Archive by Month
October 31, 2003
Rip Rense is feeling so down on L.A. these days that today he ripped off a second Riposte column for the week. He calls it...
The second issue of L.A. Innuendo is online and presumably in print, though I haven't yet run into it anywhere....
Cosmo Israel is a start-up where Editor-in-chief Lea Kantor-Matarasso grapples with the big questions. “It's sometimes difficult to write with humor or tell stories about...
Today's Christian Science Monitor reports on the "hot, new indie-lit scene" in Los Angeles and says it is especially hot in the neighborhood around Skylight...
Because Dean Singleton didn't buy the paper. Dave Wielenga in OC Weekly recalls what happened when Singleton's Media News took over the Long Beach Press-Telegram:...
A week ago, three L.A. Times reporters -- Ralph Frammolino, Nicholas Riccardi and Ted Rohrlich -- had a solid front-page investigative story that I missed...
October 30, 2003
Sharri Berg, VP-News Operations at Fox News Channel, responds at Romenesko to the criticisms leveled yesterday by former producer Charlie Reina: "Like any former, disgruntled...
The cover story in this week's L.A. Alternative Press by Joseph Mailander follows up on his first night report at Joyrides Without Maps with more...
October 29, 2003
Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker, the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes and Time magazine’s James Poniewozik all turned down the L.A. Times television critic job that...
L.A. Observed makes the cut at Relevant or Irrelevant?, where the slogan is "I decide."...
If what former Fox News producer Charlie Reina says is true, Roger Ailes and his pals not only aggressively juice the political slant, they've created...
Richard Horgan makes a persuasive case that the London-based World Entertainment News Network is commandeering celebrity news and gossip without crediting the right sources, and...
Whatever came of Richard Riordan's plans for a Los Angeles Examiner to avenge his unhappiness at the L.A. Times and promote the virtues of the...
Daniel Okrent has a good grasp of what his new position at the New York Times will mean to his cultural legacy: Now my obituary...
One of the new community news websites listed on the right is Canyon Newspaper.com, which says it covers the hills from Malibu to Hollywood. (The...
October 28, 2003
The Lakers won their opener tonight, but are in organizational disarray because of the Kobe and Shaq troubles. The Kings may be worse off. Eight...
Prompted by the Gregg Easterbrook flap, Mickey Kaus offers a long defense of unedited blogs. In the course of it, he manages to compliment Luke...
Inside sources who seem to know say the L.A. Times had more than 9,000 subscribers cancel over the paper's election coverage, especially the Schwarzenegger groping...
Elvis Mitchell pulls together a pretty decent panel to talk about the screeners issue on The Treatment this Wednesday, 2:30 p.m. on KCRW (89.9). Says...
The right side column of links has been freshened and cleaned up. The recall cluster is gone, for instance. I think it's a little more...
October 27, 2003
Last week's book sales by L.A. writers or of local interest, from Publishers Lunch Weekly email: Journalist Christopher Noxon's Rejuvenile: How a New Species of...
TV Barn says that Entertainment Weekly writer Carina Chocano will be named chief TV critic at the L.A. Times, replacing the retired Howard Rosenberg. Supposed...
With brush fires continuing to spread across Southern California, blown by Santa Ana winds, Channels 2, 4 and 9 are staying live with coverage. Channel...
The Downtown News out today has a feature on Philippe's, which will mark its 95th year next week by selling French dips sandwiches at the...
The publisher of a book that asserts the Pakistan government was behind the murder of reporter Daniel Pearl is upset with the L.A. Times Book...
On the gala night Disney Hall opened, Mayor Jim Hahn tried to hold a gathering of city and state officials and their aides at Getty...
L.A. Times staffers Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, authors of The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire, tell...
October 26, 2003
Good piece by Joel Kotkin in the LAT Sunday Opinion section on downtown revival and how Disney Hall is not it. But there's another reason...
The L.A. Times Magazine checks out the surge in migration by Americans (especially from California) to New Zealand. Corie Brown says many of the 200...
A year after New Times closed with a $9 million, somewhat-illegal nudge from the Village Voice, the LA Weekly has been the biggest benefactor, Darrell...
October 25, 2003
Venerable Canter's Deli on Fairfax took over an existing deli at Treasure Island in May and is getting set to open a big new showcase...
Author Mark Salzman was invited to visit a writing class at L.A.'s Central Juvenile Hall and was so blown away by the experience that he...
Garrison at The Aesthetic writes: Alright, that's it. Now that we're spending more time in the car, we've found ourselves listening to no small amount...
Fashion Week in Los Angeles for the spring lines begins Sunday. Runway shows are held at The Standard downtown and at Smashbox Studios in Culver...
October 24, 2003
Nikki Finke on the LA Weekly website has the news that Sharon Waxman of the Washington Post Los Angeles bureau is taking the long-vacant New...
Susannah Breslin, the L.A. writer of the late Reverse Cowgirl blog, is out with You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, billed as "a short story...
Joseph at joyrides without maps is a blogger with cul-chah. He gives a great inside-the-hall report on opening night at Frank Gehry's monument -- and...
"Tony Rafael" at In the Hat, the website where he writes about L.A. gangs and crime, posts a lengthy observation spurred by Jill Leovy's Slate...
October 23, 2003
Variety columnist Brian Lowry took Entertainment Weekly to task yesterday for taking this year's "101 Most Power People" so seriously that, with ties, there are...
The Daily Breeze's Ian Gregor says that Mayor Hahn's vision for L.A. International faces a new hurdle. Mayor James Hahn’s $9 billion LAX modernization plan...
Katie Roiphe, in a piece for Slate, ponders the evolution of USC law professor and feminist author Susan Estrich, who wrote a column strongly attacking...
Cathy Seipp in CityBeat doesn't quite buy my take on the L.A. Times groping story about Arnold, and doesn't quite dismiss it either. In any...
Ella Taylor in LA Weekly explains how the Los Angeles Film Critics took up her idea to cancel their awards dinner this year, in protest...
In case anybody forgot, Bill Bradley reminds us in his LA Weekly column out today that he can still get the Governor-elect on the phone....
An internal source reports that KPFK's first big fundraising drive since the station made over the program lineup to please the lefties is not going...
Jill Leovy, the L.A. Times crime reporter in South L.A., is writing the Slate Diary this week on the crime-ridden 77th Street Division. People typically...
October 22, 2003
The Magnificent Montague and L.A. Times writer Bob Baker were on "Day to Day" Monday talking about their book on the early days of black...
It may be a come down for Tina Brown to go from editor of The New Yorker and Talk magazine to a column in the...
October 18, 2003
L.A. Times publisher John Puerner tells the L.A. Business Journal that subscription cancellations have slowed to a trickle and that some readers who quit over...
I've been meaning to mention J. Michael Walker's unique artistic take on Los Angeles for weeks now, just for its scale alone. But it keeps...
October 17, 2003
The coming breakup between partners La Opinion and the Tribune Co. is the subject of a segment tonight on Life and Times (7 p.m., Ch....
Responding to the continuing and heated criticism of his post about Kill Bill and Jews at the studios, Gregg Easterbrook has put up a long...
October 16, 2003
That's the secret, not-to-be-uttered-in-front-of-Him nickname that some on Schwarznegger's staff have for Arnold, says Lloyd Grove, the new gossip at the New York Daily News....
Tony Pierce is singled out for writing "L.A.'s most entertaining Web log" in the graphic that runs with James Verini's story on Los Angeles-centric websites...
I left Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen) off yesterday's list of local authors nomnated this week for a National Book Award. Rene Tawa in...
L.A. city councilman Jack Weiss is known around City Hall as a profligate issuer of press releases and, in the great tradition of Westside representatives,...
Just how many drug stores does L.A. need? The creeping urban plague of big superstores opening a few blocks from other big superstores is about...
The L.A. Times political writer Mark Z. Barabak jumped into the fray over the paper's campaign coverage, apparently telling a class of Berkeley students yesterday...
It's not just the Los Angeles TV stations that are planning to cover the Capitol when Arnold gets there. No fewer than eight stations from...
The LA Weekly that comes out today is all Best of L.A. features -- nothing else. There's the usual roundup of best burger, best shopping...
October 15, 2003
In his food and wine columnist hat, the LAT's David Shaw has had it with the Zagat guide ratings for Los Angeles restaurants. Zagat is...
Freedom Communications CEO Alan J. Bell calls the deal to keep the Register mostly in the Hoiles family "nothing less than an armistice" between long-feuding...
At the end of a long screed against Quentin Tarantino over Kill Bill, New Republic blogger Gregg Easterbrook suddenly singles out Harvey Weinstein and Michael...
Couple of prominent locals are nominees for the National Book Awards: T.C. Boyle in fiction for Drop City and Carol Muske-Dukes in poetry for Sparrow....
Poynter has a feature up about Michael Connelly, who went from covering night cops in the Valley for the L.A. Times to writing best-selling mysteries....
Bob Drogin of the L.A. Times and four other journalists have been ordered by a federal judge to reveal their government sources for stories on...
If I'm reading these ratings from RadioandRecords.com correctly, the recall obsession wasn't good for KFI. The talk station's summer ratings were down slightly from the...
Los Angeles TV news departments, which long ago closed down their Sacramento bureaus, will increase their Capitol coverage when the ratings-booster takes over, says Ron...
John Connolly, the author of the Premiere magazine profile on Schwarzenegger, can't sell his expose book, but humorist Andy Borowitz (or actually his agent Mort...
October 14, 2003
Syndicated columnist Jill Stewart responds to L.A. Times editor John Carroll with a long scathing report on her website. Stewart, like most others, assumes she...
That didn't last long. Fred Muir, since last year a senior vice president for public affairs in the Los Angeles office of Fleishman-Hillard International Communications,...
Mickey Kaus takes a look back at that L.A. Times Poll midway through the recall campaign that was widely questioned because it's numbers were so...
Freedom Comunications has signed a deal with the two equity firms that represent Hoiles family descendants and other shareholders. The Wall Street Journal says it...
October 13, 2003
I'm glad someone figured out the spam trick of placing links in old comment threads on Movable Type sites (such as L.A. Observed). But what's...
Matt Labash has a pretty funny Boy on the Bus report from the final days of the Schwarzenegger campaign at the Weekly Standard site. He...
Kim Masters, who seems to be everywhere these days, will host tomorrow's edition of KCRW's The Politics of Culture on the issues raised by the...
Howard Kurtz writes in the Post that for journalists, "On paper, an effort to recall a California governor who had just been reelected and had...
An LAT source with some likely knowledge of the situation says that subscription cancellations at the L.A. Times over the Schwarzenegger groping stories have cleared...
October 12, 2003
The leading jockey in horse racing history rode 40,000 times, most of them here at Southern California tracks. He was paralyzed in at 59 in...
A New York Times' Week in Review story today on the ethics of phonecams includes an anecdote and photos from members of the Los Angeles-based...
Darrell Satzman in the LA Business Journal looks at the firing last week of the longtime general managers at both local AM radio news stations,...
Jamesland by Michelle Huneven, dining columnist for LA Weekly, gets a good review in the New York Times. And Malcolm Margolin, publisher of Heyday Books,...
October 11, 2003
The Times' Jason Reid called it right when he reported a couple of days ago that Frank H. McCourt was the new top bidder for...
Following some weeks of high-level negotiation, Robin Wright, the long-time L.A. Times reporter on international terrorism, has jumped to the Washington Post. Washington bureau chief...
Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll responds to the paper's critics in an unusual (and somewhat testy) commentary in Sunday's paper. Titled "The Story Behind...
The subject on Deadline L.A. on Sunday (KPFK, 1 p.m.) is the coming grocery wars triggered by Wal-Mart's non-union move into town. The guest is...
October 10, 2003
John Wayne's 1942 application to be a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (the CIA before there was a CIA) is on display at...
Bunch of interesting L.A. presence on Schwarzenegger's transition team, including Richard Riordan and Eli Broad (do they go everywhere together?) and Democrats like mayor Jim...
October 09, 2003
Paul Weeks, retired public info guy for RAND in Santa Monica and ex-LA Mirror reporter, recalls when he was sent to the Valley to do...
David Denby in The New Yorker on Kill Bill--Vol. 1: “Kill Bill” is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap. It will...
The Republican talk show host and columnist has been the Times' most vituperative and partisan critic through the campaign (he signed on early with Arnold)....
Cathy Seipp takes a read of Peter Bart's new collection of short stories, Dangerous Company: Dark Tales from Tinseltown, and says the Variety editor "has...
Christine Pelisek reports in the LA Weekly on the deadly gang battle going on over claims to Silver Lake. In the streets abutting Vendome and...
Welcome to NBC Universal: LAT, NYT, Hwd Reporter Leno: Nikki Finke in LA Weekly, LAT, Wash Post Shriver: NYT, USA Today, Wash Post...
La Opinion, the largest Spanish language paper in Los Angeles, has been owned 50% by the Lozano family and 50% by the L.A. Times parent...
LAT editor John Carroll tells the San Francisco Chronicle that subscribers are continuing to cancel, but he added no new numbers. He said the furor...
A&E is planning to begin production on a TV movie called "See Arnold Run." Says the New York Times: The movie will trace what its...
The heat on the MPAA over the loss of free screener DVDs is rising apparently. Richard Horgan, meanwhile, talks to a DVD pirate about the...
October 08, 2003
Bill Thomas was the top editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1971 to 1989, most of the time with Otis Chandler as publisher. Today's...
There's a new front-runner in the contest to buy the Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the L.A. Times' Jason Reid says. It is Frank...
Mickey Kaus's long explanation of why he voted as he did is pretty interesting, dare I say brilliant. Read the whole thing, as they say....
October 07, 2003
Turnout in today's election could hit 65%, the Field Poll says. That would be the most in any California election for governor in 20 years,...
L.A. Times editor John Carroll says in the Wall Street Journal today that he expected a backlash against he paper's Schwarzenegger stories, because they were...
October 06, 2003
The Hollywood trade paper has started a couple of blogs -- but you have to be a subscriber to Variety.com to read them. This is...
The L.A. Times had the newsiest of the weekend media stories on itself, reporting that about 1,000 subscribers have cancelled since the paper began publishing...
Kim Masters, the Esquire columnist and former Vanity Fair contributing editor, jumps from Marketplace to cover Hollywood in the National Public Radio operation here in...
October 03, 2003
Journalist and author Amy Wilentz and Jim Sterngold, the San Francisco Chronicle's man in Los Angeles, talk about the recall with Barbara Osborn. Deadline L.A....
The final Field Poll of the recall race shows the Schwarzenegger lead solidifying -- 36% to 26% for Bustamante. They were even in the previous...
Hollywood writer-producer Roger L. Simon declares on his blog that the backlash against the MPAA's no-DVDs policy begins with him: This Academy voter (and film...
Former Democratic campaign aide Susan Estrich, now a USC law professor and syndicated columnist, comes down hard on the L.A. Times for publishing the allegations...
Booked into Wilshire Division for being under the influence, released on bail, picked up again in Beverly Hills, taken to Century City Hospital. Says the...
October 02, 2003
In a small group discussion tonight during a USC gathering hosted by the Online News Association and OJR, I praised Kausfiles' handling and prescient call...
The volume of stories and Hollywood reactions to the loss of free screener movies has officially surpassed L.A. Observed's ability to keep up. (Kind of...
Yesterday in New York, the question "Is California Crazy?" was debated at lunch by Ron Reagan, Tom Hayden, Bill Simon, Barry Goldwater Jr. (the long-lost...
Schwarzenegger denies the specifics of the L.A. Times story on his treatment of women, but tells a friendly audience, "I have to say that where...
He quits as an ESPN football commentator over his remarks about a black quarterback, then the National Enquirer reports (via the NY Daily News) that...
After looking into the often-heard allegations about Arnold's sexual harassment, an L.A. Times team turns up six women who contend they were groped or otherwise...
Grant Robinson of Los Angeles is the winner of The New Republic's contest to name Gregg Easterbrook's new blog. It's now the Easterblogg. These must...
October 01, 2003
Robert Kardashian, the Simpson friend and lawyer who later questioned the football star's innocence, died last night of cancer. It was at Kardashian's Encino home...
Dan Weintraub takes a big swig at the Schwarzenegger debut party in Sacramento....
Sam Hall Kaplan's "City Observed" commentaries on local architecture and design are off the weekly schedule at KCRW. In a note emailed to architects and...
The LA Weekly's Bill Bradley discloses his role as a back-channel emissary trying to arrange a debate between Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the...
Variety's headline writers have fun with the apoplexy shaking Hollywood (here and here) over the end to free screener DVDs and videos. The L.A. Times...
The next ballot measure that Los Angeles voters may get a chance to decide (after the Davis recall) is whether to cancel the city council's...
The new L.A. Times Poll pretty much agrees with all the others (except CNN-USA, which seems to have overstated everything). Barring the unforeseen, the outcome...
Life and Times on KCET (Channel 28, 7 p.m. and midnight) will look at the future of the old Raymond Theater in Pasadena on tonight's...
