Archive by Month
April 30, 2004
Michael Kinsley doesn't start until June 14 but he is introducing himself around the L.A. Times building today. He also expounds a bit on his...
Antonio Villaraigosa tells the Times that he has known since losing on election night in 2001 that he would run for mayor again. The only...
Today is Bob Edwards' final day as the host of "Morning Edition" on NPR after 24 years. L.A. Times radio reporter Steve Carney weighs in....
April 29, 2004
A veteran Czech-born performer who goes by the nom de porn Jessica Dee worked with infected star Darren James on March 24 and got the...
The guy who claims he was the one to pelt candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger with an egg at Cal State Long Beach back in September has...
Mike Hiltzik's "Golden State" column in today's LAT skeptically analyzes the media ripples that followed Reuters' April 21 report that Sony was close to buying...
Newsweek's former Los Angeles bureau chief, most recently the magazine's senior editor for news development, is going to the Dallas Morning News to be the...
SWAT teams summoned. Only in the spoof world of George Wolfe's LALATimes. Also in the new issue: "Bush Declares California Disaster Area - In General"...
For mayor of Los Angeles, that is. Writes Harold, no Hahn man to begin with, in today's LA Weekly: Against all odds, L.A. is going...
During the Valley secession campaign in 2002, the city's Department of Water and Power hid its plans to ask for massive rate hikes, the Daily...
The federal grand jury investigating the city commissions wants to talk today with its first commissioner, James Acevedo, a Valley-based political consultant appointed by Mayor...
April 28, 2004
Michael Kinsley plans to fly back and forth between the two cities when he takes over June 14 as editor of the Los Angeles Times...
KNBC reported that the LAPD has issued a threat advisory after federal officials received an "unsubstantiated potential threat of an attack" planned against an unspecified...
Lucian Haas worked for the old Daily News and was a leader of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild in the 1940s and 50s. He later...
Yesterday's final entry of Gregg Easterbook's blog sucked up, as he puts it, to everybody from George W. Bush to John Kerry to the New...
The Sacramento Bee columnist would appear to be no fan of Jim Hahn as mayor. Hahn and his mayoral reign have been likened, not without...
Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic, Harpers and Slate, is joining the L.A. Times as editor of the editorial and opinion pages....
Nick Tosches announces his death with a tribute at Selby's official website. Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile...
The Daily News' James Nash reports on an unusual court hearing yesterday where Bob Hertzberg's ex-wife asked that he be stopped from running for mayor....
Jon at the website Dodger Thoughts interviews Mark Langill, the team's historian and publications editor. There is also a special place within Dodger Stadium, tucked...
April 27, 2004
Since blogging about The Office almost two months ago, I've wondered how Aleks Horvat's venture to rent work tables in a communal space to writers...
Bad day in literary L.A. In addition to Paul Holdengräber's exit (see previous post, below), Mark Sarvas reports at The Elegant Variation that the reading...
Paul Holdengräber, the creative force behind the county art museum's Institute for Art and Cultures, has resigned. His departing email is short and sweet: Subject:...
In the May/June issue of Mother Jones, George Packer writes that there is "something peculiarly stale and tired" about political blogs. He reads them anyway....
Local author Thomas Greanias's Raising Atlantis was a bestselling ebook on Amazon and a Web phenomenon. Now the novel about an iconoclastic American archeologist and...
The lede of a story in the Sydney Morning Herald was written to prey on the worst fears of Australians and decent people everywhere: Sydney...
Air America Radio CEO Mark Walsh said Monday he has left the liberal radio network. The Chicago Tribune, which seems to be covering the Air...
April 26, 2004
All those competitors who have been taking potshots at Fleishman-Hillard for its city contracts may rue the day. Mayor Hahn today called for all outside...
The L.A. Business Journal reports (subscribers only) that five of Infinity's seven local radio stations will be moving to the former E! Entertainment (originally California...
The L.A. Times has hired a new Metro desk editor to oversee City Hall coverage. It's John Hoeffel, who ran the San Jose Mercury's coverage...
The New York Times has been unfair to Mel Gibson and his hit film The Passion of the Christ, Variety editor Peter Bart (an ex-Timesman)...
From 2 to 4 p.m. today, the station will air the war debate that occured yesterday at the Times Festival of Books between Robert Scheer,...
Ex-city councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., now a City Hall lobbyist, is raising eyebrows for distributing a newsletter that boasts of his prowess at getting his...
The newest copy of Fortune has a long piece looking at Barry Diller's moves to build a company, InterActiveCorp, that intends to get a cut...
The L.A. Times Festival of Books is a great community event, no question. People have a good time, it's free, authors meet readers and many...
Radio artist and playwright Joe Frank teamed up with Sandra Tsing Loh in an anti-Ruth Seymour stage performance back on April 9, and he vents...
April 25, 2004
Freelance writer Candice Reed looked at the grisly photos of charred American bodies dangling from an Iraq bridge and thought, Thank God that isn't anyone...
Pete Dexter (Train: A Novel) gave the funniest acceptance speech, Anthony Hecht (Collected Later Poems) the most poignant, and Bruce Wagner and R.L. Stine were...
How seriously do the bosses back at Fleishman-Hillard headquarters take the public relations agency's media hits here in Los Angeles? Pretty seriously, according to a...
David Zahniser, the City Hall bureau chief reporter for Copley News Service, writes in the Sunday Daily Breeze that insiders are "amazed" at Mayor Jim...
Washington Post Metro columnist Donna Britt came to town and had her say about Los Angeles in a Friday column. The email correspondent who called...
April 23, 2004
The official line from Camp Anschutz is that yesterday's Wall Street Journal profile of the boss, while accurate, did not quote him directly. Reporter George...
It's not the writing that Tim Rutten likes about the new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack. He writes in today's LAT review, "Woodward's prose...
Variety's Pamela McClintock reports that changes in the New York Times film-reviewing roster are expected to include Elvis Mitchell leaving the paper. He may already...
April 22, 2004
In today's LA Weekly, David Ehrenstein argues against journalists' use of unnamed sources in a piece that begins with a scene from the "Mary Tyler...
A rare profile of Philip Anschutz on the front page of the Wall Street Journal -- with an even rarer direct quote, and a line...
Avalon owner Steve Adelman claims in a Page Six item today that Vanity Fair writer George Wayne demanded two free first-class tickets between New York...
Toby Young, the Brit journalist who used to write for Vanity Fair, is writing the Slate Diary this week about living in L.A. for three...
For the third time in 10 days, a power outage has hit LAX. This time they blame a crow. In Wednesday's incident, the crow on...
Today on KPCC's "Talk of the City," Kitty Felde will have on ABC's Cokie Roberts and Greg LaVoi, the author of Barbie Loves L.A.: America's...
April 21, 2004
Add Robert Hertzberg, the former state Assembly Speaker, to the list of candidates who will be running against Mayor Jim Hahn for the next year....
An Internet message board with an obvious slant, AntiPolygraph.org, has a thread alleging to be inside info on problems in the LAPD polygraph unit. The...
The strident host of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" show brings her book tour to Wilshire Boulevard tonight, but first the Times' Greg Braxton weighs in...
Mack Reed at LAVoice.org is skeptical about the decision by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation to release the stage names of porn actors...
The Times Festival of Books is this weekend at UCLA, which means there will be a lot of authors around the city (doing TV and...
April 20, 2004
Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus dings the LAT's Mark Z. Baraback over some political analysis, and predicts that Wonkette (and by extension the other Nick...
Michael Huffington clarifies the record in a piece by Robin Abcarian in today's LAT, saying that he is bi not gay, intends (unlike ex-wife Arianna)...
It's official: the liberal radio network of Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Marty Kaplan won't return to KBLA. Air America announced today that it's in...
Fleishman-Hillard's St. Louis headquarters announced today that the PR giant will withdraw from its three controversial Los Angeles city contracts. The agency has gotten a...
Scott Collins, the L.A. Times TV writer on book tour for Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, shows...
Mayor Jim Hahn delivered mostly good news in his annual "state of the city" address yesterday in a fire station hangar in Sherman Oaks, then...
Lake Elsinore blogger Kynn Bartlett (Shock and Awe) has begun writing a column every other week for the Californian in Riverside County. His first this...
April 19, 2004
A couple of key positions have been filled in local TV news, according to RonFineman.com. Channel 4 has brought in Keith Esparros, a former executive...
Retired L.A. Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg appears in today's Broadcasting and Cable with the first of what will be a recurring guest column on...
Columbia has picked up Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies with plans for John Calley to produce a feature film. Some other local sales in this...
The cover of Los Angeles magazine this month is 25 Great Weekends. Cover lines to stories mention R.J. Smith's piece on how L.A. car culture...
Here it is Monday morning and Air America's old spot at AM 1580 is still being filled by Spanish-language news and talk. The liberal radio...
L.A.-based publications such as the L.A. Times Magazine, Robb Report, Angeleno and the Advocate are riding a big jump in ad pages over last year,...
April 18, 2004
The cover story in CityBeat by Chip Jacobs is about Jerry Schneiderman, the Hollywood real estate developer and agitating political gadfly whose formative episode as...
Rob Wagner, who wrote Red Ink, White Lies about the early history of L.A. newspapers, recently left his job as features editor at The Stockton...
April 16, 2004
Jack Miles, the former LAT Book Review editor and Pulitzer Prize winner for God: A Biography (and current senior adviser to the president of the...
From SpaceDaily, via Boing Boing (which got it from somebody else): Russian-born University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok says he can...
U.S. Attorney Debra Yang has shocked City Hall and given her corruption probe a newly threatening edge by formally asking that every email to and...
April 15, 2004
Variety reports that the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation and Adult Video News, the industry's trade publication, have called for all porn production to...
Folks at Forbes are a mite amused by a pitch from the PR rep for LA.com, asking if the website's president and editor can meet...
In the world of L.A. neighborhood activists, former "General Hospital" regular Shelley Taylor is the force responsible for putting Westwood North Village on the map....
Cybele at blogging.la has posted an item there (with pictures) on the display of old Los Angeles street lamps planted in the shopping center parking...
It doesn't look like the business dispute keeping the liberal radio network off the air in Southern California and Chicago is going away. Air America's...
Will Fowler was the first reporter on the scene of the Black Dahlia murder and kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer at...
Used to be that the Sunday magazines in L.A. newspapers were packed with ads for swimming pool builders. New pools became rare in the suburbs...
The wife of Hahn fundraiser Ted Stein, herself a member of the city's Board of Public Works Commissioners, voted four times to benefit Kaiser Permanente...
Michael Silverblatt's guest today on "Bookworm" is novelist Octavia Butler, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Kindred. KCRW's new Tuesday book commentator, David Kipen, had a...
April 14, 2004
A reader emails that Hal Fishman's commentary on tonight's KTLA "News at Ten" defended Sharon Tay, who was the subject of that "Are Anchors Too...
Hollywood sees journalists and our ilk as the next great comedy foils, the Boston Globe writes. Lawrence O'Donnell ("West Wing") is doing a half-hour comedy...
The liberal talk network bounced a big check and owes more than $1 million to its radio outlets in Los Angeles and Chicago. KBLA, the...
Local journalist Deanne Stillman writes in today's New York Observer about the Robert Blake and Phil Spector murder cases, which she has been covering since...
Mayor Hahn's appearance at the City Ethics Commission yesterday to argue for his package of reforms drew four television cameras and merited stories today in...
Ron Fineman's complaint on his website a few weeks back about the way Channel 5 anchor Sharon Tay dresses turned into a full-blown story in...
April 13, 2004
Laurie Pike at LA.com is on a roll today [not so fast...see below *], blogging that her old job as editor of Distinction magazine has...
The Pasadena Weekly's April Fools edition (no longer online, far as I can tell) pushed some noses out of joint, including that of the Pasadena...
The 2003 Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Excellence in Journalism, from the Society of Professional Journalists, include prizes for the L.A. Times and Ilsa Setziol...
The U.S. Attorney has subpoenaed the emails of Port of Los Angeles executive director Larry Keller, as part of the unfolding probe of possible city...
LA.com has Heather John's departing email: she's leaving as Style editor for Bon Appétit, where she writes, "as a senior editor I'll be covering wine...
Caltech (soon to be USC) history professor William Deverell delivers a paean on the L.A. Times op-ed page: Kevin Starr is nothing short of the...
The Greater L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (website here) is launching a series of monthly "mixers" at what they hope will be...
April 12, 2004
Since last week's Inglewood vote (and L.A. Observed item) pushed a few buttons, here's a follow through from L.A. blogger Armed Liberal over at Winds...
Carol Lay, whose comic "Way Lay" appears in papers all over the country, drew a strip on her Franklin Hills neighborhood recently. "Things I Love...
It's been decades since anyone has written a serious biography of Hugh Hefner (Hef's Little Black Book, co-authored by Hefner and Bill Zehme, to be...
LA.com blogs that Adam Moss at New York magazine may (or may not) be looking for a Hollywood columnist since Anne Thompson was let go...
A tribute to Spalding Gray will air on KCRW (89.9 FM) on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. The half-hour special by independent producer Jon Kalish features...
The California Studies Association, based at Berkeley, is having its annual conference in L.A. at Loyola Marymount on April 21-23. The keynote luncheon speaker is...
Police chief Bill Bratton, a favorite of the New York tabloids, has been out of the city for 128 days since the start of 2003,...
April 10, 2004
Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review carries reviews of the new books by Eric Lax and Joe Domanick, and sees Richard Clarke displace Suzanne Somers from...
That's a hot Hollywood rumor about the pseudonymous Rance, says Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin....
U.S. Attorney and District Attorney investigators separately looking into L.A. city corruption have begun to cooperate and are expected to merge into a single probe,...
April 09, 2004
Former E! Online columnist Andy Jones today begins a new weekly gig for FilmStew.com about party life. It's called SWAG: See Where Andy Goes. In...
It's been a month now since Times travel writer Susan Spano began her online journal from Paris. She seems to have settled into posting once...
On the L.A. Times op-ed page today, the National Review's Jay Nordlinger reacts to the Inglewood vote against Wal-Mart with a big kiss for Sam...
Barbara Becnel, the journalist who has reported on and collaborated with Crips founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, is the guest this Sunday on Barbara Osborn's "Deadline...
The cover story in today's Jewish Journal of Los Angeles is on author Michael Chabon's venture into comic books with "The Amazing Adventures of the...
The "One Question" feature at I Want Media asked Marty Kaplan of Air America and the USC Annenberg School to define "broadcast indecency." His answer:...
Laura Chick disclosed Thursday that she will run for reelection next year rather than go after Mayor Jim Hahn's job. So far she's yet to...
April 08, 2004
Talk is around City Hall and other PR shops in town that the FBI served subpoenas yesterday on Fleishman-Hillard in connection with the federal grand...
Just to finish the thought from a posting here in February about Laurie Niles, who hoped to audition for an opening with the Los Angeles...
The headline of David Carr's piece in today's New York Times says "highish brows" are furrowing at the thought of an auto writer winning a...
CityBeat's cover story says that Los Angeles is home to "the most dangerous publishers in America." The piece by Mick Farren profiles Adam Parfrey and...
The LA Weekly's John Powers gives Air America a try and says liberal talk radio has some growing pains to get through. Air America has...
LGF is a Los Angeles-based warblog by Charles Johnson that generates 3,000 comments a day and invites strong opinions about the war, Islam and questioners...
April 07, 2004
That's the rampant gossip in San Diego, says a writer for the local CityBeat there. Head guy David Copley is ill and the company's acounting...
L.A. Times Calendar writer Scott Collins chats up his new book, Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, in...
The New York Post's Page Six dishes on the just-concluded Los Angeles fall fashion shows: L.A. Times fashion writer Booth Moore was barred by Sue...
Bernard Parks will start raising money to run against Mayor Hahn, the man who ended his LAPD career. He tells the Daily News: "People from...
Hollywood, Interrupted, the book by Mark Ebner and Andrew Breitbart, includes a chapter about Heather Robinson, who says she used her job at AOL to...
April 06, 2004
Too Much of Nothing is the title of a new novel by Michael Scott Moore set in the fictional South Bay town of Calaveras Beach,...
L.A. Times editor John Carroll is set to be on with Charlie Rose tonight, along with Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post...
The president of the city Airport Commission resigns but denies in strong terms any suggestion of corruption. In his statement, Stein also blasts City Controller...
Thursday night on California Connected (KCET, 10 p.m.), host Lisa McRee will guide a discussion about talk radio among John Kobylt of KFI's "John and...
Chill Out LA is a website and weekly newsletter "devoted to helping you become a happier, healthier, more centered Angeleno."...
An email correspondent to Romenesko passes along some backstory in the career of Dan Neil, the LAT automobile critic who won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday....
Architect Pierre Koenig died Sunday at his home in Brentwood. His Case Study houses #21 and #22 helped put Koenig among the elite modernist architects...
Reason magazine's June cover will be devoted to a cool exercise in technology: the 40,000 subscribers will see individualized satellite photos of their neighborhood, with...
Stories in the national media about the L.A. Times' pick up of five Pulitzer Prizes -- the second biggest sweep ever -- talk about a...
The LA Weekly's (and the Nation's) Marc Cooper has a new blog. Next! * And: Jon Wiener too. It's mostly the lineup for his weekly...
April 05, 2004
National security advisor Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will be aired live Thursday morning on KCRW...
NPR commentator and autism expert Christina Adams has turned an essay about her son's recovery that she wrote last year for the L.A. Times Magazine...
It's to be Bruce Orwall, the longtime ace entertainment industry reporter in the Los Angeles bureau. The bureau staff was told he's the guy to...
The Times' winners are Sacramento-based editorial writer Bill Stall for pieces about state government, photographer Carolyn Cole for her work in Liberia, automobile critic Dan...
In some depth, by Mack Reed of LAVoice.org (who didn't get the job to be the site's editor). The site - almost two years in...
April 04, 2004
The Los Angeles-based show from Minnesota Public Radio aired for the final time today. Host Diana Nyad announced on the air (on KPCC) that "The...
Anna Richardson, the British TV journalist who accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of groping her during a 2000 interview, says she'll file a libel lawsuit against the...
PaidContent.org, which authoritatively tracks media efforts to make money on the web, is now listed among my links on the left side as a Los...
The LAT's Bob Baker has a piece in the Calendar section on the newly younger and hipper magazine put out by AARP, the group for...
April 03, 2004
It was bad enough that Liz Smith reported in her New York Post column last Tuesday that the old Perino's building was demolished the day...
After taking its lumps for a couple of weeks, the World Journalism Institute has toned down its Christian advocacy mission statement. It no longer states...
The Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the University of Missouri cites the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Business Journal in...
Some media and books things going on around town in April. The calendar gets updated through the month:...
On her new blog, Arianna Huffington pledges not to cash her $494.20 car tax refund but to turn it over to the California State University...
Yesterday's Christian Science Monitor tossed up a little feature on Wonkette Ana Marie Cox: A political blogger, untamed, rattles cages in D.C. Previously at LAO:...
April 02, 2004
Alexandra Jacobs summarizes the recent Sandra Tsing Loh dustup in her "Palmy Days" column. The only factoid I recognized as new is that KPCC will...
City Controller Laura Chick announced yesterday that she plans to use her audit powers to dig into the $9 million public relations contract between the...
The L.A. Times investigative team chasing the City Hall corruption story is out with a piece that says an engineering company, URS, has told the...
April 01, 2004
Blogging.la was just April Fooling when it reported on selling out to LA.com, but the serious word is that Gawker is getting close to trying...
I won't be posting for much of Thursday. Fair warning......
