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Archive by Month
June 30, 2008
Oakley's Barber Shop is the last of the original businesses in Westwood Village, dating to 1929. It started on Vermont, near the original UCLA campus...
Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp subsidiary that includes Myspace, signed a 12-year lease agreement to move next June into a new facility at the...
ERS News says that seven Channel 5 news staffers got the pink slip today, including on-air reporters Walter Richards, Bill Smith, Willa Sandmeyer and Janet...
That's what retired baseball player Lenny Dykstra is asking for the seven-acre, 12,713-square foot Lake Sherwood mansion he took over from hockey great Wayne Gretzky....
Six events at least, including a bunch involving contributors with business (or potentially so) pending at City Hall. David Zahniser touches on them at the...
Kathy Reich, who is familiar to many on the California politics scene, posts at Take Back the Times: I am deeply saddened to write that...
Word at the Los Angeles Times is that retired reporter Ken Reich, 70, died in his sleep. He was found this morning. Friend and former...
Status report on the mayor Rick Orlov interviews the mayor on the start of his fourth year, talks to a few observers, and concludes "for...
June 29, 2008
That's what retired Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Reich calls his series of blog posts telling a little bit about 75 former Times staffers who...
Eighteen months after he lost his news editor job at the LA Weekly to Jill Stewart, Alan Mittelstaedt is back in the Weekly's good graces...
June 28, 2008
KNBC's News Raw channel, which is branded as Digital 4.4, announced today that as of Monday, pre-Olympic programming from Universal Sports would take over many...
The LA Observed neon cruise with the Museum of Neon Art a couple of weeks back is featured on today's Off-Ramp on KPCC at noon....
June 27, 2008
Most of Big Sur's main landmarks have been spared by the Basin Complex Fire, but there have been some losses and several close calls. From...
Patrick Goldstein (plus Ben Affleck), Patterico (plus Judge Alex Kozinski) and Alan Mittelstaedt (plus David Nahai) come together in this week's LA Observed segment that...
Not Antonio Villaraigosa, but Russell Napolitano — the city's mayor in our LA Observed Script Project story Right of Way. This week's winning writer, Marvin...
Chick and Delgadillo, the morning after This morning's stories add some context to the fight that went public yesterday between the controller and city attorney....
June 26, 2008
From the Long Beach Press-Telegram website: The sudden death of James Melroy, 36, whose byline has graced these pages both as a prep editor and...
Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller sent the staff a little pre-layoff salvo to prepare them for the cuts and repositioning that will be announced...
City Controller Laura Chick wants to audit the City Attorney’s Workers’ Compensation Program. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo declined her request to turn over records, so...
Email from proprietor Michael Dawson announces that Los Angeles' oldest bookstore, now located on Larchmont Boulevard, will go to appointment only. Dawson's has sold books...
TJ Sullivan checks out the Mindworks Global website and decides to help the Orange County Register's new offshore copy editors with their command of English....
A remarkable editorial in this morning's Daily News admits the paper got used in the news story earlier this week about DWP chief David Nahai...
Britt Allcroft is the Santa Monica-based creator of "Shining Time Station" on PBS and "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends." If you have been the...
California Air Board proposes major cut in greenhouse gases It's the first comprehensive plan by a state, affecting virtually every sector of the economy, but...
Ray Bradbury spoke last night at the iconic Long Beach bookstore and railed about its threatened closure and the dearth of bookstores in certain areas...
June 25, 2008
Roosevelt Dorn is expected to be charged in connection with a low-income housing loan he reportedly received from the city of Inglewood, according to the...
Steve Young's regular column in the DN's Sunday Viewpoint section is no longer needed, given that this week saw the last Sunday Viewpoint section to...
Mark Lacter isn't alone in predicting that Sam Zell would be lucky to get any value for the Los Angeles Times property in the Civic...
You know that L.A. Times-Bloomberg Poll this morning that had Barack Obama up by 12 points? The Gallup tracking poll out today disagrees in a...
I'd much rather not be posting all the time about a Chicago billionaire, but Sam Zell is L.A.'s biggest news media mogul right now. Yesterday...
Drew Street raid in progress A federal indictment targeting the violent Northeast Los Angeles gang will be unveiled at noon. CBS 2 Also: Preliminary injunction...
June 24, 2008
CurbedLA's sharp eyes spot a new sign on the building....
Anaheim Ducks co-owner Henry Samueli was suspended indefinitely by the National Hockey League after the co-founder of Broadcom pleaded guilty to one count of lying...
Frank Girardot, city editor at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, also posted his paper's original 1958 coverage of the murder of writer James Ellroy's mother....
Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Coliseum Commission is ready to entertain offers for the rights to put a name on the city's most...
Alan Mittelsteadt blogs that the Daily News and reporter Beth Barrett — he calls her "the Queen of Spoon-Fed Journalism" — got snookered into running...
Copy-editing of some stories in the Orange County Register, as well as layout of a sister community paper, will be handled at a company in...
Tribune's Lee Abrams, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, sought to clarify some of his image as...a not very informed observer of...
Radio talker Hugh Hewitt offers some new advice to Sam Zell and Randy Michaels on the problem child of their big debt-laden, default-threatened investment in...
At the Los Angeles Press Club awards on Saturday night, L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez had some fun at Sam Zell's expense — alluding...
Preparing for a SAG strike Threat of the actors going out or being locked out already has slowed production in Hollywood. Greenlighting of movies has...
The writer of the Times' weekly Big Picture column will now start posting to a blog, also called The Big Picture. The print column will...
June 23, 2008
Today is the 50th anniversary of a story hitting the Los Angeles papers that would become iconic in local literature. On June 22, 1958, 10-year-old...
New Geography.com, based in Sherman Oaks and North Dakota, has launched as a website "devoted to analyzing and discussing the places where we live and...
From now until November, expect the presidential candidates to be a giant pain in L.A.'s butt. Motorcades shutting down entire freeways, etc. For Barack Obama's...
This time the Tribune innovation guru explains why the Orlando redesign will work. Again, nothing about higher quality or better, deeper, smarter stories. It's all...
Paparazzo attacked by Malibu surfers Looks like a couple of beach skirmishes over the weekend, triggered by photos of actor Matthew McConaughey. LAT, TMZ, X17...
June 22, 2008
The once-edgy comic who played on his counter-culture roots died about 6 pm at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica. He was admitted in...
Eric Lynxwiler and I will be the featured speakers in Westwood today at 4 pm at the inaugural literary salon of the Friends of the...
Journalists of the year announced at last night's Los Angeles Press Club awards: Big print: Melissa Healy, L.A. Times Small print: Anat Rubin, Los Angeles...
June 21, 2008
Earlier this month, it was Truthdig's Robert Scheer reappearing on the L.A. Times Op-Ed page — notable because his firing as an Op-Ed columnist after...
June 20, 2008
Right after he got back from his week in Israel, Mayor Antonio Vllaraigosa took off for a Conference of Mayors gathering in Florida where he...
Sam Zell's Orland Sentinel has unveiled its new more colorful and "get to the point" redesign. The editor of the Chicago Tribune today told her...
Powerful L.A. women gather Downtown Councilwoman Wendy Greuel hosted a reception for Los Angeles Magazine publisher Amy Saralegui last night at Elevate Lounge attended by...
June 19, 2008
Sunday's four-page Viewpoint section will collapse next weekend into two pages (to be labeled Opinionated) inside the front section. The Sunday Wall Street Journal section...
Today's high of 109 degrees set the local record for a June 19. AP...
I really like this photo of Venice from 1957, showing the lineage of the ocean-front condos and converted beach shacks that are now so desirable....
KCRW host Harry Shearer and KFI's Bill Handel are on the list to get their stars installed on the Hollywood walk of fame next year....
Jamiel Shaw murder case in court Two witnesses described the shooting of the Los Angeles High School star near his Arlington Heights home at the...
June 18, 2008
A reader sends in the personal ad o' the day at the Los Angeles craigslist site. I will be house sitting for relatives for 3...
Back in 1988, Pete Handelman shot some High-8 video asking ordinary people in Boston who was going to win that year's finals: Celtics or Lakers?...
Quick run around the site: Celeste and Mayor Napolitano are reunited — with a twist I didn't see coming — and it's time to...
Greg Rogers, a flack at CRPR who represents Anisette and other restaurants, tells Eater LA that he created the Frappuccino while working at a Starbucks...
Parking fines increased in L.A. Come July the average parking fine will be $35. DN City sued over Las Lomas Legal action over the giant...
June 17, 2008
Elaine Martin, left, and Cindy Gise have been together since meeting at Valley State College, now Cal State Northridge. They were among the first in...
"This is unbelievable," one of the ABC announcers gasped when the Celtics went up by 29 points in the third quarter. (Soon to be 37.)...
Back later in the afternoon. Check out Mark Lacter's posts at LA Biz Observed and listen to him this morning on KPCC....
June 16, 2008
What I posted earlier was the word from corporate headquarters at Emmis. Tu Ciudad's founder and publisher, Jaime Gamboa, takes it more personally. Colleagues, peers,...
The Online Journalism Review had survived for ten years under the stewardship of USC's Annenberg School of Communications. No more. Editor Robert Niles posted today:...
The anonymous L.A. Times staffer (plural?) behind Tell Zell has posted a list of the LAT journalists who have left the newsroom in the past...
Tu Ciudad, the Emmis magazine that has tried to make a go of the upscale Latino market in Southern California, is suspending operations. The email...
Billy Vasquez has only posted a few dozen times at The 99 Cent Chef, but he makes them count. He was featured recently on "Marketplace"...
Los Angeles magazine's many-month contest to let readers choose the single greatest thing about L.A. probably fizzled credibility-wise that first round when McCabe’s Guitar Shop...
I've been kicking myself for a week for under-playing the selection of Russ Parsons, one of my favorite food writers, to the dining industry's hall...
John Rabe, host of "Off-Ramp" on KPCC, hopes to be pretty much first in line for a marriage license Tuesday morning at the Beverly Hills...
Judge Kozinski's wife speaks out In a lengthy letter to Patterico, Marcy Tiffany criticizes Times coverage of her husband and says there was no website,...
June 15, 2008
I don't know if National Public Radio's "Bryant Park Project" airs here at all, but if you're interested the show has done a story on...
The Lakers gave back a couple of big leads, but held on to force game 6 back in Boston. It was closer than the final...
June 14, 2008
Anita Busch, the journalist who was famously threatened by associates of jailed Hollywood snoop Anthony Pellicano while reporting for the L.A. Times, has a letter...
June 13, 2008
The longtime moderator of "Meet the Press" and chief of NBC's Washington bureau collapsed this afternoon in the bureau and could not be resuscitated. He...
My KCRW commentary airing at 4:44 pm ties together the Lakers, the Roman Polanski documentary and Susan Atkins. Archive and download Mark Lacter's LA Biz...
Cyrus Sanai is the Beverly Hills attorney who found sexually explicit photos and videos on Judge Alex Kozinski's personal website and who tipped the Los...
June 12, 2008
Susan Atkins, center, did the stabbing of actress Sharon Tate during the August 1969 murders in Benedict Canyon that are popularly blamed on Charles Manson....
The Lakers blew a 24-point lead and just buckled to the Celtics, both defense and offense, in the second half. Boston goes up 3-1 and...
Never a dull moment.... Chicago Tribune publisher Scott Smith says he'll retire, calling it time for Zell and Randy Michaels to bring in their own...
Sheriff: serious race violence problem Sheriff Lee Baca writes that "as a Latino raised in East Los Angeles, and as the elected sheriff of Los...
June 11, 2008
This was inevitable. In its quest for a young demographic, Metromix has added a weekly sex advice column. Peter Gilstrap, who has written for Variety...
Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, confirmed to the L.A. Times that he had posted sexually explicit photos on...
Two of the lawyers featured prominently in the HBO documentary on Roman Polanski that debuted this week have issued a statement disputing the Superior Court's...
Times acknowledges magazine plans Unbylined story in Business quotes Publisher David Hiller calling Annie Gilbar the "leading candidate" to be editor of a renamed Sunday...
Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary of the County Labor Federation, will join Mayor Villaraigosa and his coterie of city employees and Jewish community leaders on...
June 10, 2008
Weather reader Jackie Johnson was out last night with Channel 9 colleagues Mary Beth McDade and Melissa McCarty, but it was Johnson who got all...
They beat the Celtics 87-81 to win game three. Kobe and Sasha overcome off games by Odom and Gasol. ESPN Meanwhile: Convicted ex-referee Tim Donaghy...
Patricia Tobin, co-founder of the National Black Public Relations Society, died today at Cedars-Sinai. She had been treated for colon cancer. The Black Journalists Association...
Dave Zirin has been named the first-ever sports correspondent for The Nation. From the flackage: Starting this month, Zirin will report regularly for The Nation...
Times editor Russ Stanton emailed the newsroom today with his take on the conversion of the LAT's Sunday magazine into a non-editorial venture. He suggests...
You may remember my post (and photo) in April on the Gibbon Conservation Center in a wild corner of Bouquet Canyon, just beyond the Santa...
Mayor Villaraigosa has appointed Alicia Maldonado to the Housing Authority, Margarita C. Garr to the Housing Authority, Marsha Hirano-Nakanishi to the Commission for Children, Youth...
The Ethics Commission today fined Los Angeles Councilman Herb Wesson $3,000 for taking campaign money above the limit and and Councilman Richard Alarcon $2,650 for...
Brad A. Johnson, national food and travel editor for Angeleno, won the James Beard Foundation Award in restaurant reviews for his pieces on Hampton's, Sona...
Fuentes bill yanked in Sacramento Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes pulled his AB 212 after the coverage of it being a special interest bill for a developer...
June 09, 2008
The New York Times has posted the story it almost ran last week revealing a sloppy end to the Los Angeles Times Magazine as a...
Joel Sappell, who vented recently in the American Journalism Review about Sam Zell and other changes that led him to flee the Los Angeles Times,...
The toll is corrected upward after late killings in Los Angeles, Inglewood and Long Beach. Most are believed to be gang related. LAT Previously: 11-murder...
YouTube video of at least two fights between fans at yesterday's Staples Center screening of the Lakers-Celtics game is posted at LAist. Here's the more...
The public information office at the Los Angeles County Superior Court has a bone to pick with tonight's Roman Polanski documentary on HBO. The court...
No of course not, but the Downtown News' satire of the mayor's upcoming junket to Israel with a bunch of city officials in tow gets...
Harriet Ryan has been a senior correspondent for Court TV and "is comfortable on camera," the L.A. Times memo says. In Times fashion, the memo...
The Huffington Post blogger's decision to tape, and then post, Bill Clinton slamming Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum is still being discussed and dissected all...
Jon Regardie at the Downtown News imagines an address by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in advance of this week's trip to Israel. Selected quips: Many people...
Today's Los Angeles Times front page Two stories about sex and a Bill Plaschke column on the Lakers make A1, but no mention of the...
Our bi-annual (or so) LA Observed neon cruise pulls out of the Museum of Neon Art downtown this Saturday evening. Urban anthropologist Eric Lynxwiler serves...
I guess Josh Kleinbaum's last official title was director of audience development for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group websites, but he came out of the...
June 08, 2008
At least eleven, says the Times roundup — nine of them in the city of Los Angeles, and four of those in the Valley. Ruben...
Celtics run away 108-102, even though the Lakers — down 24 points in the fourth period — closed to within two with 38 seconds left....
Tony Pierce of the LA. Times website captured and posted video of the boss, publisher David Hiller, belting out the national anthem at Thursday's Cubs-Dodgers...
June 07, 2008
The good news out of today's Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards in Philadelphia is that Jeffrey Anderson won top honors for investigative pieces in the...
I'm told that opinion columnist and Friendly Fire blogger Bridget Johnson has accepted an offer to become an editorial writer, columnist and member of the...
The saga of the Long Beach deadbeat continues. The Press-Telegram's Paul Eakins reports today that Rep. Laura Richardson didn't pay a $735 mechanic's bill on...
June 06, 2008
I reported last weekend that Variety would move down Wilshire Boulevard to the former People's Bank tower across from the new entrance to LACMA. Today's...
While Sam Zell's pronouncement of yesterday continues to ripple across the media, the New York Times has budgeted a daily for Saturday saying that the...
She's the Huffington Post Off the Bus blogger who recorded Bill Clinton's three-minute rant about Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdom — and who earlier captured...
LAUSD teachers strike for an hour Erika Schickel has a mother's point of view at Native Intelligence, plus coverage at the LAT, KPCC audio LAPD...
June 05, 2008
After being threatened, chased, kidnapped, battered and beaten, fictional L.A. mayor Russell Napolitano finally got back to his office in City Hall. Phew. The fast-moving...
Celtics win game one of the NBA finals, 98-88. Even before the game, the Daily News' Steve Dilbeck predicted the Lakers will lose the series....
Marjorie Miller says it's her call to return to reporting and that the new management team at the L.A. Times should get to name its...
6 PM - Lakers and Celtics tip-off in the NBA finals, from Boston. Channel 7 6:55 PM (ish) - Times Publisher David Hiller sings the...
Former candidate for mayor Bob Hertzberg told a bunch of friends at lunch at The Palm that he won't be running for anything next year....
Did Henry T. Nicholas III, the co-founder of Broadcom, really spike the drinks of other tech executives with ecstasy? The feds say he did that,...
* Update: The Times' unofficial pressroom blog, which posted the Sam Zell memo formerly quoted below, now says it was a repeat from February. (!)...
Villaraigosa scampers over to Obama side National co-chair of the Clinton campaign announced his acceptance that Obama is the party's nominee. "Americans said it's time...
June 04, 2008
Five years in, CityBeat plans to relaunch next week with a new design, logo and lineup of columns and features. The most notable addition is...
Author and urban affairs expert William Fulton says a challenge to Mayor Villaraigosa "would be a haberdasher’s dream," but he doesn't buy that developer Rick...
In an interview with Mediabistro's David S. Hirschman, L.A. Times Editor Russ Stanton puts the good spin on the cuts that his newsroom expects to...
Journalists attending the junket for "Love Guru" were required to sign a detailed contract about how they would treat...Justin Timberlake? Sharon Waxman verbally flails his...
The actress has demanded a retraction from Vanity Fair and says she has only been in the presence of former President Bill Clinton three times,...
Perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints burned up in the weekend fire, causing an immediate impact on films available to theaters, museums and other...
Department of Water and Power chief David Nahai has hired former Assemblywoman (and City Council candidate) Cindy Montañez to do whatever it is that pols...
State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas came out on top in the race for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, but fell way short of a...
June 03, 2008
Erika Schickel chatted up Bo Diddley on a plane to New Mexico. She was ten and headed for sleep-away camp. Denise Hamilton loved Pest Control...
Mandalit del Barco of National Public Radio wraps up a four-part series on Los Angeles street gangs with a seven-minute piece on All Things Considered...
Staff writer Thomas S. Mulligan, based in the New York bureau, writes "Newton's message carried praise for his colleagues and the paper, plus a hint...
Not just fewer pages and sections, but fewer days of the week in print. The Daily Pilot in Orange County just dropped Mondays....
Updated Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller announces that Jim Newton, his editor of the editorial pages, will leave in July to write a book....
Tom Waldman is the chief of staff to Los Angeles school board member Tamar Galatzan (and he formerly was press secretary to Rep. Howard Berman.)...
Worker's blowtorch blamed for Universal Studios fire Two workers and a supervisor were putting up shingles in an alley on the New York Street set....
June 02, 2008
Brittin was the in-house photographer of the Los Angeles avant-garde artists who made the Ferus Gallery legendary in the 1950s and 1960s, then he faded...
Turns out that irreplaceable master recordings from top artists may not have been lost in the destroyed video vault at Universal Studios. Nikki Finke was...
Joel Sappell had been at the L.A. Times for 26 years, most recently as an investigative projects editor. He never considered any previous buyout, thinking...
Telemundo had another bad day on Friday, dropping the network's national morning show "Cada Dia" and making some executive changes. Host Maria Antonieta Collins, who...
Stripped across the bottom of today's front page is a paid ad banner for a candidate in the 27th congressional district. The day before the...
Heart failure in Florida. Here's the lede of the New York Times obituary: Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his...
The courthouse facade on Courthouse Square was saved, and no sound stages were burned. The statement that follows sheds no light on the fate of...
Oh, let somebody win on Tuesday so it can all be over. KPCC's Frank Stoltze went out walking the district with the candidates for a...
After three somewhat stormy years living and blogging in Paris, four months in China and a stint in a rented apartment near Santa Monica beach,...
The former E! Channel host, Elite model and daughter-in-law to Ed Asner (she's now married to Steven Soderbergh) has a new novel landing tomorrow. "Whacked"...
Universal park to reopen MTV's Movie Awards went off Sunday night as scheduled, post-fire. The theme park side of the lot is set to open...
June 01, 2008
Nice piece on public radio's "Weekend America" about Sophie Evans, who moved up from magician's assistant to the close-up room at the Magic Castle. "She...
At least two Japanese gangsters who received liver transplants at UCLA Medical Center then donated $100,000, the LAT reports. (WitnessLA adds some context to...
First, some raw Associated Press video from this morning. AP's Mike Meadows on the ground, via L.A. Times gallery: Aftermath, from Andrew Gombert / EPA...
Thousands of original Decca, MCA, and ABC master recordings belonging to Universal Music were lost in today's fire at Universal Studios, Nikki Finke says, quoting...
Universal's New York and New England sets, Courthouse Square, the King Kong stage, at least one soundstage and a video vault have been destroyed...
© 2003-2008 • About LA Observed • Contact the editor
| The documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” is being cited in the director's request to dismiss the molestation case against him.
| A mythology has taken hold about the financial disaster: That only a select group of economists and money managers saw it coming.
| Hennessey + Ingalls Art and Architecture bookstore opens a branch in Hollywood this week.
| Bush sought to "make the pie higher," but President-elect Barack Obama says it's time "to make sure we're growing the pie …"
| Legendary 19th-century photographer Carleton Watkins, who is the subject of an exhibition at the Getty, traveled hard miles around California with a simple motto: stand "where the view looks best."
| For every dollar I put into my first car, I got back a lifelong education in auto repair, and this disease.
| Erin Kaplan responds
Here’s a way city hall can strong arm the Dodgers into paying at least part of the cost of providing public transportation to the stadium during baseball season.
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