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Archive by Month
March 31, 2005
Photographer Gary Leonard's archive of 40 years of Los Angeles ephemera and artifacts—menus, flyers, concert tickets and other hard to replace historical items—was soaked by...
March 30, 2005
Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Sorry....
March 29, 2005
Drex Heikes, recently replaced as editor of the LAT Magazine [actually, he was doing the #1 job from the #2 slot, with the top editor...
The famed Los Angeles defense attorney, former prosecutor and behind-the-scenes political figure died from his brain tumor today, reportedly at home in Los Feliz. He...
Remember Fleishman-Hillard? The PR agency's former boss in Los Angeles, Doug Dowie, has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit over losing his $370,000-a-year job in January,...
So far today—and it's still early!—the Hahn campaign has challenged Villaraigosa to stop hiding and debate, the Villaraigosa camp has responded by calling that "the...
David Shaw's Sunday media column in the Times struck me as one of his intellectually weakest efforts. His position that bloggers should not be covered...
Regarding Monday night's political theater-slash-debate at CSUN, the print reporters pretty much agreed: Times: "Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and his challenger, Antonio Villaraigosa,...
March 28, 2005
Evan Wright, who writes locally for Rolling Stone and others, has picked up this year's J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Generation Kill: Devil Dogs,...
A Sunday piece by Chicago Tribune business writer James P. Miller summarizes the parent company's weakened financial status and points to the "still controversial" 2000...
I noticed ex-councilman Nate Holden standing around when Mayor Hahn posed for the cameras last week at Galpin Motors, but I didn't chat him up....
In the ongoing feud between the two Writers Guild of America spheres, score one for the New Yorkers. Walter Bernstein, who sits on the WGA-East...
The official version, put out by the LBPD and printed Thursday in the Press-Telegram, is that the dog charged at a detective, who shot in...
March 27, 2005
The Times' Mark Z. Barabak writes Sunday that the replay between Hahn and Villaraigosa echoes the 1973 rematch between Tom Bradley and Sam Yorty, but...
The Defamer item below reminded me it's been a year since I checked in on the popularity rankings of local blogs. On Technorati.com's Top 100,...
March 26, 2005
Mark Lisanti and Defamer get nice front-page treatment in the new L.A. Business Journal. The story goes into Lisanti's background and blogging ethos—"he tries to...
Dan Tana's in West Hollywood is apparently as hot as ever (and more expensive.) A piece in tomorrow's New York Times Sunday Styles by Hooman...
* Updated All three dailies (Times, Daily News, Daily Breeze) top their Saturday campaign stories with Mayor Hahn's Friday attack on Antonio Villaraigosa that he's...
March 25, 2005
LAist's Josh Strike says that ex-mayor and current education secretary Richard Riordan was humbled yesterday at LAX. With about 500 people in the security line...
Russ Stanton is the new LAT Business Editor. The memo follows:...
The Metro staff has muscled up a bit. Gale Holland, city editor of the Daily Journal, is joining the Times as the editor overseeing legal...
The other night, DA Steve Cooley told some reporters that Robert Blake was guilty as sin and a miserable human being. He also remarked that...
In today's "Heard on the Street" in the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times' drag on Tribune Co. fortunes is examined. Joseph T. Hallinan writes...
March 24, 2005
Friday's New York Post Page Six picks up the story we had Tuesday on the three KNBC news staffers fired over an affair that somehow...
Blame the lollipops. At least some Variety subscribers didn't get their morning fix until late Thursday. Apparently the promotional suckers wrapped in with the full-page...
The mayor said today he would reserve a seat on every city commission for members of neighborhood councils. I presume that includes the juice commissions...
The black-Latino political coalition that could make 2005 different than 2001 for Antonio Villaraigosa moved a good bit closer to reality today. Rep. Maxine Waters,...
Some collected items, from here and there (updated a couple of times): • District Attorney Steve Cooley told the SPJ gathering Tuesday that Robert Blake is...
March 23, 2005
Imagine a blog that does nothing but noirishly count off the days in 1947 Los Angeles, felony by bloody felony. Stabbings, gunshots, suicides, interspersed with...
Turns out a second writer had her op-ed piece on the great rains of 1861-62 rejected by the Times. Frances Dinkelspiel, a Berkeley journalist and...
Weekend reporter Sam Hall Kaplan has left Fox 11 News after ten years. In an emailed column scheduled to run in the April 4 Downtown...
In a brilliant comment on Barry Bonds' "The Media Ruined Me" speech, Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts turns for inspiration to—yes—Blazing Saddles: I'm tired Tired...
The Times has made official what L.A. Observed reported a couple of weeks back: deputy business editor Anne Reifenberg will become the number two editor...
Ralph Shaffer is Professor Emeritus of History at Cal Poly Pomona (he compiled a searchable book of 1880s letters to the L.A. Times) and something...
The Hahn campaign just released the list of eight debates the mayor has agreed to participate in with Antonio Villaraigosa. First one is next Monday....
Jonah at LA Blogs links to what he calls "possibly the best documented freeway encounter that I have read." It takes place on the southbound...
The top editorial in today's Times sets its sights on that $35,000 a year that Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez gets paid by his friends in...
Not surprisingly, the Times' James Rainey has the longest story on the paper's new 45-year-old publisher. The news didn't break until after 2 p.m. here,...
March 22, 2005
James Nash of the L.A. Business Journal has posted a web story that Richard Alarcon will announce tonight that he is endorsing Villaraigosa for mayor,...
First in a series, I think. EXT. GALPIN MOTORS PARKING LOT DAY Noise from 405 Freeway and Van Nuys Airport traffic drowns out voices. Cameras...
Times publisher John Puerner, who has had his share of battles with Chicago, is going surfing. No nice landing within Tribune, no nothing—he's just gone...
When last seen at Canter's deli, Bob Hertzberg was chasing after Mayor Jim Hahn with a kitchen sink. On Monday, they sat down at Art's—at...
Ron Fineman follows up today with reporting on his scoop last week that KNBC reporter Kyung Lah and "Today in L.A." producer Jeff Soto got...
March 21, 2005
Copley's James P. Sweeney reports today that investors across the U.S. are being pitched about a big Indian casino to be built near Magic Mountain...
Loyola Law School election expert Rick Hasen looks at the election night Inka job by City Clerk Frank Martinez and concludes it was not "ballot...
Jim Hill gives reality tours of Disneyland to tourists who want the inside story, not the official Magic Kingdom pablum. During yesterday's tour, park security...
A new batch of construction photographs from the Griffith Observatory renovation are posted at Griffithobs.org. It wouldn't reproduce small here, but the top-down, fish-eye view...
After many years on Ocean Park Boulevard, the Center for Law in the Public Interest is moving where it's warmer. They have taken the 16th...
LAT profile I: In her piece on labor boss (and Hahn airport commissioner) Miguel Contreras, Matea Gold goes quickly to the Godfather card: "With his...
March 20, 2005
Santa Monica architect Thom Mayne on Monday will become the first American in fourteen years to receive his profession's top award. His Caltrans District 7...
In his Times column in Sunday Opinion, Michael Kinsley paid a nice compliment to the NYT op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd: [She] proceeded to reinvent the...
On the front page of Monday's paper, the Washington Post comes out to report on how badly things went when Cedars-Sinai Medical Center tried to...
David Abel, public policy consultant and publisher of The Planning Report, argues in this week's Outside the Tent that dumbed-down media are largely to blame...
March 19, 2005
The Jewish Journal story about forged Hahn endorsement signatures has legs. The Times and the Daily Breeze picked it up in Saturday's paper after Rabbi...
March 18, 2005
Betty Pleasant is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Wave and writes the paper's gossipy Soul Vine column, mostly about black community politics. In...
Joel Kotkin, still in disbelief about Bob Hertzberg's inability to make the runoff, writes in Friday's Jewish Journal that Jewish political clout in L.A. is...
Catching up with some reading and email after a slow online day: • Venice gets the 36 Hours treatment in Friday's NYT Escapes. Janelle Brown has...
March 17, 2005
The city attorney just elected to a new term filed to run for state attorney general. Delgadillo says in the Times, "I've said all along...
March 16, 2005
Well, you just never know. From AP via Yahoo News: LOS ANGELES - A jury acquitted tough-guy actor Robert Blake of murder Wednesday in the...
The Public Policy Institute of California is out today with a new survey of attitudes in Los Angeles County about life here. It's an annual...
Here's some stuff that piled up while I was off. Updated a couple of times: • Gary Webb, the investigative reporter whose suicide has been partly...
March 15, 2005
No blogging today. Back tonight....
March 14, 2005
In a column today about the discussion of why so few women writers run on op-ed pages, the New York Times' Maureen Dowd takes a...
Some local blogs were honored with 2005 Bloggy Awards announced this afternoon at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. Boing Boing won for...
Seth Rosenfeld's Freedom of Information Act request for FBI documents was filed in 1981. The San Francisco Chronicle reporter is still waiting, after three lawsuits,...
The Monterey Bay Aquarium's young great white shark, the only one in captivity, has started doing what they do best: killing other sharks. But they...
The mayor has to go negative to cut into Villaraigosa's vote, but by now his own numbers are so low he may not be believed,...
March 13, 2005
Disney's board today named Bob Iger as the successor to Michael Eisner. Here's the Disney press release, reaction from dissidents Roy Disney and Stanley Gold,...
Updated occasionally, newest at the bottom. • Bob Hertzberg tells the Daily News he's undecided about what the future holds for him. • That Friday Times piece...
March 12, 2005
Andy Fixmer in the L.A. Business Journal has a piece (sub. req'd) on the L.A. hot dog scene and the impending arrival of a new...
Michael Kinsley, the Times' Editorial and Opinion Editor, is interviewed (sub. req'd) by James Nash in next week's L.A. Business Journal. Susan Estrich is only...
Los Angeles City Clerk Frank Martinez, a recent Hahn appointee, had election workers use blue ink to color in ballot "bubbles" that were only partly...
March 11, 2005
Industrious readers have been emailing that KTLA morning anchor Cher Calvin's banned-by-management website lives on in the cache of various Internet search engines. But now...
Times columnist Steve Lopez writes today that he ran into councilmen Alex Padilla and Tony Cardenas at Pete's Cafe downtown on election night and got...
The Times' new media reporter, James Rainey, steps between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley with a piece in today's Calendar. The brouhaha that Rainey covers...
Did the Times get used by the defense in the high-profile gang-rape case that is occupying so much attention down in Orange County? R. Scott...
I caught up last night with E! News for the first time in months. To my surprise, Giuliana DePandi is back in the host's chair...
March 10, 2005
I guess Times editors don't spend a lot of time with the Thursday Calendar Weekend section. Just a month ago, staff writer Hugo Martín wrote...
LA.com says they have caught the San Francisco Chronicle's website in some premature gossiping. SFGate's Daily Dish column has a colorful item about a PETA...
No surprise that City Controller Laura Chick came out today in support of Antonio Villaraigosa. She endorsed him four years ago, and in the city...
Taking off from the news that Robinson's-May will soon vanish from the scene, Cathy Seipp revisits the department store past of Los Angeles in her...
Catching up on my reading: • LA.com catches Susan Estrich un-wowing at the William S. Paley Television Festival. On her website, Estrich sort-of apologizes for bringing...
Jesse James Hollywood has been returned to Santa Barbara after being tracked to coastal Brazil and arrested. Authorities say he was being supported there by...
Media coverage of Day One of Round II all predicts a campaign high in invective. The Times says Hahn begins as the trailer in this...
March 09, 2005
The list of rumored Pulitzer finalists I began running last week keeps growing. Editor & Publisher adds the leaked photography categories, and among the finalists...
He is the ex-reporter for Salon and an LAT community paper—and former president of the local SPJ chapter—whose piece about the energy crisis was retracted....
Jim Hahn opened his press conference at noon with a smile and a quip—"now the fun begins." A cursory look at yesterday's results, however, shows...
Cher Calvin's short stint so far as Sharon Tay's replacement co-anchoring KTLA's morning show has not met with much approval at RonFineman.com. The TV site...
Villaraigosa33.07%Hahn23.68%Hertzberg22.15%Parks13.37%Alarcon 3.59%99.19% of precinctsLatest results from City Clerk Unless there's an unexpected change, it's Antonio Villaraigosa versus Jim Hahn in the May 17 general election for...
• In the 11th council district, they couldn't settle it. Runoff between Bill Rosendahl and Flora Gil Krisiloff. • Controller Laura Chick waited to see which good...
You might remember we told you on Feb. 14 that Rick Wartzman will be the new editor of a relaunched Times magazine. He's more than...
In this week's New Yorker, New York Sun book critic Adam Kirsch takes a leisurely look at the life and work of the late Los...
March 08, 2005
Things are pretty quiet around City Hall today, with most of the press and many of the political staffs engaged on the election. But out...
David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle, "Day to Day" and KCRW asked each of the Big 5 candidates for mayor to name their favorite...
After reading Sunday's freelanced L.A. Times story about CNN chief Jonathan Klein, Slate's Mickey Kaus says he's finally figured out why Calendar's website blocks readers...
Election Day I is finally here. Final campaign wraps in the Times, Daily Breeze and Daily News. Daniel B. Wood of the Christian Science Monitor...
That's the name of a documentary about foreign correspondents being screened tonight by the Los Angeles Press Club and the American Cinema Foundation. It was...
March 07, 2005
Michael Hiltzik's "Golden State" column in today's Times tells the story behind Movable Type, the popular blogging software developed by Six Apart, a San Francisco...
On the rumored list of Pulitzer Prize finalists I excerpted last week, add Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal in the criticism category. The...
SurveyUSA is the polling operation that uses the recorded voice of KABC news anchor Marc Brown to ask questions and lets respondents answer without talking...
Daniel Olivas is profiled in Stanford magazine: At age 3, Daniel Olivas stopped speaking for an entire year. When his parents took him for tests,...
The SPJ chapter in Los Angeles recently changed the name of its Journalist of the Year awards to the Distinguished Journalist awards. This year's winners...
Most of Howard Kurtz's Media Notes column in today's Washington Post is about the public squabble between Susan Estrich and Michael Kinsley that began as...
It's the day before the day before the real race for mayor begins. In the main daily stories, the Times decided to cover the gamut:...
March 06, 2005
Mayor Hahn's campaign schedule for Sunday includes stops at several black churches, Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, Canter's on Fairfax and Farmers Market. Bob Hertzberg's first...
March 05, 2005
KCRW has added Harry Shearer's Le Show to the list of programs that are available as podcasts. (Here's my Feb. 23 post announcing the move...
A photographer at photoblogs.org has posted some tips for making last-hour pictures of the doomed Ambassador Hotel, which closed this week to on-site location work...
Street closures begin Sunday just before the wheelchair racers take off at 7:50 a.m. It can be a mess getting around for several hours. On...
Rolling into the final weekend, the candidates are riding buses, filling the airwaves and sniping at each other. All in the name of getting out...
Conservative political blogs led by talk show host Hugh Hewitt have chosen a new media bogeyman, or woman in this case. She is Barbara Demick,...
March 04, 2005
The sports journalism world seems both mystified and miffed that somebody ponied up $15,000 to give ESPN broadcaster Jim Gray a star this week on...
R. Gregory Stevens, 42, was a houseguest of the actress in Hollywood for Oscar weekend, the Washington Times says. She found his body Saturday morning,...
When TV and newspaper weather reports talk about the amount of rainfall in the "Civic Center," don't believe it. The rain is actually being measured...
For the second time in less than three weeks, one of Michael Kinsley's predecessors as opinion editor of the L.A. Times, Tom Plate, has shown...
E-Day minus four: • He's baaaack: Carlos Vignali returns to L.A. politics in a new Hahn ad that hits both Villaraigosa and Hertzberg for writing letters...
March 03, 2005
How Only in L.A. is this? It's 4 a.m., you're nursing a cup of Joe at Astro Burger on Santa Monica Boulevard. In blasts a...
Tracy Wilkinson, the L.A. Times bureau chief in Rome, has sold Warner a book on, as Publishers Lunch puts it, "the chief exorcist for the...
The first wave of supposed leaks from the Pulitzer judging swept through newsrooms today. Both the Times and the Register are buzzing that they're finalists...
Tom Hayden and Mike Woo both ran for mayor and lost to Richard Riordan. In this week's CityBeat, they have some things to say. First...
In the news on Election Day minus five (* updated with new entries at the bottom): • Talkin' 'bout Enron: Hahn's hit at Hertzberg and...
March 02, 2005
Starting March 14, Infinity Broadcasting will make available streaming audio of 11 news and talk radio stations. In addition to KNX (AM 1070) and KFWB...
It's down to 24 pages in black and white, on odd-sized 11-by-19 inch paper, the New York Times says. There are no paid ads, and...
* Updated below The Times' Jeffrey L. Rabin reveals that for two months Bob Hertzberg has refused to disclose the law clients that have paid...
March 01, 2005
Rob McMillin at the baseball blog 6-4-2 has posted an MP3 audio clip of Vin Scully calling the ninth inning of Sandy Koufax's perfect game...
The landmark Ennis Brown house in Los Feliz has been ruled "uninhabitable" due to a crumbling retaining wall. Inspectors estimate that about $500,000 in rain...
LAT investigative reporter Gary Cohn emerges from the Schwarzenegger-groping beat to chip in a piece in today's paper about KTLA entertainment reporter Zorianna Kit grazing...
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