In his weekend column acknowledging the controversy around his paper's series on teachers and student testing, Los Angeles Times media columnist James Rainey writes: "As my former colleague Bill Boyarsky, one-time city editor at the paper, argues in his blog, it would be easy for readers to miss an explanatory essay by the paper that acknowledges the margin of error built into the ratings." Uh, that blog would be at LA Observed: here's the post Rainey kinda-sorta lets his readers know about. An editor on the Times' website kindly added a link to Bill's page, so online readers of the Times weren't left totally in the dark. But it made me curious how often or how seldom the paper has credited LA Observed recently. After all, a fair number of LA Observed items turn up later as Times stories or blog entries; Rainey's column topics in particular often trail a couple of weeks behind LAO. For the record, a quick search for LA Observed (and the less-correct L.A. Observed) on the Times' website found four mentions this year, all on LAT.com blogs. Hmm: fewer links than Mark and I provide to LAT stories on a typical day.