American Media Tries To Bring Star, National Enquirer Up To Speed Online

enquirerlogo.gifYou don’t have to look farther than today’s front pages of nationalenquirer.com and AOL’s TMZ.com for an illustration of why American Media Inc. needs to get its online act together. AMI’s National Enquirer site is light years behind the biggest celebrity gossip story of the moment, reduced to following — without identifying — TMZ.com’s report that the arrest record of Mel Gibson’s early Friday a.m. stop for DUI included details of an anti-Semitic outburst and the gossip site’s subsequent non-stop coverage. Then there’s the TMZ video of Lindsay Lohan partying.
AMI is fighting back; the Star relaunched earlier this month and revamps of all the sites are slated by the end of the year, as the Palm Beach Post reports. The Star will add celebrity video clips in the near future, according to Pamela Russo, AMI VP-interactive operations. Russo followed AMI president John Miller from Hachette Filipacchi Media.
AMI’s Miller: “The TMZ slant is successful for them; maybe we’ll experiment with that. … Our site will bring somebody who is looking for a little more credible information, versus blog sites, where people just go to see who’s saying what about whom. … We haven’t done all the things we could do. That’s what we’re doing right now.” (via Romenesko)
Update: Here’s a good example of what the Star can do online; it’s an update of the Gibson story. It’s also an example of how far they have to go — an exclusive on Gibson entering rehab, attributed by TMZ.com (it links to the site), wasn’t on the front page and could only be found on the story page by scrolling down. BTW, Star didn’t link to TMZ when the rival site was mentioned in its story.

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