They’ve got reporters. They’ve got informers. They have an operation that “resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization, and it has turned its domain, Los Angeles, into a city of stool pigeons.” And they break stories that, for better or worse, are big. The New Yorker’s Nicholas Schmidle examines how Harvey Levin’sTMZ gets the digital dirt. It would be so interesting if TMZ would turn its news gathering machine towards hard news and investigative journalism. Imagine TMZ in Flint.