 
|
 |
|
Archive by Month
December 31, 2006
Did the Los Angeles Times have a tough year or what? Lots of unhappy departures, speculations about a dark future and criticism aimed at the...
Some of the Los Angeles-area institutions, famous and not, that didn't make it though the year — as covered by LA Observed. Ambassador Hotel Tower...
December 30, 2006
Obituaries come in three varieties on LA Observed. Either the death is big news with a SoCal connection, the deceased is prominent in the fields...
Ron Fineman lost his battle with colon cancer today. The founder of the television news website Ron Fineman's On the Record was taken off his...
Former LA Weekly-ians Charles Rappleye and Tulsa Kinney have reappeared as publisher and editor, respectively, of Artillery, a new Los Angeles-based art magazine distributed mostly...
December 29, 2006
City ethics commissioner Bill Boyarsky took the on-line ethics course required of Los Angeles officials and found the exercise filled him with mixed emotions. "Campaign...
Today's Wall Street Journal front page says that in breaking up an international car theft ring recently, the LAPD interrupted the flow of profits to...
The webmaster at PR industry blog Strumpette has posted a fake AP dispatch announcing that the blog's creator, the pseudonymous Amanda Chapel, suffered broken bones...
Kim Masters writes at Slate that David Geffen is the wrong man to run the L.A. Times, taking issue with the position voiced earlier this...
December 28, 2006
Five more LAPD officers will hold a press conference Friday to allege misconduct by ex-deputy chief Michael Berkow, Eric Leonard reports at KFI.com. Berkow is...
Shades of Brown in the LA Weekly was Daniel Hernandez's take on the relationship between the Times (his former employer) and its Latino staffers as...
Judge Dzintra Janavs bitch slapped Mayor Villaraigosa over his LAUSD compromise, David Zahniser writes in the LA Weekly. Greg Stacy found out the hard...
Rebecca Dana, a 2004 graduate of Yale, has been covering television for the New York Observer. At the New York Times she will carve out...
Stephanie Edwards tells the Pasadena Star-News that she took the hint and declined KTLA's offer to reprise her limited role in KTLA's Rose Parade coverage....
December 27, 2006
Lots of Time Warner cable woes, a response to Daniel Hernandez on Latinos and the L.A. Times, many complaints from Times subscribers — also Stephanie...
James Mee, the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who arrested Mel Gibson in Malibu, claims through his lawyer that he's being harassed by supervisors. Mee's...
Gov. Schwarzenegger has been out of state for 204 of the 1,136 days he has been in office — or 1 of every 5.6...
Mary Kaye Schilling, the former executive editor of Entertainment Weekly, gets the helm of the LAT's Calendar Weekend section. She used to be the magazine's...
December 26, 2006
Former president Gerald Ford died today, Betty Ford announced. No location was given, but the Fords were residing in Rancho Mirage on the desert near...
Print reporters who have to work the dead week between Christmas and New Year's are always scratching for news to fill the time and the...
Yesterday's New York Times offered some backhanded praise of Los Angeles architecture, with writer Robin Pogrebin taking the position that L.A. design is leaving the...
Longtime local news figure Ross Becker is leaving NBC4 and the on-hiatus daytime show he anchored, The Local Story, for an anchor slot at...
December 25, 2006
James Brown died early Christmas Day in Atlanta after being admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business made one...
December 24, 2006
The NWS says Christmas Day in L.A. will be a lot like today — spring-like and mostly clear. Sunday's warmth helped make for a festive...
December 23, 2006
KTLA's press release tries to make the upcoming coverage of the Rose Parade sound special: "Bob Eubanks and Michaela Pereira will be back as co-hosts...
One thing I can add to the Times' appreciation today of It's a Wonderful Life, the film classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed: all...
You can ride the buses, Red Line and light rail lines for free from 9 pm Dec. 24 to 2 am on Christmas morning. The...
December 22, 2006
Mark Lacter has the scoop over at LA Biz Observed: Rick Wartzman gave his notice at the L.A. Times to join the New America Foundation,...
KCAL-9 will once again air the yule log on Christmas morning, continuing a 40-year tradition (in New York — just three years here.) The log...
John Balzar, one of the last ties to the L.A. Times' run as an exemplar of the literary newspaper journalism form, has given his notice...
Ex-mayor Richard Riordan already owns the Original Pantry downtown and Gladstone's 4 Fish on Pacific Coast Highway. Now he's close to closing a deal for...
A recent email reminded all the lawyers in City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's criminal branch never to talk to reporters without clearance — and how they...
December 21, 2006
A day after News & Chatter broke the unfortunate news that Dutton's Beverly Hills is closing, the store posted an explanation on the web...
Superior Court Judge Dzintra I. Janavs this afternoon threw out AB 1381. The law that Mayor Villaraigosa and friends pushed through the Legislature would have...
Daniel Hernandez, a former Metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times, goes long on the paper's dearth of Latino journalists and disconnect from the community...
December 20, 2006
Not much of a hiatus today, it appears — but I promise to make up for it tomorrow. Peace in our time: the city and...
It was a big deal for Beverly Hills in 2004 when Dutton's opened the city's first general bookstore in a decade. Business has not been...
Alissa Rubin, who just last September was given the Paris bureau chief slot for the L.A. Times, succumbed to the lure of the New York...
LARadio.com reports that Ron Fineman, the former TV reporter and producer whose On the Record is one of the original Los Angeles media websites, is...
Four in ten California voters (41.5%) cast their November ballots absentee. Los Angeles County voters not so much: just 26% of those who voted used...
Dean Baquet's defense of news values against the bean counters — and his November ouster from the LAT — has won him the New York...
In July, Ryan A. Jimenez left the staff of the Geffen Playhouse to become press secretary for Maria Shriver in Sacramento. He abruptly departed that...
This time it wasn't local, but still. While Paul Magers was reading a story last night about the heavy snowfall that blanketed New Mexico, the...
December 19, 2006
Yeah, the former head of LAPD internal affairs cops to the affair with a sergeant under his command — but only for three years!...
December 18, 2006
Warner Bros sends word that animation legend Joseph Barbera died today at home in Studio City. He and partner William Hanna, who died in 2001,...
Founder Dov Charney will remain chief executive officer after the $382.5 million sale to be announced tomorrow, the New York Times reports online. Nothing on...
Catching up with the fallout from KFI shouter Bill Handel's tirade on Jamie White's morning show last Friday, LARadio.com says that Handel will sit out...
No Morning Buzz today, but here are some offerings from LA Observed contributors. How not to blog: When his piece flinging around 23 n-words riled...
Some highlights from the past week at LA Observed, chosen by the guy who signs the checks. Judith Regan's firing by fax breaks late Friday....
December 17, 2006
Nate Holden, the ex-city councilman and state legislator, bopped into the HMS Bounty on Wilshire Boulevard last night confident of two things. For 40 years...
Greg Goldin, the architecture critic for Los Angeles magazine, thinks outside the box in today's West and defends the McMansions that have been altering Los...
An "offensive" phone call to a HarperCollins attorney on Friday preceded Judith Regan's sudden firing, Sunday's Los Angeles Times says citing two unnamed but "highly...
Saturday's Daily Breeze ran this photo of Dean Singleton addressing the staff, along with a main story about the day's big news in the South...
December 15, 2006
Judith Regan, publisher of the terminated O.J. Simpson book, was abruptly fired tonight by HarperCollins. The company announced the dismissal, “effective immediately,” in a news...
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose barred further executions in California, saying the state procedure for lethal injection "lacks both reliability and...
The list of co-chairs for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inaugural includes leading California Democrats Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, Villaraigosa and Núñez — and even a few...
When Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally got in trouble recently over issuing fake badges to friends and campaign contributors, he called the fellow Democrat who was assigned...
Radio hype or actual anger allowed to get on their air? Never can tell with KFI. Morning angry man Bill Handel did not like that...
The website immediately slows down to molasses. Hearst's purchase includes the Palos Verdes Peninsula News, The Beach Reporter and More San Pedro. Dean Singleton's MediaNews...
Video blogger Jacob Soboroff uploaded from last night's Clippers' game, chatting in the floor seats with #1 fan "Clipper" Darrell Bailey and courtside at Staples...
Big serving of politics, media and police beat items for a Friday — plus another reason to avoid 7-11 and more. All nicely hidden...
Harvey Levin, who covered the O.J. Simpson legal circus for CBS 2, has some observations over at TMZ.com on Brian (Kato) Kaelin, who lived in...
Hollywood Today calls itself a "newsmagazine, with attitude...we cover the world of entertainment in all its multimedia glory, from screens and stages large and small."...
December 14, 2006
The founder of Atlantic Records died today in New York. Ertegun fell at an Oct. 29 concert by the Rolling Stones and later slipped into...
Chief William Bratton says in the LAT that the department is investigating the former deputy chief in charge of internal affairs over allegations that he...
AmericanLife TV is a "network for baby boomers" showing up on the new channel alignment for Time Warner Cable. Its selling point is old series'...
Laura Mecoy, the Sacramento Bee's Los Angeles reporter, weighs in today with a longish piece on L.A. transit pegged to the revived talk of a...
Jill Leovy covers homicide and the police for the L.A. Times, often in South Los Angeles. She writes today at Salon.com that the recent uptick...
Readers of The Envelope in yesterday's Times might have thought that Calendar staffer in New York Paul Lieberman's interview with Martin Scorsese was timely. It...
Babel leads Golden Globe nominations If you own a movie or worked on one, you should care. Otherwise... List State Sen. Alex Padilla has...
Tribune has neither accepted nor rejected David Geffen's all-cash offer last month to buy the Los Angeles Times, a source tells the paper's James Rainey....
This is kind of fun: Bonhams and Butterfields' big auction Sunday of Hollywood materials includes papers that Warren Beatty apparently abandoned in a New York...
December 13, 2006
Hearst filed a legal document today that says it will buy the South Bay Daily Breeze from Copley, then sell the Breeze to Dean Singleton's...
Curbed LA has the skinny and the renderings of the proposed new Midtown Crossing where Pico, Venice and San Vicente come together. Lowe's will anchor....
Active members of homeowner and residents' group live in a world of acronyms and nettlesome neighborhood issues. In their honor, here's the Christmas carol that...
No, not Allen Iverson — not yet anyway. LA Observed contributor Bob Baker has taken over from Rick Cipes as the official, paid Clippers blogger...
Randy Alcorn, chief financial officer for the News-Press for 23 years, was escorted out of the building just before he could quit in exasperation with...
The author and screenwriter contributed a blog entry on Condoleezza Rice to the Huffington Post over the weekend that begins: I met Condoleezza Rice last...
Dean Baquet told his younger brother Terry (right) that he was being ousted as editor of the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 31, seven days...
Bill Booth, the Washington Post Style section's writer in Los Angeles, is on a roll. Last week it was the 99-tuba salute for Tommy Johnson,...
Chandler family trying to buy the Times They could be the worst option yet for editorial quality. The Chandlers who are left are mostly...
A quartet of Hollywood old hands — Patrick Goldstein and John Horn of the LAT and Sharon Waxman and Laura Holson of the NYT —...
December 12, 2006
L.A. journalist Mona Gable has stirred up a storm at the Huffington Post with a post reacting to her 16-year-old son receiving mail from the...
Michael Buchanan, the security guard who stabbed an intruder at the Beverly Hills home of celebrity trainer Gunnar Peterson, is an ex-Rampart Area officer who...
Dodgers bullpen closer Eric Gagne has agreed to a one-year deal with the Texas Rangers for $6 million, pending a physical. He actually only closed...
The Teamsters union is trying again to organize in the L.A. Times pressroom, and new publisher David Hiller has taken to the web to urge...
City of Future winner to be announced The contest sponsored by the American Institute of Architects challenged top architecture firms and students to design...
Both Felipe Fuentes and Cindy Montañez have been persuaded to drop out of the 7th council district special election and make way for Richard Alarcon....
Records containing the names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of students, faculty, employees and some applicants since the early 1990s may have been accessed....
December 11, 2006
I've switched the color of links here on News & Chatter to black, hoping to cut down on the cacophony of dark red (closer to...
My cover story on Antonio Villaraigosa's first eighteen months as mayor has gone online at the still-in-transition Los Angeles magazine website. The piece delves into...
Remember this spring when the Los Angeles Times announced with some fanfare that it was devoting three staffers, two front-section pages and some design energy...
The slogan at Netty's is "serving Silverlake before it was hip." Well, no longer. Netty's, which brought takeout "California Comfort Food" to the corner of...
The New York Film Critics Circle today voted United 93 their best film of the year. Martin Scorsese was deemed best director for The Departed....
One day after ABC featured LAPD officer Kristina Ripatti on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Chief William Bratton sent out an update on all the officers...
If you saw the SUV barreling the wrong way in the carpool lane on the 134 early this morning, first, congratulations for not getting killed....
On today's New York Times op-ed page, USC Annenberg professor emeritus Murray Fromson for the first time discloses the source of his 1967 report for...
They are refining the masthead titles at Variety. The winner seems to be Michael Speier (pictured), who has been named executive editor of news for...
L.A. film critics pick 'Iwo Jima' Clint Eastwood's World War II drama Letters From Iwo Jima won the best movie nod from the Los...
December 10, 2006
It was a good week for scooplets, links and smart posts by LA Observed contributors at large in the city — here's my dozen-plus-some for...
December 09, 2006
School board incumbent David Tokofsky, a critic of the mayor's bill to dilute the board's powers, has filed papers with the City Clerk dropping his...
Jan Perry and her estranged husband, Douglas Galanter, blame him and his business problems for falling $270,000 behind on taxes and being late on mortgage...
Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart uses today's column to say he doesn't think much of The Envelope, the L.A. Times' effort to take Oscar campaign ads...
On January 1 Mayor Villaraigosa becomes responsible for three clusters of L.A. Unified schools — three high schools and the elementary and middle schools that...
December 08, 2006
Richard Montoya of Culture Clash (left, as Sen. Gilbert Garcia in "Water and Power" at the Taper) recently joined the Villaraigosa Administration as a commissioner...
Staffers at the South Bay Daily Breeze were previously told to switch to a new, post-Copley ownership timecard as of Sunday. That directive has been...
There's already been an item today about David Geffen and the L.A. Times, but this is about his home on Carbon Beach in Malibu. The...
Nelson is a professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC and a former national correspondent at the Los Angeles Times. In an op-ed...
Couple of interesting sessions coming up at Zócalo, the public lecture series started by Gregory Rodriguez that LA Observed helps sponsor. Next Tuesday, Dec. 12,...
There will be a new lineup of Los Angeles Times editors managing coverage of the next presidential race. The desk will be bicoastal: one editor...
Stromme died yesterday of cancer at the age of 59. She wrote the Echo Park novel Joe's Word and the Underground Gardener column for the...
Brief history lesson and somewhat optimistic view of the future from The Economist: In the past 15 years the city has gradually built a skeletal...
Breeze sale '99% complete' Hearst will buy the Torrance paper but MediaNews will "operate" it, until eventually buying the paper from Hearst, the Breeze...
David Geffen tells the WSJ that Dreamgirls is his final Hollywood project: "I don't want to keep solving the same problems. I'm not interested in...
Morning Buzz will be delayed today....
The Museum of Neon Art has to vacate its downtown space by the end of January. Talks on a new location have broken off, the...
December 07, 2006
The South Bay Daily Breeze will fetch just $25 million and end up in the hands of Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group via an indirect route,...
Hollywood Reporter lays off five more, including executive editor Peter Pryor, Fishbowl LA and Nikki Finke say. Earlier in the week editorial director Howard...
Maybe it's the nature of LA Observed, but I keep hearing nothing but horror stories from subscribers to the Los Angeles Times and disgruntled customers...
Sean Joseph Meade, 41, was taken from home on order of Chief Bill Bratton after a videotape allegedly showed him choking a handcuffed sixteen-year-old suspect...
Richard Bloom, the mayor from 2002 to 2004, is back again after the bi-annual dance of the slates on the Santa Monica City Council. You...
With Glendale and Burbank included the Valley's population is now 1.74 million, larger than every U.S. city except New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston....
Announced today: Developer Geoffrey Palmer, Tom Gores of Platinum Equity and Eric Smidt, CEO of Harbor Freight Tools in Camarillo and collector of postwar art....
Development stories Only in L.A. would a pair of 47-story condo towers in Century City be rated by planners as good for traffic, and...
December 06, 2006
The mayor took city officials, friends and media up to Independence today to let Los Angeles water flow in the lower Owens River bed, officially,...
While Greg Maddux takes however many innings might remain in his 40-year-old arm to San Diego, the Dodgers appear to have a deal with Jason...
Will Campbell at Metroblogging interviews the artist who claims to be responsible for the doves found hanging from wires over many Los Angeles streets....
Suspected gang members backed into and nearly totaled the car of a black woman who has been testifying for several days in the racially inflamed...
The talker item around here yesterday was definitely 99-tuba salute, my post on Hollywood studio musician Tommy Johnson from Bill Booth's story in the Washington...
Courage on the witness stand Jill Leovy's lede on the LAT Column One: "Debra Johnson was poor, skinny, asthmatic, addicted to crack cocaine and...
December 05, 2006
From Eric Lynxwiler at LottaLiving.com I learned that this classic-style, fully functioning neon sign on the Rose Motel in Harbor City was taken down before...
Harold Nelson is out as director of the Long Beach Museum of Art, replaced on an interim basis by former board president Ron Nelson...
Barbara Bogaev is out as co-host of the American Public Media program heard here on KPCC. It sounds as if a number of Los Angeles...
LA Observed contributor Cari Beauchamp posts at Native Intelligence on the frustration of trying to wrestle answers about her cable service from the voice(s) on...
No, Michael Richards did not attend a celebrity roast for Whoopi Goldberg in blackface. Nor did he pour a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup over...
Tuba players came from all over to play at USC's Bovard Auditorium in tribute to the member of their club whose deep notes you have...
New religion and higher education reporters, a philanthropy beat, a reporter for the South Bay and Long Beach and Jeff Rabin moves off the city...
Nativadad Cano, the gent on the right, is a legend in his own time. Born in Jalisco, he came to Los Angeles in 1957 as...
Amy Pascal, promoted this year to co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, tops the latest edition of The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Power 100. She...
Thinking through Prop. 83 Times reporter Peter Y. Hong wanted to hear out the convicted child molester before deciding whether to join his Altadena...
December 04, 2006
William Morris has sent along the press release on former Villaraigosa deputy Cecile Ablack, who we told you Friday was going Hollywood. The flackage —...
LA Observed reader Marc Litchman emails with one of those shake-your-head stories about trying to get through to the more-depleted-than-ever business side at the Los...
Reports in the newsroom are that Howard Burns, editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter, will leave the job tomorrow. A call to him was transferred...
Tu Ciudad's new issue proclaims Erwin Raphael McManus's Mosaic the city's fastest-growing and hippest Christian congregation, with services that feature comedy skits, video clips and...
Political Muscle, the Times' Sacramento politics blog, sees a certain resemblance between Borat Sagdiyev and newly elected state Assembly member (and ex-L.A. City Council member)...
Lippin had co-managed Brian Wilson and had been a PR rep for, among others, Prince, Eric Clapton and Stephen Stills. The Lippin Group, where she...
The LAT is once again trying to find good reporters willing to relocate to, as Jon Stewart puts it, Mess-O'-Potamia. Memo from foreign editor Marjorie...
James N. Wood, former director of the Art Institute of Chicago, will become president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust in February. This...
National Public Radio reporter Daniel Zwerdling spent six months investigating a story that is billed as an exposé of the mistreatment by the Army of...
Acting fire chief Douglas L. Barry has been with the department 31 years and is African American. Mayor Villaraigosa will introduce him this morning...
December 03, 2006
Some of the more talked-about, linked-to or noteworthy exclusive posts from the past week here at LA Observed: Job openings in the mayor's press office...
December 02, 2006
UCLA 13, USC 9 No national title for the Trojans this year. Game stories: ESPN, AP. It's quiet around TJ Sullivan's neighborhood, but my daughter...
December 01, 2006
Considering how many confidential requests I received this week for the email address to apply for jobs with Mayor Villaraigosa's press office, there should be...
Daily Trojan saga comes to a head: Jeremy Beecher, an ally of editor-in-exile Zach Fox, was elected editor for the spring, apparently with the...
Political theater plays out: Mayor Villaraigosa accepted the fire chief's resignation this morning. Just now William Bamattre faced the cameras at a station in Panorama...
Alan Abrahamson, Los Angeles-based columnist for NBC Sports.com, is in Kuwait City with the International Olympic Committee and finds that anti-American sentiment will be the...
I'm quoted in another out-of-town piece about the Los Angeles Times, this one a cover package by Rob Gurwitt in Governing magazine that takes on...
On the occasion of the paperback release of his well-received first novel, The People of Paper, Salvador Plascencia talks with guest blogger Daniel A. Olivas...
Sure, the city promoted William Bamattre to fire chief eleven years ago hoping he would clean up the station house culture of abusing women and...
The Los Angeles archdiocese just announced the first settlement of claims alleging sexual abuse by clergy here. It covers 45 out of 562 pending claims,...
USC says that Zach Fox, already elected once as spring editor of the Daily Trojan but blocked by administrators, can run again. He tells Jacob...
Times says Bamattre to quit today Fire chief William Bamattre, never able to stem longstanding controversy over the racist and sexist extremes of the...
© 2003-2008 • About LA Observed • Contact the editor
| The high price of gasoline and airline tickets is good news for Disneyland, Universal Studios and other local destinations.
| Allstate has ranked the average frequency of getting in an auto accident in various cities. At least we beat Philly.
| Librarians are some of my personal heroes, providing a beacon of light in a world that often seems hellbent on...
| But please don’t just think of of the victims.
| The LA native is the biggest signing in team history and he creates a legit Laker-Clipper rivalry.
| The Lakers look to re-sign Sasha Vujacic and Ronny Turiaf, while the Clippers are making a push for Baron Davis.
Sponsors
Premium Blogads
Books, Blogs & Events
Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.
