Archive by Month
June 30, 2005
Edgy it's not, but the Times' not-quite-a-blog on inauguration week has had some pretty good items. Today Steve Hymon went to Hahn's free exit lunch...
The Times' Larry Stewart broke online the news that Spero Dedes will replace Joel Meyers as the Laker's radio play-by-play announcer. Meyers went to the...
Up in Sacramento, Political Pulse bought the Capitol Weekly website and newspapers and plans to launch a state political news portal later this summer. The...
I've also copied below the Villaraigosa transition's list of diginitaries attending the Friday swearing-in. It's for readers whose enjoyment is in the details. I count...
Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa will be sworn in to office on Friday by Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Reinhardt is...
The search for a Times book review editor is starting to drag on, considering that Steve Wasserman told his bosses he was leaving before the...
At the Times' online Inauguration Notebook, Daniel Hernandez looks at how the local Spanish-language media has been getting ready for the Villaraigosa era. Hoy has...
KCRW says their daily podcast traffic jumped tenfold to 100,000 when Apple released the new iTunes on Tuesday. The latest version of iTunes lets users...
June 29, 2005
Someone who observed today's City Council farewell to Cindy Miscikowski emails that both Hahn and Villaraigosa showed up (along with ex-members Zev Yaroslavsky and Joy...
Reporters Matt Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times go to court today to be sentenced for contempt in the Valerie...
Outbound: • Hahn chats with Tina Daunt about the future, goes dirt-bike riding with Jackson and Katrina, and tries to score Rolling Stone tickets for the...
June 28, 2005
The Times has finally named a fulltime radio reporter. Martin Miller is the first staffer asigned to the beat in a long while. [* Update:...
LATimes.com is posting a running Inauguration Notebook. It's starting out slow, though Daniel Hernandez picked up on the not-intended-for-the-public job applications showing up on the...
Burson-Marsteller just announced that Fred Muir, formerly a reporter and editor at the Times, is taking over the Southern California office as "market leader" and...
You might not want to be around the Civic Center on Friday unless you are there to partake in the festivities. Here's the word from...
According to to the pay site RonFineman.com, Channel 2 was thinking seriously of taking Jim Hill out of the sports anchor slot. Hill didn't want...
The Times sent Valerie Reitman to cover the last rites at the Redwood, which began Friday night and spilled over into Monday. Turns out the...
In response to Ken Reich's blog rant last week about the low turnout of Times people at a Little Tokyo event for the Frank del...
June 27, 2005
L.A. Business Journal editor Mark Lacter gives the details on long-time political reporter Howard Fine's shift onto some new beats. His email also says that...
On Friday morning the long windup ends and Antonio Villaraigosa's term as mayor actually begins. To prepare, the Times interrupted former government editor and City...
June 26, 2005
When they weren't invited some years ago to join Steve Wasserman's Institute for the Humanities (which some members call The Geniuses), journos Mickey Kaus and...
Big ink for KCRW's Nic Harcourt in the NYT Magazine, where Jaime Wolf anoints him "The Star Maker of the Semipopular"...The NYT also does a...
June 25, 2005
The office of state Assemblyman Mike Gordon announced that he died today from the brain tumor that was diagnosed in February, shortly after he took...
Folks, one of our protectors was killed yesterday doing his job in the city of Hawaiian Gardens. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Jerry Ortiz, attached...
June 24, 2005
Summertime, and the living is easy. So just shorts today, but check the tail end for updates. • Controller Laura Chick released a highly critical follow-up...
June 23, 2005
John Balzar becomes a senior writer for the weekly Home, Food and Outdoors sections at the Times. Bettijane Levine, the former fashion editor, joins Home....
Hollywood freelancer (for the New York Times and others) Ross Johnson has fallen into the blogging web. And for his first meaty entry at The...
Julius Shulman is rightfully legendary for his architectural photography, but as he slides well into his 90s he's getting more known for his irascibility. I'd...
Longtime L.A. Times rock critic Robert Hilburn is asked by a reader in today's Calendar Weekend section: "What do you do to protect your hearing...
The mayor-elect told the Times that cuts are necessary to correct a growing deficit. He declined to get specific, but said "people are going to...
They happened Tuesday night on the southbound Harbor Freeway near Adams Blvd. The victims were both wounded, but the driver got off the freeway, got...
If it seemed to you like reaction to the L.A. Times wikitorial split along the lines that often divide those who get the Internet from...
June 22, 2005
Nikki Finke says in the LA Weekly that Anita Busch, the former Hollywood Reporter editor and writer for the LAT and NYT who was threatened...
Luke Ford reports at his blog that Andrew Breitbart, the West Coast editor for the Drudge Report until he left in April to help launch...
Updated with new entries at the bottom... • It's official: the Dodgers' star reliever Eric Gagne is done for this year and the start of next...
Bob Hertzberg, Eric Garcetti and Bernard Parks all came out Tuesday as supporters of former Speaker Herb Wesson's candidacy for the city council. He wants...
More than 1,300 law enforcement officers raided homes of the Vineland Boyz/Boys starting at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, serving 43 search warrants in three counties and...
June 21, 2005
Several of the personnel moves posted here recently have been Style desk writers on the Times' features floor taking new assignments -- Roy Rivenburg to...
Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist Doug Krikorian has been doing sports talk on L.A. radio since 1992. On Monday, he got the axe at KSPN (710...
Lisa Beebe at Blogging.la noticed a Mary Kay cosmetics peddler making sales to passengers on the MTA's 152 bus. When Beebe got on again two...
I bumped up the main font just a hair. If it bothers you, let me know. By the way, I designed the site so most...
FishbowlLA turns sleuth and checks on the cred of a semi-anonymous trendy mentioned in last Thursday's New York Times Styles section. The trail leads, possibly,...
Retired Times writer-turned-blogger Ken Reich raps his former LAT colleagues on the virtual knuckles for not turning out last night to support a book of...
As if freelancers weren't already feeling pensive about the coming remake of the Times Sunday magazine, they now have good reason to expect fewer assignments....
Martin Ludlow's coronation as labor boss of L.A. County hit a snag when some unions refused to go along. Instead of the 10th district city...
Porn photos posted late at night doomed the L.A. Times wikitorial, the New York Times reports Tuesday. Deputy editorial page editor Michael Newman suggests the...
June 20, 2005
Jim Hahn — I'll have to check, but I believe he is the mayor of Los Angeles — makes a rare public appearance on Saturday...
Mondays are always so busy... • This news won't help the layoff jitters sweeping the LAT's newsrooms this week. Tribune Company stock was downgraded Monday to...
Jim Flanigan's column has been a fixture in the Times Business section for more than two decades. His last piece as senior economic editor runs...
Well, you knew this was coming. The Times has taken down its first experimental wikitorial, explaining: Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at...
The LA Weekly picked up four first-place AltWeekly Awards, the most of any paper. From the release: The Los Angeles paper won not only for...
• Change is coming to the third floor press rooms. At the City News Service desk, Art Marroquin is coming up from San Diego to take...
June 19, 2005
In a Week in Review piece in today's New York Times, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff dishes on the design of most stadiums and says Frank...
June 17, 2005
Tyler Green, reviewer for Bloomberg News and the blogger at Modern Art Notes, lives on the East Coast but keeps up on museums out here....
It has been a while now, but some might remember when then-Times reporter Anita Busch was threatened in 2002 over a story she was pursuing...
Robin Kramer will return to the third floor of City Hall as the chief of staff to Mayor Villaraigosa; she previously served in the same...
The innovation du jour at the Times editorial page is a lead editorial, titled War and Consequences, where readers are invited to go online and...
• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect...
Well not exactly the Times, but this was the top Google ad tonight on the California news page on LATimes.com: Topless in Vegas Folies Bergere...
June 16, 2005
The experiment called the L.A. Times editorial page veered off in a new direction today. In place of editorials and letters to the editor, they...
Jacoba Urist is 28 and worked as a lawyer in the New York office of O'Melveny & Myers for eight months, before quitting two years...
Obits are praising the accomplishments of Carlo Maria Giulini, conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1978-84. "We have lost one of...
Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opens today at LACMA. The last time Kig Tut's treasures were here it was a mega-event. The...
The first Villaraigosa inaugural invitations are going out. As you can see on the full-page PDF file, dining and dancing with the mayor-elect won't come...
June 15, 2005
Yeah, the photo is familar. I ran it in March — but it's a great downtown image from 1923, showing the old Farmers and Merchants...
The Liberty Film Festival, which got some attention for its debut last year as a West Hollywood showcase and schmoozefest for conservatives, is coming back...
Mayor-elect Villaraigosa flies to Fort Worth today to speak to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention. Meanwhile, the Times' Patrick McGreevy and Jessica Garrison...
Michael Kinsley's old friend and Slate colleague Timothy Noah writes today that the L.A. Times should just do away with unsigned editorials. Excerpt: If the...
June 14, 2005
• Times feature writer Roy Rivenburg is going legit, transferring to the Metro staff in Orange County. Writes Style editor Rich Nordwind, in a memo to...
There's no rest for the politics weary. No sooner is the mayor's race over than the drumbeats begin for the governor's agenda-pushing special election, called...
Ben Stiller was on KCRW's Design and Architecture this afternoon, talking with Frances Anderton about the city and the new book he co-edited, Looking at...
Councilman-elect Bill Rosendahl is going to take the ceremonial oath of office at Venice Beach. He will do it Saturday, July 2, from 10 a.m....
Longtime award-winning L.A. reporter Warren Wilson announced his retirement from KTLA yesterday. When we last heard from him, Wilson had hired Melanie Lomax to press...
Phil Jackson will be announced as the next coach of the Lakers at a 2 p.m. press conference. Just this morning, the Times reported that...
David Brown is stepping down as host of American Public Media'a Marketplace, the daily business and finance show produced here in L.A. Brown says, "I...
Since the so-called 3-12 work schedule for officers went into effect, crime is down [pretty much everywhere...] and morale and recruitment are up, but it...
Stanley C. Jaroszenski, who is 64 and lives downtown, was arrested Monday on a federal indictment listing 117 charges of sending hypodermic needles and threatening...
Former Fleishman-Hillard executives Doug Dowie and John Stodder were in federal court Monday and got an extension on their conspiracy and wire fraud trial. Their...
Howard Kurtz's column this week in the Washington Post visits with Stephanie Miller, the L.A.-based host for Air America, the talk radio-for-liberals service. As recently...
June 13, 2005
ChoiCentral tracks the sudden rise to popularity of Dodgers first baseman Hee Seop Choi, who this weekend opened a lot of eyes by clubbing six...
* Never fails. Something new comes in every time I post one of these shorts lists. Fresh shorties at the bottom. • The Times live-blogged the...
You can't say that Michael Kinsley hasn't gotten people talking about the L.A. Times editorial and opinion pages, though Kinsley and his colleagues might wish...
Our friends and colleagues in Santa Maria can come home now. Jacko not guilty on all counts. Much ado about not much....
The Daily News' Rachel Uranga lands the first story since the election about Corina Villaraigosa, "a soft-spoken educator and mother who shies away from the...
June 12, 2005
Eric Stone, the Silver Lake author of Wrong Side of the Wall: The Story of Blackie Schwamb, the Greatest Ballplayer in Prison History, is driving...
A To Our Readers note on Sunday from L.A. Times Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez introduces some upcoming changes to his page (and his former...
That gentle but noticeable 8:41 a.m. earthquake was actually decent sized, a 5.6 (preliminary (downgraded to 5.2) magnitude ground shudder centered below the desert six...
Bob Giraldi, a commercial and music video director, explaining in the New York Times why he went ahead with shooting a promo film for New...
Michael Lewis has been stricken from the online menu of Sunday Opinion columnists at the Times since I observed last Wednesday that his presence there...
People are buzzing about how L.A.'s mayor is suddenly spotted everywhere these days, giving speeches, meeting the folks, dedicating a new ride at Universal City,...
The quote is how Tijuana journalist Jesus Blancornelas began his remarks last night at the 47th annual Southern California Journalism Awards. He accepted the L.A....
June 11, 2005
Readers of Mickey Kaus's blog at Slate know he's no fan of the local paper, but the Times really got him going this week. On...
The Daily Bruin at UCLA is on to a good story that doesn't turn up anywhere else on a Google search. It seems that the...
June 10, 2005
Today's Daily Journal report on Steve Sugerman, the latest ex-Fleishman-Hillard exec to face charges, says that prosecutors expect Doug Dowie to plead guilty when he...
The Times sends three reporters after Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz, and they come back with reports of lavish spending, petty demands and much resentment....
June 09, 2005
It has been one of those shorty kind of days... • The westbound lanes of the Century Freeway were shut down for two hours this afternoon...
Now we know who one of the key government witnesses will be against Dowie Dowie and John Stodder, the former Fleishman-Hillard executives charged with fraudulent...
Staffers close to Antonio Villaraigosa say that Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas is at work on a book about the mayor-elect's rise and the state...
• Antonio Villaraigosa intends to become chairman of the MTA board when he takes ofice. The mayor gets to appoint three other MTA members, and he...
June 08, 2005
One of Deputy Managing Editor John Montorio's ambitions for the features side of the Times is a stand-alone weekly section called Image. He thinks it...
Times-watcher Patterico points out on his blog that the LAT Sunday Opinion section has not run its innovative Outside the Tent feature since April 24....
When he was a rookie on the Palos Verdes Estates police force 23 years ago, Dan Dreiling arrested a home burglar named Charles Vaca. Dreiling...
Slate's Mickey Kaus complains that yesterday's freeway chase-shutdown story should have been on page one of this morning's L.A. Times, not B-3 with a teaser...
Randy Archibold, who used to be a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Daily News, is returning to town as a national correspondent for...
• As expected, Martin Ludlow will leave the City Council to take over the County Federation of Labor. He will make $37,000 a year more...
June 07, 2005
Participants in the Congress for the New Urbanism meet in Pasadena from Wednesday through the weekend. Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa will deliver remarks about his vision...
Anne Bancroft, an actress for fifty years, has died of uterine cancer in New York. She was 73. Of her many roles, she might be...
The San Bernardino Freeway is closed in both directions in Alhambra while a SWAT team negotiates with a kidnapping suspect. A robot just brought the...
Maria Shriver tells the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove that she had no contact with anyone at NBC about the Schwarzenegger biography by Laurence...
Sitrick and Co. executive Kelly Mullens has a fulltime office at Dodger Stadium these days, and the strategic PR company's tab to help team owner...
Union leaders have called a noon news conference, presumably to announce that Councilman Martin Ludlow has been named executive secretary of the County Federation of...
June 06, 2005
Antonio Villaraigosa's chief media adviser in the campaign, David Doak, has signed on to do the same for Fernando Ferrer in New York. Ferrer is...
The Times is converting a seat on the editorial board into a three-month visiting fellow slot, as a way to bring in more thinking from...
In this week's Downtown News, Jay Berman looks back at the story of legendary Los Angeles lawyer Joseph Scott. He arrived in town in 1893...
The 47th annual Southern California Journalism Awards have come on as a sponsor of L.A. Observed. That wouldn't necessarily merit an item on the blog,...
The entire editorials column in Sunday's L.A. Times was devoted to the first effort in what appears to be an ambitious months-long campaign against malaria...
The ocean phenomenon where red algae bloom, bacteria deplete the oxygen, fish die and the beaches look and smell bad is apparently pretty extreme now...
That was the amount in so-called independent expenditures — not subject to limits — during this year's city election campaigns, the Times' Jeff Rabin reports....
O'Leary, a former nun, ran the political consulting firm O'Leary and Associates in Los Angeles and served twelve years on the Democratic National Committee. She...
June 05, 2005
Laurence Leamer, author of Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, lost a shot at promoting the book on "Today" because of Maria Shriver, according to...
At the end of his Monday column about Deep Throat and Watergate, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz touches on Times political writer Ron Brownstein's...
Over at the Huffington Post, former L.A. television news anchor (now actress, production exec and blogger) Bree Walker takes a shot at ex-husband (and likewise...
Soon-to-be-ex Mayor Jim Hahn gave his first extensive interview since the election to Rick Orlov of the Daily News. Orlov has known Hahn a long...
June 04, 2005
I'm not certain that I had ever heard his name until now, but Emil Praeger was the architect and engineer of Dodger Stadium. He and...
An evolving post, with the newest items at the bottom: • If true, this will open up some movement in local politics. According to email from...
June 03, 2005
Turns out that Sen. Hillary Clinton's appearance at Roland Emmerich's house was just the kiddie portion of her Wednesday night stay in L.A. She raised...
The paid informant known as "Psycho Mike" who is the chief source for the notion that "Suge" Knight conspired with an LAPD cop to murder...
June 02, 2005
The Times identifies Steve Sugerman, a former Fleishman executive and ex-Riordan deputy, as one of the unnamed (and uncharged) co-conspirators. The LAT also says that...
• Bob Hertzberg, chairman of the Villaraigosa transition team, will be on KPCC's Talk of the City Friday at 2 p.m. with guest host Jon Beaupre....
Mayor Hahn is seeking soft landing spots for some of his key aides. He has moved to appoint chief of staff Tim McOsker to the...
City Controller Laura Chick, whose audits brought some attention to the Fleishman-Hillard PR contracts, released this statement about today's indictment of City Hall figure Doug...
City News Service has moved an urgent advisory, saying that Doug Dowie, the former head of Fleishman-Hillard public relations in Los Angeles, has been charged...
With grim editor faces and private meetings up on the sixth floor fueling rumors about new cutbacks coming at the Times, the business section has...
Chris Morris, music editor of the Hollywood Reporter, contributes a piece to this week's CityBeat about the new Ry Cooder album "Chavez Ravine." It was...
A Defamer operative files a report from last night's $125-a-head Hillary Clinton fundraiser: The beer and wine flowed freely, for those guests brave enough to...
Antonio Villaraigosa's Washington trip went well, with the mayor-elect being asked to sign copies of his Newsweek cover and getting good reviews. He spoke to...
The LA Weekly's recurring Weekly Literary Supplement has a cover piece on eighteeen local independent presses, sidebars on Tosh Berman’s TamTam Books, Feral House, Tsehai...
Sharon Waxman reports in Thursday's New York Times that, with his star Tom Cruise increasingly pushing Scientology and acting oddly while promoting War of the...
June 01, 2005
A week before Johnnie L. Cochran died in March, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving a disgruntled former client of...
Copley's David Zahniser details in today's Daily Breeze the different hats worn by Fernando Guerra, the Loyola Marymount professor and commentator on local politics who...
On today's Times op-ed page, Cardinal Roger Mahony writes that "the church recognizes the right of our country to control its borders, and it does...
