Monday Buzz, 6.19.06

The dual snubs were part of a broad conflict between the two Democrats.

Villaraigosa is torn between party loyalty and the potential rewards offered by his new alliance with the Republican governor. He plans to campaign with Schwarzenegger for bond measures on the November ballot that could offer Los Angeles billions of dollars for schools, housing and traffic relief. And the governor would decide where much of that bounty went.

There is also a matter of personal ambition: Villaraigosa is widely seen as a top Democratic candidate for governor in 2010 — provided that Angelides loses.

The surprise visit by the CBS chief rallied the troops more than a news chopper exclusive of a freeway car chase at rush hour and helped honor the end of a decades-long losing streak that perhaps only the Los Angeles Clippers could understand. "His visit to the newsroom was a huge psychological paycheck," said local news veteran Laura Diaz, who co-anchors the 11 p.m. news with relative newcomer Paul Magers. "There are people who've worked here for decades and have never experienced being No. 1....It feels pretty sweet."

The last time the station reveled in first-place glory for its 11 p.m. newscast was in the early 1970s when Jerry Dunphy and "The Big News" commanded the local airwaves. The top ratings are more a reflection of CBS' strong nighttime programming — particularly with older adults, a prime audience for evening newscasts — and the personal appeal of its revamped news team than any truly distinctive journalism that separates it from its closest rivals, according to analysts.

In August 1995, I made a secret trip to Seattle to talk with Microsoft about starting an online magazine (whatever that might be). On the plane back home to Washington, D.C., I found myself sitting next to Christopher Buckley, the comic novelist. Like an idiot, I immediately asked him, "Why were you in Seattle?" He said he had been giving a speech, and, like a gentleman, naturally asked me the same question. To which I was forced to reply, like a parody of the Washington self-importance in Chris' novels, "I can't tell you. It's a secret." When the secret came out a few weeks later, Chris sent me a note: "I figured it wasn't Boeing."

It wasn't Boeing. But Microsoft's suburban corporate campus was still an odd place to be practicing journalism. My interest in the project and Microsoft's interest were very different, but a good fit. Like many magazine editors, and journalists generally, I dreamed of starting a magazine of my own. And I had discovered that the magic words "on" and "line" were a way to interest others in this solipsistic proposition. Microsoft, meanwhile, had no particular interest in starting a magazine. But, like many companies in those early days, it was flinging anything it could find at the Internet to see what might stick.

In his new book, "The Great Black Way," Smith adopts the French flâneur guise to introduce us to Los Angeles' historic African American boulevard as he imagines it existed then. Step off the train at Union Station, he implores, and walk a few blocks south to 1st Street, where the journey begins. "Central Avenue was like a river, like the Amazon or the Nile," he says (quoting musician Clifford Solomon), "and downtown was the mouth."