As an amateur admirer of mariachi, I enjoyed CityBeat's feature on the female ensemble Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles. But I was stopped by the byline: Kamren Curiel, who I heard from in February in her role as the director of public relations for La Fonda, the mariachi venue on Wilshire near MacArthur Park. La Fonda gets a paragraph and a listing in this week's story, so I wondered: does the new regime at CityBeat let flacks "cover" their clients?

New editor Rebecca Schoenkopf assures me she does not. She didn't know of Curiel's connection to the business, she says, and wasn't too happy to learn of it from my inquiry. When I asked Curiel, she explained that she no longer works for La Fonda and says the mention was one necessary graf in a long story: "If you're writing about mariachi music in LA, you kinda have to shout out La Fonda as everyone who's from LA has been there for the music."

Photo: CityBeat