By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2013
By 2013, TMZ had reshaped celebrity news. Its approach to hiring, it turned out, was just as unorthodox.
Then
In March 2013, FishbowlLA flagged a job listing that stood out from the usual Mediabistro postings. TMZ was searching for a managing editor, and the ad set the newsroom scene with characteristic swagger, assuring applicants that no prior celebrity-news experience was required — it was, the listing said, not brain surgery.
The real hook came next. TMZ founder Harvey Levin would be in Austin for South by Southwest that weekend, March 9 and 10, and was willing to meet qualified candidates there. FishbowlLA’s verdict: leave it to TMZ to turn a job interview into a festival highlight, memorable even for applicants who never landed the gig.
Now
The job-hunt-as-spectacle instinct was pure TMZ. The operation Harvey Levin built fused tabloid aggression with a television-newsroom format, and through the 2010s it stood as one of the most influential — and most imitated — brands in entertainment news.
Ownership shifted around it more than once as its corporate parents reshuffled their assets, but Levin remained its public face. The 2013 SXSW recruiting stunt reads now as an early, minor example of a company that always understood attention itself was the product.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.