in the mid- and even late 2000s, this sort of unmediated footage was a novelty. Granted, many readers, especially those relying on AOL dial-up, couldn’t even load it. But its existence punctured the celebrity myth not through the scandal of their words or actions, but the very banality of their existence. It was a quietly radical idea: Celebrities weren’t “just like us,” in fact, they were more clumsy, less intelligent, more boring.

The reliance on video also facilitated the development of TMZ on TV. Like Telepictures sibling Extra, TMZ was developed for syndication and, through an agreement with the Fox network of affiliates, pre-sold in an unprecedented 80% of American stations. Its first episode aired in September 2007; by month’s end, it had become the highest-rated new show in syndication, with a 1.7 household rating, second only to Entertainment Tonight in its genre. Today, TMZ is still second to ET — and regularly battles for the second place spot with Inside Edition — but remains, according to Broadcasting & Cable, dominant in the all-important 18–34 demo.

And it does it on the cheap, with production values that The Atlantic’s James Parker called “low-res, viral, shit-textured.” Each episode is composed of two overarching elements: paparazzi footage, which could be shot, edited, and added to the show right up to the last minute using TMZ’s cutting edge “instant production” and the now much-emulated morning meeting, in which the ever-expanding TMZ staff, seated casually at their desks, spar with Levin concerning potential stories.

In these meetings, Levin functions as a sort of hapless, middle-aged father figure who might not understand things like Google Glass, but knows the business better than anyone. And he’s been smart enough to surround himself with people whose vitality match and complement his own: Co-producer Charles Latibeaudiere, who came over from years at Extra to co-produce the show, is the voice of reason; Mike Walters and Dax Holt are the benevolent big brothers; the rotating carousel of young staffers are the whippersnappers fighting each other to say something clever enough to make the final cut. Even the lawyers get in on the mix, discussing which stories can be covered, how, and with what language. It’s all performative, of course, but the unmediated “reality” aesthetics make it seem like a window onto the “real” world of gossip production.

The main show may be the means through which most of America is exposed to the TMZ brand, but the site remains the central node for all of the properties, from the TMZ-branded tours of New York and Los Angeles to brand offshoots TMZ Sports, Dax Chat, and TMZLive. The TMZ team was the first entity to successfully transfer web content to television, illustrating a cross-media savvy and dexterity that has earned unreserved admiration within the industry. As New York Times media critic David Carr put it, “TMZ is one of the best written, best cast shows on television. There. I said it.”

Accounts of Levin suggest that he’s driven far less by a desire for personal fame and much more by a generalized, all-encompassing hunger: to be the best, to dominate the industry, to prove his naysayers wrong. He’s a man of extremes (in the ‘90s, he was overweight; today, he’s incredibly fit, doesn’t drink, sleeps four hours a night, and looks younger than his 63 years). Former employees describe him as a “mad genius,” “all fast-twitch muscle,” and “like he’s taking the blue pills in Bourne Identity.” And it’s that metabolism and bottomless hunger that’s manifested in the site: When people call it all-consuming, they’re both referring to its domination of its corner of the gossip landscape and the way it dominates the lives of its employees, including Levin himself.