The producers, consumers, and subjects of gossip create a self-perpetuating cycle.

Question: Who is dominating the gossip world?

 David Hauslaib: We are.  No.  I do think you have the Perez Hiltons of the world.  And people have very mixed feelings about him, but I do think he’s one of . . .  He’s sort of mastered the act of immediately reporting information as it breaks.  The accuracy is sometimes in question, but really reporting that information without the corporate . . . the corporate conflicts that could come.  I do think you also . . .  When you do have, you know, higher profile writers or bloggers in this business like him who are so engrained in the machine themselves at this point, are you gonna see a really terrible Paris Hilton item on his site?  Probably not. Will he trash Lindsay Lohan any chance he gets?  Yes, because there are those relationships in place.  But I think that’s really interesting that it went from something really organic to almost a cog in a machine by itself.

  Question: What’s the best scoop you’ve ever had?

David Hauslaib: What’s the best scoop?  One thing that we’re really proud of, I mean on the media end, is the firing of Judith Regan.  We broke that story ahead of anybody thanks to a great source.  And you know that story really reverberated through racial and, you know, anti-Semitic channels; through the publishing and media industries all the way to the celebrity avenue with O.J. Simpson.  So that was a pretty significant story for us.

Question:  Do you regret inaccurate stories?

David Hauslaib: Well you always do look back because a story is never dead.  And if . . .  If accurate information . . .  If we’re shown to have been inaccurate in the past, or another party pops up and has a side of the story to tell, we are more than willing to relay that information.  And I think what’s different about blogs is, you know, one item is not the end all.  It can be a series of two or three, or 20 or 80 items that really create the story.  Whereas if you’re, you know, talking about a celebrity weekly, they have one issue to get it right theoretically.  Then they go back the next week and contradict themselves.  But that’s sort of the point.  But you know with . . . with blogs, if we get something wrong we update that item immediately.  Certainly we try to be wrong as little as possible.

Recorded on: Jan 23 2008