Each morning, we'd gather in the office with our coffees and hangover remedies and newspapers and decide which story was the one people would be most interested in. What story or event got us mad? Made us laugh? Grabbed us? The key was running stories that no one else had, but everyone wanted. Over at the networks, they were deciding what story the public needed to know or what lesson the nation needed to be taught. At the local news departments, they were cutting articles out of the morning papers to follow the leads from 24 hours earlier. We were taking down satellite feeds to watch the promos of our competition--so we could steal the story out from under them a couple of days in advance. We were finding one-line items in small-town papers, gaffes on the morning news shows--anything that caught our fancy as being news. If the nation was captivated by a major news event, we had to come up with an exclusive or an angle no one else had thought of. We'd have a show rundown ready to go in the morning. The fun part was throwing it out and starting from scratch--and during the glory days, fun was what mattered. We lived tabloid and breathed tabloid; when we left work we headed over to the pub to talk about what we could do the following day.

People forget that tabloid TV shows weren't actually news shows. They were entertainment and all that mattered were the ratings. Our competition wasn't Inside Edition, it was Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. So we had to do whatever it took to get people into the tent. That occasionally meant petty larceny, like airing tape that belonged to someone else, or grand larceny, like stealing video from satellite feeds. It meant paying for stories. It meant sabotaging rival shows. In at least one case, it meant bribing a Neilsen family. But all of us in the middle of the chicanery always believed there was a higher goal to it all: We were getting the story out. For all the lying behind the scenes, tabloid television offered cynical TV journalists the first opportunity to tell the truth.

Peter Brennan, the father of tabloid television and a key figure in my book, always told us: "Never look down on your audience. They're a lot smarter than we are." The networks traditionally looked down on that wondrous terrain known as Middle America. They called it "fly-over country," because they'd fly over it to get from Washington or New York to LA. The Australians who invented A Current Affair held no such prejudices. They brought a new democracy to TV news. At the time, the only network journalist traversing this great land and extracting stories from the Heartland was Charles Kuralt. He'd do homey pieces about glassblowers and can collectors and present it as the CBS News version of Middle America. It was only after he died that we found he'd jump into his Winnebego with his extramarital mistress. That was America! We also got the bulk of our stories from small-town newspapers. Our staff would read hundreds every day, and that's where we'd find the drama, the tragedy and the odd stories that network news ignored. Oddly enough, Peter Brennan and his fellow Aussies who invented tabloid television were more Middle American than any American TV executive was. Brennan proves it to this day. He's executive producer of Judge Judy.

It took a few years, but the networks finally had to admit that the tabloid shows knew what was news--and what made money. Meanwhile, as tabloid-TV shows proliferated, the executive ranks were being filled with more network news veterans. So the gap between "legitimate" and "tabloid" began to narrow. By the time of O.J. Simpson's trial, everyone was covering the same story and there was no gap. Today, you get your "tabloid TV" stories on shows like Dateline NBC and 20/20. And they're told the same way, because the people running and staffing those shows came from the tabloid shows. They call these network TV journalists "tabloid babies." They're everywhere.