Celebrity Reporting: Continuing to Be Harder Than You'd Think
• From the Us Weekly website today: "In some early editions of the July 18 issue, Us Weekly inaccurately reported that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were adopting a baby boy together. Her new daughter is, in fact, a girl, and while Pitt was present when Jolie signed the adoption papers, he himself was not a party to the adoption. As the magazine went to press on the night of July 4th our reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia were continuing to report out the story. By the following morning we learned that we had made these errors and stopped the print run in order to correct the story. However not all issues were corrected in time."
• And passed along by our favorite mole in the celeb-mag world: "from a spy who was at the exclusive parrot key resort with ben affleck and jen garner after their wedding: the people magazine reporter, an older woman, who was down there observing the happy couple, may have been the most ridiculously obvious reporter of all time. she would literally pretend to be reading her book while sitting next to them and leaning her head over to their table to eavesdrop. everytime she saw anything, like if jen sat on ben's lap, she would get on her cell phone and call it into her editors with urgency. it was so obvious it was pathetic. finally, ben must've alerted security, because she went to go make a cell phone call and was surrounded by several guards. they snapped her cell phone shut and told her to pack her things and get off the island. not to be deterred, people sent ANOTHER reporter down later that day."
Makes Judy Miller's beat seem easy.