Janice Min's arrival as boss at The Hollywood Reporter with an infusion of her people has left the trade's previous staffers feeling shut out, Sharon Waxman says in her column at The Wrap.

The alienation has become so severe that the legacy staff have a secret name for the new team: “The Others,” according to several insiders.

The pre-Min journalists live in a strange purgatory (none will be named in this post, but information came from several places), where they have little say and less contact with the new team. The painful word from inside the newsroom at THR is that Min (above, left) has little to do with them -- doesn't speak to them, or look people in the eye.

That may be no surprise.

As WaxWord has written about recently, Min has started to implement her plan to take THR to a more consumer, celebrity-focused publication.

Waxman's sources tell her the big loser might be Elizabeth Guider, "still technically the editor [but] she currently functions as a 'glorified reporter,' as one person put it."

Before he was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten was an editor in the Opinion section and got to know Paul Conrad well. His tribute to the political cartoonist is one of the best I've come across. Excerpt:

He never lost his sense of outrage.

My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.

He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents...as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives.

The cartoon above is from John Sherffius of the Boulder Daily Camera and Creators News Service. "My editorial cartooning hero," he writes of Conrad. Conrad obituaries of note: James Rainey in the LAT, Robert D. McFadden in the NYT, Mr. Fish at Truthdig.

Previously on LA Observed:
Paul Conrad, political cartoonist was 86

Writer, filmmaker and Los Angeles political figure Kelly Candaele has launched Politics and Films, writing that "I've loved going to movies since I was a child and I still see an average of three films a week. I enjoy reading film criticism and film history but I have no pretense to scholarship in the field....I will write about feature films and documentaries from a political perspective." He starts with The American, the new thriller starring George Clooney. Candaele, the longtime elected trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District — in the same job where Jerry Brown first held office — also used to be on the board of the City Employees' Retirement System, before a certain bit of political hubbub. Former LA Weekly columnist Harold Meyerson will contribute to the blog.

Other current project: Candaele is making a film on the soccer rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Stephen Randall, the editor in Los Angeles for Playboy magazine, explains in an Op-Ed piece for the LAT that while he loves his smartphone and all of his tech toys, the old fashioned telephone on his desk at home still has its place. Can you hear me now?

I love my iPad, my Prius was one of my smarter purchases, I'd give up sugar before I'd give up Quicken, and chances are good I'll be buried with my ever-present smartphone.

But my smartphone isn't always smart. When it comes to an effortless, nearly foolproof, reliable, high-quality device, I have a soft spot for my land line. The reason is simple: If I'm talking to you from my land line and you're on your land line, I can actually hear you....

He adds, as an aside: "Bluetooth alone has done more to destroy civil discourse than cable news and talk radio put together."

After a day of protest marches, vigils and confrontations with police, the LAPD declared an illegal assembly about 10 p.m. and officers in riot gear began clearing the streets around 6th Street and Union Avenue. That's where an LAPD bicycle officer on Sunday shot and killed a man identiified by friends as Manuel Jamines. The department says he was threatening a pregnant woman with a knife and came at officers. People in the community say he was a gentle soul, an immigrant from Guatemala who did not understand English or Spanish very well. A march that began at the intersection moved to the Rampart police station, then back to the 6th and Union area where rocks and eggs were thrown at police. It looks on media reports as if activists from the Revolutionary Communist Party have been in the crowd urging on the protests.

Guatemalan Consul General Pablo Garcia Saenz urged calm at the scene tonight. His assistants said that a community meeting was planned for 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Guatemalan Consulate. LAT, AP, NBC 4

Photo: Tony Valdez of KTLA on Twitpic

Molly Knight wrote the ESPN Magazine piece on McCourt v. McCourt for the July 26 issue. She was out here last week to cover the first five days of court testimony — "It’s pretty much a circus" — though she wrote on her blog last month that she could easily have missed it.

I honestly didn’t think it would get to this point. My money was on the McCourts settling when July turned into August, but here we sit. Yesterday was the deadline to reserve a seat in the court room and I would have forgotten to do so had the ineffable Bill Shaikin not emailed to remind me.

She also announced on her blog that she's moving back to Los Angeles in a few months. She moved to New York at 20, is now almost 29, and says that Joan Didon explains it best in Goodbye to All That.

In his weekend column acknowledging the controversy around his paper's series on teachers and student testing, Los Angeles Times media columnist James Rainey writes: "As my former colleague Bill Boyarsky, one-time city editor at the paper, argues in his blog, it would be easy for readers to miss an explanatory essay by the paper that acknowledges the margin of error built into the ratings." Uh, that blog would be at LA Observed: here's the post Rainey kinda-sorta lets his readers know about. An editor on the Times' website kindly added a link to Bill's page, so online readers of the Times weren't left totally in the dark. But it made me curious how often or how seldom the paper has credited LA Observed recently. After all, a fair number of LA Observed items turn up later as Times stories or blog entries; Rainey's column topics in particular often trail a couple of weeks behind LAO. For the record, a quick search for LA Observed (and the less-correct L.A. Observed) on the Times' website found four mentions this year, all on LAT.com blogs. Hmm: fewer links than Mark and I provide to LAT stories on a typical day.

David Westin's email to the staff casts his exit at the end of the year as a personal thing, but says the New York Times' Bill Carter, "one staff member informed before the release of the e-mail said tha the decision was also related to a long-running conflict between Mr. Westin and the management of the network, including ABC’s parent company, Walt Disney, over the financial standing of the news division." More analysis by The Wrap and Deadline Hollywood. Westin's email to the staff is after the jump.

By the time we headed toward the beach, the fog was a dozen blocks inland at least. Plenty festive crowd anyway at the Reel Inn on PCH, undeterred by the chill. In Santa Monica the sidewalks and streets around the pier and new Santa Monica Place mall were jammed with tourists. Jammed. A few blocks away on Main Street, I made eye contact with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver pedaling their bikes northbound, toward the crowds and home. She was between the gov and an unknown rider who led their pack.