He's the next mayor
I left LA for Chicago why?
This time I was included in the direct messages sent from the account of Davan Maharaj, the editor of the Los Angeles Times and recent adopter of Twitter. "Hi someone is posting terrible things about you," the message said, with a link. Same as the last time Maharaj was hacked, about a week ago.
After Saturday's incursion, Maharaj tweeted: "Taking a break from Twitter after changing password. Huntington Beach here I come." He lives in Orange County, unless he has moved recently.
He didn't take much of a break, though, tweeting later in the day about the national anthem singer at the Kings-Devils game being Trinidadian (as is Maharaj) and about the Kings' victory — "Hell freezes over as Angelenos crazy abt hockey not bskball in June." Between Saturday and today he also flacked inks to a half-dozen Times stories on various topics.
This is good. People in Los Angeles know next to nothing about the paper's top editor, whether it's his politics, worldview (or cityview) and cultural interests and biases. He doesn't write much for the paper, though he did when he was a Metro and suburban reporter and later an Africa correspondent. (His teenage son chips in some news posts that the paper;s blogs publish.) So Maharaj's tweets could end up being the only way most Times readers ever connect with him, if he can learn to keep his password private.
His semi-revealing tweets thus far include a thumbs up for Republican pundit Peggy Noonan, who he says "schools the presidential candidates" with a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. He retweeted a Salman Rushdie tweet and pushed a BBC piece on a Kenyan musician. More to come, I suspect.