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Don Mischer apologizes for and explains his unexpected starring role on CNN the last night of the Democratic convention. He is the convention producer whose plaintive, then exasperated f-word pleas...
LA Observed archive
for July 2004
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Peter King's last byline in the Los Angeles Times (says LATimes.com) was during the recall election in October, 2003. Several months before then, he and photographer Genaro Molina began working...
Randolph Steven Webster used to be vice president for publicity at FX until he was fired in 2001, then went on to be VP for corporate communications and marketing planning...
They send away All Star catcher and leading clubhouse quotemonger Paul Lo Duca, intimidating reliever Guillermo Mota and starting rightfielder Juan Encarnacion to get starter Brad Penny and first baseman...
Starting Sunday, craigslist will charge $25 for placing job ads on the website in Los Angeles and New York. The cheapskates who want models, actors and artists to work for...
Roger Friedman, the gossip columnist at Fox News, wraps up his backstage view of the Democrats' gathering with this zinger: Did we learn anything in Boston? Yes. For one thing,...
In today's papers, city controller Laura Chick pulls further away from her early endorsement of Jim Hahn for reelection. She accuses the mayor of poor leadership and gets into a...
Colleen Cason, the columnist for the Ventura County Star, nominates a new candidate for Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's secret inside source during the Watergate investigation into the crimes of the...
L.A. Times staff photographer Rick Loomis writes about the battle for Fallouja at SportsShooter.com, a website for photojournalists. I finally tried to wash the Marine's bloodstains from my pants the...
One of the best things about Boston so far is that Harry Shearer has gotten to reprise his Bill Clinton voice alongside Warren Olney on KCRW. For the Republican convention,...
The New York Times has snared another Los Angeles journalist, but this one's not from the Times. Howard Beck, who covered the Lakers for the L.A. Daily News for seven...
In an email sent to the staff today, embattled PR giant Fleishman-Hillard announced a ban on corprate campaign contributions, set up a hotline for employes to report questionable practices directly...
Eleven years ago, Ellie Nesler pulled a gun in a Central California courtroom and killed a man accused of molesting her young son. There was the usual hero worship from...
He wasn't included on the schedule on the wires, but they let mayor Jim Hahn speak at the convention Wednesday in Boston. He got three minutes at midday, "watched by...
Local music writer Kate Sullivan writes on her blog about trying to interview Pamela Anderson and David LaChapelle recently. It didn't go well. The interview was probably the most emotionally...
While local blogger BoifromTroy enjoys his stint as the guest Wonkette, the starting quarterback for his favorite football team has begun to blog. Matt Leinart's website reports on media day...
The ex-host of "Morning Edition" is leaving NPR to do a morning program on the XM Satellite Radio system, according to NPR. Edwards hasn't confirmed or denied it. An earlier...
Mayoral candidate Richard Alarcón, the state senator and former councilman from the Valley, unveiled his campaign website Tuesday. Yes, for better or worse, he has an AlaBlog. The Daily News...
MSNBC's gang of convention bloggers is a strange group. It crosses the spectrum from Pat Buchanan to Willie Brown and includes Ron Reagan and a couple of Democrats steeped in...
With no suspense to be had in the big hall, the L.A. mayor's race was the talk of the California delegation at breakfast yesterday morning. The Weekly's Harold Meyerson blogs...
Kem Nunn broke into fiction writing with Tapping the Source, his 1984 "surfing novel" set in the beach culture of Huntington Beach, "a twisted world of crazed Vietnam vets, sadistic...
Marc Cooper blogs at the LA Weekly on the most lavish and well-attended party that he (and many in the California delegation) have enjoyed so far in Boston. It was...
The creators of that cartoon parody sweeping through the Web — a Shockwave clip of Bush and Kerry singing to the tune of "This Land is Your Land" — are...
Heather La Bella is director of tactical marketing for the Los Angeles Sparks, the Women's NBA team that is always looking to bring in more young hetero male fans. She...
Appropos of the reader comments in yesterday's item about the film Los Angeles Plays Itself, which drifted into a discussion of L.A.'s street car past and the change to automobiles:...
In 2001, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Nalder left the Seattle Times for the San Jose Mercury News. Well known in investigative reporter circles, he did major pieces on Gray...
Channel 2 is adding a new weatherman to its morning news, Ron Fineman reports at his site. It's John Elliott, formerly of MSNBC, and his arrival will mean some kind...
For what it's worth, the folks at Snopes.com have declared false the notion that writer Anne Jacobsen encountered a band of rehearsing terrorists on her Northwest flight into L.A. last...
The office building at 1100 Wilshire Boulevard just west of downtown has always been a turkey. It opened in 1986 and never had more than a few tenants, partly because...
The Press Club's annual awards dinner held in June is getting some cable time on Adelphia. That's Channel 10 in areas of the city served (if that's the right word)...
Bernard Weinraub has told his editors and the L.A. bureau of the New York Times that he'll retire from the paper at the end of the year, Nikki Finke reports...
Joel Bellman (who works for supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky but is writing for himself) has the "Counterpunch" in today's LAT Calendar arguing that the media has bought into a faux frenzy...
Edited and updated Rick Orlov in the Daily News notes that both the L.A. City Council and the county's Board of Supervisors shut down for the week because a majority...
An L.A. Times front pager today on Fleishman-Hillard says the agency prides itself on its skills at crisis management, but was slow to recognize that it violated the guiding rule...
In his cinematic essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, filmmaker and Cal Arts professor Thom Andersen tries to correct the false images of the city he says are created by L.A....
Ken Layne, no longer in Los Angeles, but of the place. He co-founded L.A. Examiner.com with Matt Welch, wrote for the Online Journalism Review at USC and began blogging four...
A Van Nuys internist from South Korea, Dr. David Lee, began buying up office buildings on Wilshire Boulevard at distress prices after the 1992 riots left mid-Wilshire a white-collar ghost...
Three times before, Ken Jennings purposely stopped in a tie for the one-day record of $52,000. Last night, he wagered $23,600 on the final question — name two of the...
Howard Sunkin will work upstairs in the office, not on the mound. The longtime City Hall lobbyist has been named the team's senior vice president for public affairs. He comes...
Tonight's Nightline will take a vacation from war and politics to ride some 25-foot waves at Maverick's Beach up near San Francisco. The show's note says: "So this is one...
Yes, Microsoft is talking about selling the online magazine to the Washington Post, the New York Times or a handful of other potential buyers, the Post's Howard Kurtz reports. Microsoft...
That's the headline on Michael Collins' latest cover story in CityBeat about environmental carnage at the old Rocketdyne facility in the Santa Susana Mountains, one ridge west of the Valley....
Steve Lopez asks in the Times today what DWP customers got for the $20 million paid to Fleishman-Hillard for PR services (his answer: an 11% rate increase). He also plucks...
Local blogger with attitude BoifromTroy says he will be filling in as the guestblogger at Wonkette when Ana Marie Cox takes her amusing shtick to MTV for the Democratic Convention....
Jessica Garrison in the L.A. Times takes a first crack at the "tangled web of onetime alliances, betrayals and broken relationships" that will be in play in the coming mayor's...
L.A.-based French radio journalist Emmanuelle Richard has resumed her bilingual blog with a new design, following a long hiatus. She writes that the break was partly due to the insatiable...
Both of the big NPR stations in L.A. are going into the field for next week's Democratic convention. At KCRW, Warren Olney will broadcast "To The Point" live from Boston...
Mediabistro has put up pictures from the site's July 7 TV party in Hollywood. There are revelers from KTLA, KTTV, NBC, Bravo, E! and others. A Mediabistro photographer also worked...
Salon's resident airline pilot Patrick Smith reacts to that woman's account last week of her uncomfortable flight on Northwest Airlines with a bunch of Arabs who she feels in her...
Gov. Schwarzenegger signed a law that will require the state to keep separate records and statistics for the San Fernando Valley — to consider the Valley as if it were...
Last week, a Times editorial called for the head of Frank Salas, the acting general manager of the city Department of Water and Power who approved questionable billings by the...
In honor (or ridicule) of Arnold, Sarah Lefton introduces the Sacramento girlie men t-shirt....
Campaign Desk, the Columbia Journalism Review's politics site, observes while L.A. Times deputy managing editor Leo Wolinsky builds the paper's front page. At the appointed time, the editors pile in...
Wired News has a story up today on BugMeNot.com and other services that help visitors get around the sign-in requirements at news sites like LATimes.com. In the piece, the LAT's...
The Chicago Tribune hasn't missed a day since the Great Fire of 1871, but on Monday it almost didn't publish. What is being called a software glitch crashed the production...
Singer Linda Ronstadt, the girlfriend of Jerry Brown back when he was governor, got booed out of the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas for talking nice about Michael Moore and...
The language school guru who says he was unfairly maligned by the L.A. Times — and who the Times says inflated his World War II exploits — and whose supporters...
The Los Angeles Business Journal won the top prize for best large newspaper and best feature story ("Rich Kids," about the offspring of wealthy parents) and staffer Amanda Bronstad won...
For the August "special global issue," the Bay Area-based Business 2.0 outsourced a section of the magazine to India. From USA Today: "We could have found people who were willing...
I didn't hear it, but Michael Kinsley talked with Kitty Felde on KPCC today about his job as editorial and opinion editor of the L.A. Times. The audio is here;...
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West will be announced today, the Times says. Bill Deverell, the historian and ex-Cal Tech professor now at USC, is the director. Seminars...
Sam Hall Kaplan — who probably lost his weekly commentary gig at KCRW for dissing Frank Gehry during the Disney Hall hoopla last year — writes in the Downtown News...
Writing in his LA Weekly column, Marc Cooper does some soul searching over the murder of investigative reporter Francisco Ortiz Franco of the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta and the more...
In Monday's New York Times, Los Angeles bureau chief John Broder analyzes Gov. Schwarzenegger's sound bite about the Democrats from the weekend: The "girlie men" remark was a play on...
The Da Vinci Code has been knocked off, finally, from the #1 spot on the L.A. Times fiction bestseller list. The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason...
The Juxtaposition is less a blog than a showcase of occasional essays by the two local writers who share the space. In La Ciudad, Scott O'Malley muses on the specialness...
Mariel Garza, the Daily News' editorial writer and op-ed columnist, takes a look at the plans for Phil Anschutz's L.A. Live complex downtown and wonders: "where's the Deputy Mayor of...
Tim Rutten considers in the Times why Roger L. Simon would call the former ambassador-turned-author Joseph C. Wilson "a deeply evil human being" and other blogger obsessions, in a piece...
Fleishman-Hillard has suspended Doug Dowie, the former head of its Los Angeles office and architect of the agency's political practice, while investigating charges from ex-employees that bills to the city...
The dance pioneer suffered a stroke Tuesday and died in a Pasadena nursing facility yesterday. Born here, she formed her famous dance company in 1966. Her presence in the Los...
The staff at KNX Newsradio just received this email: MICHAEL JACKSON RETURNS TO L.A. RADIO TO PRESENT EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS ON KNX 1070 (Los Angeles, CA July 16, 2004) Michael Jackson,...
On the LAT op-ed page today, writer Marna Bunger says that her Craigslist personal requesting a man taller than 5'10" drew mostly witty replies in New York and San Francisco,...
Writer Annie Jacobsen at Women'sWallStreet.com goes into detail about her nerve-wracking flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in June with 14 suspicious-acting (to her) Middle Eastern men aboard. She writes...
I turned off the comments function overnight to let a wave of spam blow past. Remember what we always say at L.A. Observed: only a fool would buy prescription drugs...
They say Los Angeles is a city of disconnected communities, and now there's another one. Toluca Woods, the part of Toluca Lake north of Camarillo Street, gets official recognition with...
It's been a while since Fleishman-Hillard has made the news, but above the fold on today's front page, the Times says that the politically connected PR giant routinely inflated its...
From a story on the Tribune Co. in the current Business Week, out of the Chicago bureau, headlined "Wrestling With Trib Co.'s Demons: Dennis J. Fitzsimons has had better months....
The senior writer at Los Angeles Magazine whose 2001 profile of Variety editor Peter Bart was much talked about — and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award —...
Lawyers for Cameron Diaz want the Gawker Media websites to stop reporting on and having fun with that for-sale video showing the actress topless in S&M scenarios when she was...
Ken Ellingwood's Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border, based on his experiences as a reporter based in San Diego and Tijuana for the L.A. Times, is featured...
The lede of today's Daily News story by James Nash says that wire cutters were found on car-theft suspect Stanley Miller when he arrested and bonked 11 times with a...
One of the things I like about Staples Center is the view of downtown's city lights you see when you burst out the doors into the night after a game....
New book deals from the latest Publishers Lunch: Writer and co-producer of "Six Feet Under" Jill Soloway's memoir WHY JEWS GO TO THE BATHROOM WITH THE DOOR OPEN, a look...
Every sport has had it's "next Michael Jordan" or "next Sandy Koufax." Hockey right now has a "next Wayne Gretzky" in 16-year-old Nova Scotian prodigy Sidney Crosby. He doesn't have...
Attorney Pierce O'Donnell on Monday picked up another list of charges that he laundered illegal campaign contributions to Jim Hahn in 2001, this time from the city's ethics commission. If...
The founder of Gold's Gym, an L.A. institution of sorts since its founding in Venice in 1965, died over the weekend. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who worked out at Gold's when he...
More home sales closed in L.A. County in June than in any June since 1989, but the median price still jumped by 32% to $414,000. It's the first time that...
The top 50 box office grosses for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ tended to be at more suburban theaters dispersed from Texas and Florida to Orange County, while the...
Tuesday's "Politics of Culture" show on KCRW is devoted to Isaac Bashevis Singer, who would have been 100 on July 14. Ruth Seymour will discuss Singer's writing and life with...
In announcing the shift of New York Times reporter Ed Wyatt to cover the publishing beat, editors Jon Landman and Lorne Manly poke a little fun at all their recent...
Today's free web story off the front page of the Wall Street Journal is on Daniel Okrent, the New York Times "public editor." His seven-month tenure so far has created...
Maria Sharapova the rising tennis star, that is. Coming off her victory over Serena Williams at Wimbledon, the 17-year-old has decided to drop out of next week's JPMorgan Chase Open...
The cover story of this week's Jewish Journal explores the ways that Los Angeles traffic has altered community life, by spreading Jews out in the region, making it harder to...
Phil Wallace at LAist notes that the Dodgers have hired a guy who negotiates the sale of stadium naming rights. He warns owner Frank McCourt: don't even think of affixing...
Tim Wind was one of the LAPD officers videotaped kicking and striking Rodney King on a dark stretch of Foothill Boulevard in Lake View Terrace back in 1991. A rookie...
There are now more than 80 city-sanctioned "neighborhood councils" around Los Angeles, each with $50,000 a year to spend on whatever. In many cases, the elections to choose board members...
Philip Bruce, news director at Channel 28's "Life and Times" program, takes over as supervising editor for California at NPR West, the Culver City operation of National Public Radio. He...
The top editorial in today's L.A. Times, headline Show Riordan the Door, urges Gov. Schwarzenegger to use the latest blooper by Richard Riordan to do away with the "redundant office"...
Or was it their third? Anyway, Rudy Tomjanovich was hired today to replace Phil Jackson as the suit on the Lakers bench. He's done business with the Lakers before, of...
I'm told that on Wednesday night, the new travel anthology-for-a-cause My California ranked in the 20,000s on Amazon. On Thursday morning, a contributor to the book, critic David Kipen, mentioned...
Host Barbara Osborn talks to Douglas McCollum of the Columbia Journalism Review about how "the Iraqi National Congress hoodwinked the American press" with the stories of defectors. McCollum spoke with...
OK, I'm hooked. More than a month ago, flipping through the TV channels I saw a nerdy-looking guy win that night's "Jeopardy" game. Couple of weeks later, I noticed Ken...
The federal Dept. of Labor will be monitoring the upcoming vote for president of the Writers Guild. A Variety story (shorter free version at Yahoo) today spells out the terms...
The city's new regulations over cybercafes are decoded for the layman by the lead negotiator for the cafes at Corante.com. Ernest Miller gives the background, says the regs are the...
I don't think Richard Riordan is long for the state education secretary post, but we'll see. The latest is that the mother of 6-year-old Isis D'Luciano, who our ex-mayor teased...
Los Angeles author David Rensin emailed his curiosity about why, on some streets, the "BUMP" warning before speed bumps now reads "HUMP. For him, and for you, here are some...
That micro-controversy over whether or not the L.A. Times erred in making the point Tuesday in a front page story on Paul Bremer that he left Iraq without speechifying has...
The L.A. Times has begun moving to fill some of its recent unexpected openings on the Calendar and feature side. First to benefit: Carina Chocano, who is moving over from...
Janice Hahn, the mayoral sister and councilwoman from San Pedro, paid for a $100 Cinco de Mayo dress out of her office contingency account. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Assn. folks...
There are some details of Michael Cieply's wooing by the New York Times — including L.A. Times business editor Rick Wartzman advising his star writer-editor to check out what the...
A couple of bugging devices were found and removed from Michael Eisner's office on Disney's Burbank lot this past weekend, the anonymous Industry blogger A Fly on the Wall says....
Marc Cooper turns his blog today over to a correspondent who has something to do with the Department of Homeland Security and who has a different take on the border...
At best, Tim Rutten writes in today's Regarding Media column, 2004 will be the year of living dangerously for the news media. If they are not so lucky, it will...
Mickey Kaus takes a break from being unhappy about Kerry's strength to lead his Slate blog with a recitation of L.A. Times stories out of Iraq that he says have...
Phototopia blogs pictures of the town's first Kerry-Edwards fundraiser, a turnout of lesser stars Tuesday night at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. The sisters Kerry (Alex and Vanessa, pictured)...
That bizarre episode in Santa Barbara with ex-mayor Richard Riordan and the little girl got Steve Lopez's attention. He writes in today's Times column that Riordan didn't have a stroke...
Jim Hahn opens up about being a working almost-single father in an interview with Mary McNamara in today's Times. That life now includes two households; Monica lives elsewhere in San...
In today's New York Observer, Bruce Feirstein considers the evidence and sees a perfect storm of unavoidable change headed at the entertainment business. The piece is long and hard to...
Robert Tagorda hasn't quite left town yet, and he blogs today that when his friend suffered a diabetic seizure in Santa Monica over the weekend, a certain high-cheekboned First Lady...
Rick Orlov's lead story in today's Daily News also tops the Daily Breeze that's on the street, if not on the website. It looks at Mayor Hahn's conundrum — he's...
The Downtown News continues to work its way through City Hall anointing various 35-and-under "movers and shakers." This week they are David Gershwin, the press deputy to council president Alex...
Times watcher Patterico has been making a case that the L.A. Times erred when it reported last week on the front page that Paul Bremer left Iraq without giving a...
A couple of stories in today's Times features section survey aspects of the local literary scene. Lynell George's piece looks in on the three journals to start here recently: Black...
• LAist, the SoCal version of New York's Gothamist, goes public Tuesday. Earlier: Gothamist going bicoastal. • We're number one: The feds seize more contraband cigarettes at the ports of Long Beach...
The lead Letter to the Editor in today's L.A. Times Opinion section is from Nancy Reagan: In the last 30 days I have experienced an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and...
The lede and first few grafs of an AP story about the ex-mayor and candidate for governor in today's San Luis Obispo Tribune: SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - State Education Secretary...
Robert Tagorda, who blogs at Priorities & Frivolities, posts that as he and his wife prepare to leave for Harvard, they will be making last visits to favorite spots. He...
A judge dismissed the libel case of the stuntwoman who sued Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his campaign staff for erroneously telling reporters she had a criminal past. The L.A. Times...
The issue of foreign journalists being detained entering the U.S. and deported for lack of a visa that terrorists, tourists and most business visitors aren't required to have (who can...
Before he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrayed a paraplegic war veteran in The Men. For local history buffs, what's notable abut this 1950 film...
Seemed worth mentioning: • Nick at LAAvenue.com drives around the city with a live web cam on his vehicle. (Thanks to Daniel) • Gene Lichtenstein, the ex-editor of the Jewish Journal of...
I spoke to Jim Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa today, and it's clear both are preparing to go another round. Hahn talked up his record of hiring Chief Bratton, lowering the...
This time the buzz is about Michael Cieply, who's apparently leaving the LAT Business section to become film editor at the New York Times. More later... A little more: Cieply...
Just to follow up on a couple of previous L.A. Observed items: Christopher Breslin, the brother of Rosemary Breslin (and son of Jimmy), has posted a gracious thank you to...
In the expanded print version of last week's LA Weekly story on Manohla Dargis and Nicolai Ouroussoff defecting to the New York Times, Nikki Finke touches on a sore point...
The blogger and frequent L.A. Observed commenter Joseph Mailander is now part of a group blog with three friends called Martini Republic. Their mission: "To say things without regret about...
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
