Hey, you're listening to the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Michael Lohinger. This week we're bringing you a story about a contentious legal battle at the edge of what can arguably be called journalism. A battle featuring two celebrities and a notorious gossip blogger, Perez Hilton. I first learned about this saga from a new piece about Hilton in the

Columbia Journalism Review titled the OG News Influencer. Its author, Joel Simon, is the founding

director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Joel, welcome back to the show.

Micah, thanks so much for having me.

For listeners who don't spend a lot of time reading or thinking about entertainment news,

who is Perez Hilton?

I don't want to present myself as the ultimate authority on Perez Hilton.

In fact, I pretty safely ignored his career until I began to contemplate the possibility

that he was involved in a legal matter that would have implications for press freedom.

So Perez Hilton is a blogger, social media personality, and a celebrity himself, who for 20 years, has chronicled

celebrity culture in a variety of different media. He's done a lot of provocative things. He's been a

bully. He really went after Britney Spears when she was having mental health issues,

and he seemed to really taunt and show a real lack of compassion.

One of the things he's done that I think has been really controversial,

especially for a gay man, is he's outed a number of celebrities.

And the reality, of course, is all that leads to attention and clicks, and so that's part of a schick.

But he's also been a consistent chronicler of the celebrity beat and the gossip beat, which, of course, is a historic part of journalism.

Perez Hilden has now become, according to you, an interesting and important edge case

in the legal protections afforded to journalists.

Five months ago, he received a subpoena from the legal team representing actor Blake

Lively.

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