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Topic Archive: Blogs & bloggers
Eater LA, through a post signed by Curbed creator Lockhart Steele, says its post earlier this week leveling blind charges at downtown wine bar The Must "didn't rise to our...
Posted July 2, 2009 6:15 PM
The food blog owned by the Curbed chain ran a litany of damaging, specific accusations against Downtown wine bar The Must attributed to an unidentified "tipster." The owners, talking to...
Posted June 30, 2009 11:21 PM
The City of Los Angeles loves to designate historic-cultural monuments, from pallets stacked in an eccentric guy's backyard in Van Nuys (since thrown away) to actual significant buildings. Even street...
Posted June 30, 2009 2:38 PM
Sharon Waxman's report that Nikki Finke inked a $14 million deal to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily has yet to be confirmed by anyone on the record, and Finke declines comment...
Posted June 29, 2009 11:15 PM
Photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn chronicles the scene on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino: And the photo blog East of West L.A. catches a marquee in Downtown:...
Posted June 29, 2009 9:10 AM
Well, let's call it partly politics and partly law enforcement, with some union advocacy for seasoning. It's the new blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which posts today...
Posted June 26, 2009 3:13 PM
The LA Weekly's parent company congratulated Nikki Finke on being acquired (for $14 million apparently) and blogs that it wants to find another online Hollywood reporter. "We've had a great...
Posted June 23, 2009 7:07 PM
Deadline Hollywood Daily was bought by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC), which operates Mail.com, HollywoodLife.com, MovieLine.com and OnCars.com. From the company's announcement on her site: MMC also begins a long-term partnership...
Posted June 23, 2009 9:31 AM
The French department store Le Bon Marche is featuring items that subtly suggest Los Angeles, but I guess you have to be there. Laurie Pike at The Chic Leak blog...
Posted June 19, 2009 3:26 PM
The L.A. Times was forced to run a correction because Michael Douglas forgot that he hosted a 1991 event honoring his father, Kirk Douglas. The anonymous blogger known as...
Posted June 11, 2009 5:26 PM
When I played in a roller hockey league in the Valley, there was a team of deputy sheriffs that always started fights and played out of control — worst in...
Posted June 10, 2009 9:35 AM
You can now search the websites of Los Angeles County and all of the cities in the county simultaneously, using this custom Google search by Matthew Barrett of the MTA's...
Posted June 8, 2009 12:43 PM
Former Gridskipper contributor Katherine Spiers, who has a new food blog, alleges that the dates on Gridskipper posts for travelers to Los Angeles are bogus. Lots of people think I...
Posted June 4, 2009 11:40 PM
At last Friday's LA Observed rooftop party at the Formosa in Hollywood, city attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich stuck around for some fairly extended conversations with revelers. Celeste Fremon reports on hers,...
Posted June 2, 2009 1:33 PM
Over at Run On, Sara Catania wraps up her career as a marathon runner for charity. I ran longer and faster than I ever have in my life and I...
Posted May 28, 2009 4:55 PM
Sara Catania demanded a cortisone shot this morning — from a reluctant doctor — and will drag her bum knee to the starting line of Monday's Los Angeles Marathon. Will...
Posted May 22, 2009 5:07 PM
Election aftermath LAT, NYT, WSJ, Bee, CalBuzz Arguably the end of an era in California politics – the Schwarzenegger era. Anthony York/Capitol Weekly Carmen Trutanich's victory margin over Jack...
Posted May 20, 2009 9:05 AM
Former Speaker Willie Brown says Sacramento is in "total panic" believing the tax props will lose on Tuesday's ballot, and he blames years of bad decisions by the governor...
Posted May 18, 2009 8:35 AM
Dennis Cozzalio, the cinemaphile and baseball obsessive who blogs at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, is sponsoring a group outing to the Mission Tiki Drive-in in Montclair. (The...
Posted May 17, 2009 1:50 PM
The Orange County Register's communications manager is hosting a new blog to tell the rest of the story [aka the good news] about the paper and newspapers in general. Very...
Posted May 11, 2009 1:34 PM
There were any number of candidates off the Manny Ramirez situation. Just to change the subject, here are a pair of Twitter sends from Lawrence Hurley, U.S. Supreme Court reporter...
Posted May 7, 2009 3:19 PM
Brooke Burton, who recently moved from Pizzeria Mozza to Suzanne Goin's new Tavern in Brentwood and blogs at Foodwoolf, and Leah Greenstein (SpicySaltySweet.com) have proposed a code of ethics for...
Posted May 1, 2009 11:40 AM
SoCal Minds is a new blog that bills itself as presenting "Intriguing research, ideas, activity, people -- tracked from universities, cultural-intellectual institutions in Southern California." Recent posts have come out...
Posted May 1, 2009 12:19 AM
The current LA Weekly is the annual L.A. People issue. "Portraits of the waitresses and starlets ... the tech wizards and rock stars ... the activists, gang survivors, political warriors...
Posted April 24, 2009 8:53 PM
If the blogs at the Los Angeles Times website are all about the ratings, the big winner is Elizabeth Snead's The Dish Rag. Her blog packed with items on celebrity...
Posted April 22, 2009 12:10 AM
Susan Kitchens was in the fast lane on the 605 last night when a driver sped by in the adjacent carpool lane — going the wrong way! She writes: I...
Posted April 20, 2009 11:00 PM
Joe Flint will take the lead on Company Town, the L.A. Times' entry in the blog space where the NYT has The Carpetbagger. Flint has a long resume and does...
Posted April 16, 2009 4:59 PM
After U.S. Army infantryman Timothy Weston requested advice on learning the violin while on deployment in Iraq, the online community at Violinist.com took over. Soon Weston had a violin, bow,...
Posted April 13, 2009 11:21 PM
A memorial service is scheduled Tuesday for the baby of Heather and Mike Spohr, who live in Brentwood. Maddie, as she is known to many across the blogosphere, was born...
Posted April 12, 2009 10:12 PM
Wally Knox is stepping down from the city's DWP board to take the newly created position of deputy executive director of external relations at the Port of Los Angeles....
Posted April 8, 2009 9:35 AM
It's called Squid Ink and it features posts by Gourmet contributor Margy Rochlin, Los Angeles food blogger Jessica Ritz and the Weekly's own Jonathan Gold making recurring appearances with his...
Posted April 6, 2009 3:35 PM
Right-of-center blogs that used Pajamas Media as their advertising service are back on their own. The L.A-based PJM is dropping its blog ads network and will focus on PJTV, its...
Posted April 6, 2009 11:24 AM
Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth wrote last month on his blog about the old Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles and about the Wrigley Little League that plays now...
Posted April 4, 2009 5:12 PM
Former L.A. Times systems guy and news editor Brett Levy is offering free webinars for journalists to get up to speed on their tech and New Media skills. The first...
Posted April 4, 2009 4:38 PM
Writer-director and ex-journalist Rod Lurie uses a second bad experience with Nikki Finke's reporting to go off on a rant about the dangers of bloggers posting inaccurate stories, usually without...
Posted April 1, 2009 12:37 AM
Liz Arnold moved to New York to freelance for magazines on interiors and homes after working here at Western Interiors & Design. At her relatively new blog Homebodies, she posts...
Posted March 31, 2009 12:52 PM
I hadn't checked in with studio tradesperson Peggy Archer's blog in awhile. Today at Totally Unauthorized, she reports pseudonymously from a shooting set. One of our pivotal scenes yesterday involved...
Posted March 31, 2009 12:00 PM
Sommer died in a trauma helicopter en route to UCLA after being hit by a car in an Agoura Hills parking lot last week. His mother Ann, 98, also suffered...
Posted March 31, 2009 9:08 AM
The folks at Discarted take umbrage that a Los Angeles parking officer camped out in a loading zone during her lunch break in East Hollywood....
Posted March 30, 2009 11:50 AM
Channel 4's Jennifer Bjorklund went to high school in the Bay Area with one of the four Oakland police officers killed in that shootout with a parolee. I'm told her...
Posted March 27, 2009 10:43 AM
Chief Bratton endorses another candidate — this time in New York City. L.A. Now KPFK suspends "anti-Semitic hatefest" show "La Causa" for six weeks; its followers blame the Jews....
Posted March 26, 2009 5:44 PM
Not Finke the reporter, but her website Deadline Hollywood Daily — though they are really one and the same. The Wrap's Sharon Waxman tries to figure out what the site...
Posted March 25, 2009 11:10 PM
The Getty plans to slash its operating budget nearly 25% for the coming fiscal year, "an emergency response to investment losses that have totaled $1.5 billion since July and...
Posted March 16, 2009 8:58 AM
Movieline is relaunching as a web portal "covering all things Hollywood" with former Defamer bloggers Seth Abramovitch, S.T. VanAirsdale, and Kyle Buchanan on board. The press release says to await...
Posted February 26, 2009 10:27 AM
Greg Hernandez, laid off by the Daily News earlier today after finishing his Oscars coverage, blogged about it tonight at Out in Hollywood. He said the site will live on...
Posted February 23, 2009 11:53 PM
Fox News shouter John Gibson did not compare Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum, and thus the Huffington Post regrets the error. Live by...
Posted February 23, 2009 5:25 PM
Daily News entertainment writer Greg Hernandez worked long hours posting a whole bunch of blog items on the Oscars yesterday and today — and now posts on Facebook that he...
Posted February 23, 2009 4:00 PM
There will still be a Defamer brand and Hollywood posts, but they will run as a section of Gawker's main site. Owner Nick Denton explains it's part of Gawker's transition...
Posted February 22, 2009 10:27 PM
The most-visited newspaper websites — errantly labeled the "top sites" by the Nieman Journalism Lab — all posted big gains in readership in 2008. While the absolute numbers from Nielsen...
Posted February 17, 2009 10:09 PM
Ken Gurnick, the Dodgers beat writer for MLB.com, is now sharing his insights on a blog for the network. "Covering all things Dodgers since Steve Sax was a rookie," reads...
Posted February 15, 2009 8:46 PM
Patt Morrison on KPCC is giving the challengers to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa maybe a bit more than some are due — ten minutes for each on the air. Today at...
Posted February 3, 2009 11:59 AM
Jon Weisman, keeper of my favorite Dodgers blog and blogging community, is leaving the indie ranks and moving Dodger Thoughts to LATimes.com. He starts there immediately and will be replacing...
Posted February 2, 2009 6:10 PM
Some of them got together at Philippe's and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC dropped in wearing his KCET blogger hat. A discussion ensued over where's the Eastside?, and in this group...
Posted January 30, 2009 10:43 PM
Blogger and sometime writer about town Will Campbell has a post up at Metblogs reflecting on his experiences as a suicide hotline counselor, inspired partly by his bike commute past...
Posted January 29, 2009 2:10 PM
Columnist-blogger Anne Thompson is among the layoffs to hit the trade today. "Today I got slashed from the ranks of Variety staffers along with some 30 people, most of whom...
Posted January 26, 2009 4:16 PM
When Daily News reporter-blogger Julia Scott announced her Bargain Babe shopping blog, it sounded as if she would also keep writing her self-described less-edgy, less-personal blog for the paper. Nope....
Posted January 21, 2009 11:23 AM
Billy Vasquez, the 99 Cent Chef, has put together a blog and video guide to "dining and drinking establishments within the shadows of the arriving and departing giant silver birds"...
Posted January 21, 2009 9:15 AM
Lesley Balla, late of Eater LA, is not the new LA Weekly food blogger. She starts Jan. 26 as Los Angeles editor for Tasting Table LA, a new daily email...
Posted January 19, 2009 12:03 PM
Variety columnist Brian Lowry is now blogging about television at the trade's new BLTv — "Good TV; reasonable prices." He posts that the current TV critics tour feels more pointless...
Posted January 15, 2009 11:29 PM
Scott Timberg, who has started freelancing for the New York Times and others since being laid off last year by the L.A. Times Calendar section, has fired up a blog....
Posted January 15, 2009 9:21 AM
Kevin McCollister has been sharing his gorgeous photographs of Los Angeles for a few years in elegantly wordless blog entries at the Jimson Weed Gazette. Tuesday's post, however, was all...
Posted January 14, 2009 12:24 AM
An internal memo seems to indicate the LA Weekly is falling into the mode of obsessing about page views over content. We learn that music is by far the site's...
Posted January 12, 2009 2:35 PM
Readers of Los Angeles Metblogs have spoken. They voted Sam Zell as the 2008 Grinch of the Year. Quips the blog's David Markland: "Congratulations, Sam! Ebenezer Scrooge and William Mulholland...
Posted January 8, 2009 6:12 PM
The latest web venture from Drudge Report West Coast man Andrew Breitbart goes live Tuesday. Big Hollywood, he says, "is not a 'celebrity' gabfest or a gossip outpost - it...
Posted January 5, 2009 7:53 PM
One of the old-time Los Angeles bloggers, Boi from Troy, has typed his final entry. There, anyway. In more than five years since this blog started, more than 3.5 million...
Posted January 5, 2009 5:53 PM
Channel 2 (and 9) photographer Bryan Frank had Friday afternoon off and spent it taking pictures on foot in Hollywood and Downtown. Hot dogs at Skooby's and a beer at...
Posted January 3, 2009 11:49 AM
The Jewish Journal, breaking new stuff on the local side of the Bernard Madoff story, is blogging developments at Swindler's List....
Posted December 16, 2008 4:29 PM
Jane Espenson has been part of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Battlestar Galactica," most notably, and also has written episodes of "Angel," "Gilmore Girls," "Ellen," "The O.C.," "Star Trek: Deep...
Posted December 12, 2008 11:22 PM
Zócalo Public Square, the non-profit lecture series that "creates intellectual community across the nation by presenting smart ideas in an open, non-partisan, multi-ethnic space," has upgraded on the web in...
Posted December 11, 2008 5:15 PM
The life of a local television news cameraman involves a lot of hurry up and wait. Case in point: this afternoon's (yawn) Grammy nominations concert, as Channel 2's Bryan Frank...
Posted December 3, 2008 6:09 PM
Design improvements to Business, Sports, National and World, plus more databases and aggregation of (free) content from around the web, and the return of The Homicide Report, says Executive Editor...
Posted December 3, 2008 1:47 PM
Steve Hymon's Bottleneck blog is the latest Times staff blog to be folded into L.A. Now, which the paper is trying to deepen and finally build up in hopes that...
Posted December 2, 2008 9:10 AM
Susannah Breslin, the former Reverse Cowgirl turned Invisible Cowgirl (and back to Reverse Cowgirl) who we hadn't heard from much lately, does the honors and anoints BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin first....
Posted December 1, 2008 4:06 PM
Writing at LA Eastside, Browne Molyneux calls on La Opinión and the Sentinel to launch their own community-based versions of the homicide blog that has been put on hiatus by...
Posted December 1, 2008 9:38 AM
Members of Mariachi Véritas de Harvard believe they are "the first and only 100% undergraduate student Mariachi in the East Coast." Here they are (bigger) with Mexican president Felipe Calderón....
Posted November 29, 2008 3:23 PM
Pat Saperstein at Eating L.A. has some fun digging through the newly released Life magazine photo archive on Google for some prime Los Angeles images. She hit a trove of...
Posted November 24, 2008 3:58 PM
The Ventura County Star copy desk had a blog, until Patricia Marroquin was laid off. The former L.A. Times copy editor posts her farewell: Two years ago on Nov. 30,...
Posted November 20, 2008 1:38 PM
The depleted Los Angeles Times has suspended publication of the Homicide Report, which at this time last year was one of the breakout hits among the paper's blogs. Its success...
Posted November 18, 2008 11:52 PM
Oops -- the NY Times' travel section on Sunday will have a piece about visiting Santa Barbara, our own Mark Lacter points out. One week from tomorrow: the Great Los...
Posted November 14, 2008 3:10 PM
The LATimes.com website set a traffic record for itself on Election Day, then broke it the day after. The site also set a new monthly high in October, when the...
Posted November 7, 2008 4:15 PM
First the Los Angeles Times lays off its real estate editor and reporter, and now blogger Peter Viles posts that he is moving on to a corporate job. L.A. Land...
Posted October 30, 2008 2:10 PM
Variety managing editor and politics writer Ted Johnson blogged about his marriage to Stewart Scott, presided over by West Hollywood City Councilman John Duran, in the context of Proposition 8....
Posted October 28, 2008 10:52 AM
Laurie Niles of Violinist.com said the letter hit her like a punch in the stomach. "Due to the recent extraordinary conditions in the financial markets, the Pasadena Symphony has been...
Posted October 13, 2008 9:12 AM
Arts blogger Tyler Green calls Unframed, the staff blog at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his "new daily obsession." They are not limiting posts to happenings at LACMA,...
Posted October 10, 2008 3:24 PM
PBS Channel 28 has soft-launched KCET Local with original web stories, video, reader comments, calendar items and blogs by author D.J. Waldie, KPCC reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, former LAT columnist Erin...
Posted October 9, 2008 8:55 PM
Former sportscaster Lisa Guerrero has been given an outlet on The Fabulous Forum, the sports blog at LATimes.com. In this morning's post, she says it may be time for the...
Posted October 6, 2008 12:19 PM
Gawker Media creator Nick Denton sent an email announcing the layoff of 19 editorial employees (out of 133) and eliminating the traffic bonuses that whipped so many of his bloggers...
Posted October 3, 2008 2:40 PM
How important are bloggers to promoting the success of Downtown developments? Pretty important, based on this invitation by AEG for the Ritz-Carlton condos to be built as part of L.A....
Posted October 3, 2008 9:05 AM
According to Nikki, producer Harvey Weinstein told Page Six he'll give $1 million to charity if she can produce an email that Scott Rudin wrote about Weinstein's "alleged callous treatment...
Posted September 30, 2008 11:22 AM
"Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles" will be published Thursday by The Overlook Press/Penguin U.S.A. The book, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, looks like it...
Posted September 30, 2008 9:58 AM
The staff-written Fabulous Forum hopes to deliver "the who, what, where, when, why — and why not — of L.A. sports." That makes 43 blogs listed on the Los Angeles...
Posted September 25, 2008 2:41 PM
Recently departed Chicago Tribune managing editor Jim Warren will move his On Magazines column to a blog at the Huffington Post. From the release: "I have been an obsessive reader...
Posted September 25, 2008 11:34 AM
KCET's replacement for the late, lamented "Life and Times" premieres on Channel 28 at 8 pm. Val Zavala is the anchor of SoCal Connected, as she was on L&T. The...
Posted September 25, 2008 12:25 AM
The Los Angeles Times went public today with Culture Monster, its new blog by the Calendar section's critics and arts writers that goes by the slogan "all the arts, all...
Posted September 24, 2008 1:44 PM
If you've missed Steve Harvey since the Times dropped his long-running "Only in L.A." column, he has moved offshore to a new Blogspot blog....
Posted September 22, 2008 5:28 PM
Remember last year when Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein was billed as a guest instructor on oral sex at Babeland, then dropped out after we and others wrote about...
Posted September 16, 2008 5:16 PM
Exciting and fairly big news in the world of Los Angeles blogs. Eric Richardson announced today that his blogdowntown has been accepted into an incubator program at Community Partners and...
Posted September 15, 2008 1:30 PM
Here's the most interesting blog post I read all day. Political scientists at UCLA who asked students to rate the faces of hundreds of American candidates found that Alaska Gov....
Posted September 11, 2008 10:42 PM
The 14-year-old South Los Angeles girl who vanished Tuesday night turned up this morning at 3 am in Pasadena. Police think maybe she ran away, but her mother tells LAist's...
Posted September 5, 2008 12:37 PM
A couple of weeks back I was on a blogging panel with LAist editor Zach Behrens and came to appreciate that he makes more phone calls than most bloggers, often...
Posted September 4, 2008 6:37 PM
Downtown blogger Celia (5th and Spring) marks the third anniversary of the passing of her sister Laura Esguerra. Laura's illness and death touched many in the L.A. blogosphere....
Posted September 2, 2008 9:10 AM
Bill Boyarsky, posting dispatches from the Democratic gathering at Truthdig.com, concluded that this convention marked a welcome end to big media dominance of political reporting. This from a media veteran...
Posted August 30, 2008 10:35 AM
La Opinión columnist Pilar Marrero relaunched her politics blog in Spanish for the Democratic convention, and it sounds like she will keep it going on the La Opinión site and...
Posted August 30, 2008 10:26 AM
They've got Joe Torre blogging about his new life in L.A., and posing for silly pictures to hold up web spots for State Farm Insurance. Sample: So I just moved...
Posted August 27, 2008 12:13 AM
Orange County-based Kevin Drum moved his Calpundit blog persona over to Washington Monthly as Political Animal and began getting paid for his politics blogging four years ago. Now he's been...
Posted August 21, 2008 3:25 PM
Laurie Pike posts at the Los Angeles Magazine blog ChicLeak that involved sources believe the Fashion Week partnership between IMG and Culver City’s Smashbox Studios will go away after October's...
Posted August 19, 2008 5:03 PM
Los Angeles photographer Charlie Grosso has been working on an exhibit she calls Wok the Dog, an examination of "the commerce of meat," shot at markets around the world where...
Posted August 16, 2008 1:51 PM
Photographer and music journalist Rena Kosnett thinks she got one of, if not the, final interview with the singer, songwriter, musician and former "South Park" voice who died Sunday. Hayes,...
Posted August 11, 2008 12:27 AM
Top of the Ticket finished atop the blog rankings at the L.A. Times again this past month, with the celebrity driven stuff just behind. Peter Viles' L.A. Land continues to...
Posted August 5, 2008 12:17 PM
Bill Boyarsky, LA Observed's occasional politics columnist, is a finalist in nonfiction for the 2008 book award from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It's for "Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh...
Posted August 4, 2008 8:55 PM
William Lobdell launched his new Orange County-centric blog with a list of the 42 things he knows after a career at the Los Angeles Times. Excerpts: 8 - The idea...
Posted August 4, 2008 1:10 AM
Is this a metaphor about internal tension at the L.A. Times over future priorities — or maybe an indicator that the reading public is split? Here's an email that the...
Posted July 30, 2008 2:49 PM
Larry Mantle was twelve minutes into a segment with the blogger behind "Stuff White People Like" when this morning's earthquake hit. He rolled with the flow then switched into anchor...
Posted July 29, 2008 11:59 PM
Aura Bogado, who blogs at To the Curb, was in Chicago for the Unity journalism conference. Newspapers and other media outlets send recruiting teams to make contacts with potential hires...
Posted July 27, 2008 7:42 PM
Mickey Kaus has the email from Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce telling the paper's bloggers not to go there on the John Edwards-tryst-in-Beverly Hills story: Subject: john edwards...
Posted July 25, 2008 9:43 AM
Many fans seem to think of Secret Headquarters in Silver Lake as their favorite comic book store. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoingTV is one of them. Also for the channel, BoingBoing's...
Posted July 24, 2008 9:14 PM
Arthur Magazine's Jay Babcock told Jenny Burman yesterday more about his move to Brooklyn and also talks in the LAT's Soundboard blog about leaving Los Angeles. Babcock has shut down...
Posted July 24, 2008 8:45 AM
Web developer-designer Jonathan Grubb moved here from San Francisco eight months ago to work in Hollywood and has some observations about our relationship with the web. Here's a sample, minus...
Posted July 23, 2008 7:54 AM
Environment writer Marla Cone, a former president board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, sent an email to the members explaining her exit from the Los Angeles Times. Example:...
Posted July 17, 2008 3:47 PM
Michelle Quinn, one of the Los Angeles Times staff writers who blogs about technology, used this photo of Pope Benedict to illustrate a post about Apple apologizing to customers of...
Posted July 16, 2008 9:40 PM
The blogger behind MetroRiderLA says the competition from professional transportation blogs and the need to make money — plus plain old blog burnout — nudged him to call a time...
Posted July 16, 2008 11:22 AM
At the L.A. Times' Top of the Ticket blog, many of the reader comments posted about former Bush spokesman Tony Snow's death have been tasteless — to say the least....
Posted July 13, 2008 11:12 PM
Ex-Daily News editor (and future candidate?) Ron Kaye is encouraging readers of his politics blog to bring their trash to City Hall on July 14. Bastille Day — get it?...
Posted July 10, 2008 11:35 PM
Ex-Dodger hothead Milton Bradley has calmed down (except for a little brush with a reporter), gotten over the injury bug and put together a heckuva season for the Texas Rangers....
Posted July 8, 2008 10:52 PM
The July issue is a relaunch under Emmis ownership by new editor Martin Smith. Editor's note here. The issue's best of OC media section proclaims the Register's Frank Mickadeit as...
Posted July 7, 2008 9:05 AM
KCRW's popular Friday afternoon politics gabfest has added a blog. If you want to argue about Bob, Arianna, Matt and Tony or discuss things with Left, Right & Center producer...
Posted July 2, 2008 1:25 PM
BoingBoing.net, the highly read blog semi-based in Los Angeles, has shed a little light on why it deleted posts about sex writer Violet Blue. But not much light. The public...
Posted July 1, 2008 11:05 AM
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 my father, Ken Reich, died...
Posted June 30, 2008 3:59 PM
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 Tom Bradley deputy mayor Anton...
Posted June 30, 2008 11:43 AM
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 — as a poster on...
Posted June 29, 2008 11:40 PM
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 airs Fridays on KCRW. Listen...
Posted June 27, 2008 11:33 PM
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 offering up data on his...
Posted June 26, 2008 8:59 AM
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 become a rehash of what's...
Posted June 24, 2008 7:58 AM
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? It became moot when Detroit...
Posted June 18, 2008 11:17 PM
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" and tonight he's scheduled to...
Posted June 16, 2008 9:36 AM
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 over the politics and mediasphere....
Posted June 9, 2008 9:07 AM
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 Barack Obama's critique of "bitter"...
Posted June 6, 2008 2:58 PM
Bob Hertzberg is also sniffing around a challenge to Mayor Villaraigosa — or a run for city attorney against Jack Weiss — the former Villaraigosa friend and foe tells...
Posted May 30, 2008 5:30 PM
Yesterday it was a freelancer who argues that District Attorney Steve Cooley has gone easy on Jessica's Law. Today it's Doug Dowie, who worked with Kaye at the Daily News...
Posted May 30, 2008 12:22 PM
Andrew Malcolm, the former New York Times correspondent and Laura Bush press secretary (as well as part-time Karl Rove assistant), talks about his conversion from L.A. Times editorial writer to...
Posted May 29, 2008 2:59 PM
Los Angeles this month has Mark Lacter's profile of Gina Marie Lindsey, the head of Los Angeles World Airports. Another LA Observed contributor, David Davis, has a piece on U.S....
Posted May 28, 2008 10:18 PM
Laura Lane tells USA Today that she pulled her Blogspot site offline on her own. "I saw it was getting a lot of crazy attention," she says of her post...
Posted May 28, 2008 12:58 PM
Megan McArdle blogs at The Atlantic's website about life in Dean Singleton's declining SoCal empire. (Update: It's her blog, but ex-Singletonian Conor Friedersdorf wrote the post.) As a former employee...
Posted May 28, 2008 11:20 AM
Hmm, ESPN.com blogger Laura Lane's blog item where she calls the wife of Kobe Bryant insane — and talks about rumors of an affair — has gone off the air....
Posted May 27, 2008 12:02 PM
Laura Lane covers the Lakers for ESPN.com. She wrote a mildly invasive item about that weird purple tutu thing that Vanessa Bryant wore on the floor the night Kobe picked...
Posted May 26, 2008 12:37 PM
I had no idea you could do this. Author Aimee Bender reserved the Mount Wilson Observatory's historic 60-inch telescope for the evening and took along two dozen writer friends and...
Posted May 20, 2008 12:29 AM
KPFK wants to broadcast "your big fat gay wedding," as the OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano puts it. Navel Gazing Catch a photo of FishbowlLA bloggers Mayrav Saar (on the...
Posted May 19, 2008 10:45 PM
Jewish Journal God-blogger Brad Greenberg suspects the new Stuff God Hates blog is from the same Culver City writer who posts the very popular Stuff White People Like, just not...
Posted May 19, 2008 10:25 PM
Former Dodgers general manager Paul DePodesta, now with the Padres in San Diego, has started an interesting blog — he knows a lot more about baseball than the sportswriters who...
Posted May 16, 2008 7:53 PM
For the past few months Kareem Abdul-Jabbar posted to a blog on LATimes.com. As of Monday, it has moved to Abdul-Jabbar's own website (with sound, so turn down your speakers.)...
Posted May 13, 2008 10:20 PM
Mark Sarvas is often biting in his reviews and commentaries at The Elegant Variation, a point that Scott Timberg makes up front in his Q&A with Sarvas in today's LAT...
Posted May 5, 2008 1:20 PM
Eric Stone coaxed novelist Christa Faust to leave the keyboard long enough to hit a few Eastside taco trucks the other night. He writes that "the woman can write. But...
Posted May 5, 2008 12:23 PM
The May issue of W (with Cameron Diaz on the cover) proclaims Arianna Huffington more influential than ever, with her new book doing well and the Huffington Post "arguably the...
Posted May 5, 2008 12:55 AM
I've heard more grumbling than usual from the features side of the L.A. Times newsroom about the time and money devoted to this week's touchy-feely innovation session, facilitated by a...
Posted May 1, 2008 1:40 PM
Jon Weisman's blog prompt began, "My most devastating breakup occurred eight days after the 1994 baseball strike began (with the Dodgers trapped in first place in the National League West)...
Posted April 29, 2008 5:53 PM
Lt. Rick Banks introduces himself to readers as the officer in charge who manages the blog "by approving the postings and reading all of your comments and evaluating which ones...
Posted April 24, 2008 12:05 AM
We're mentioned in the latest memo from Daily News online editor Ryan Garfat....
Posted April 23, 2008 11:44 PM
Gary Scott, formerly at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Daily Journal and now on the staff of Warren Olney's "Which Way, L.A.?" and "To the Point" on KCRW, blogs...
Posted April 22, 2008 1:50 PM
Author and Roman Catholic deacon Eric Stoltz and Los Angeles photographer Francesco Curá are engaged in a project to document the state's cathedrals in fine art photography and text. They...
Posted April 20, 2008 11:40 PM
From ex-editor Ron Kaye's new blog: In my mind, it's time for people to make a stand for what they believe in, to act like the free people Americans are...
Posted April 17, 2008 11:24 PM
The former editor of the Daily News has his first blog post up (at a different address than mentioned in the Morning Buzz, which came from the LA Weekly's blog.)...
Posted April 17, 2008 11:40 AM
His business partner in the politics site is Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads and a longtime friend of Layne's. Layne tells Tony Pierce of the LAT blog Web Scout...
Posted April 15, 2008 10:35 AM
Veteran Fox 11 reporter Christina Gonzalez filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and the police department, saying she suffered "shock and injuries to her nervous system" and "severe...
Posted April 14, 2008 10:06 PM
Ken Layne, one of the founders of LAExaminer.com back in the day, has some investors and is taking over Wonkette, the Washington D.C. politics site where he is the managing...
Posted April 14, 2008 11:46 AM
Kate Coe was fired as co-editor in a dispute over money, says her friend and former colleague who blogs as Tabloid Baby. He's glowing about her, but I'm surprised it...
Posted April 14, 2008 8:22 AM
Heather Armstrong, famously fired in Los Angeles for blogging before she moved to Utah and became better known for revealing intimate details of her life as Dooce, talks in the...
Posted April 10, 2008 10:54 AM
The Webby Awards are annual plaudits bestowed on corporate and institutional websites and a relative few blogs, with 8,000 entries in nearly 70 categories. Five finalists in each category were...
Posted April 9, 2008 12:14 AM
This cartoon by Rob Tornoe runs today under the headline "Sam Zell must be very proud" at PolitickerCA. That is the relatively new local outlet of a national chain of...
Posted April 8, 2008 9:31 AM
The Atlantic's new blog The Current gave one of its three "Best Opinion" slots on Friday to Mark Lacter's recent post at LA Biz Observed wondering why most Americans feel...
Posted April 7, 2008 10:33 PM
Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger Nikki Finke didn't disclose that a law firm she wrote about is representing her in a lawsuit against E-Trade over surreptitious recording, the New York Observer...
Posted April 2, 2008 2:42 PM
Racked LA will cover shopping, neighborhood stores and the local retail scene. The chain also has a Racked NY. Editor here is Tasha Adams, who they say has written for...
Posted April 2, 2008 12:27 PM
That's the name of one of L.A.'s most literate film blogs, mentioned here now and then through the years. Now here's the backstory behind the name, pegged to the start...
Posted March 30, 2008 1:35 AM
Riffing a little on Los Angeles magazine's 64 Greatest Things in L.A. contest, Los Angeles Metblogs has started polling on the 64 Worst Things about L.A. The blog's competitive pairings...
Posted March 26, 2008 12:58 AM
The City Council will wait a week to vote on the hike sought by the Department of Water and Power. Time for more politicking study. The Daily News, which has...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:53 PM
Borrowing a page from Frank Girardot in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, adopted sister paper the Daily Breeze has launched its own crime scene blog. Reporters Larry Altman and Denise...
Posted March 25, 2008 11:50 PM
Christian Lander, the Culver City-based writer of the hit satire blog Stuff White People Like, has gotten a William Morris agent (Erin Malone) and a book deal out of the...
Posted March 25, 2008 9:25 AM
In his blog on the Times website, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says that one of the most common perceptions of him when he played basketball — that he was angry a lot...
Posted March 21, 2008 10:41 PM
Andrew Kamenetzky, half of the brotherly duo that travels with the Lakers and covers the team every day for their L.A. Times-owned blog, was denied access last night to the...
Posted March 20, 2008 1:50 PM
KNBC Channel 4 has tapped David Markland, a "city captain" at LA Metblogs, to write a couple of items a day under the California Faultline banner. He will focus on...
Posted March 16, 2008 5:40 PM
Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and media-savvy blogger, writes that the rush by respected publishers to re-brand their content as coming from bloggers "is easily one of the many...
Posted March 13, 2008 4:32 PM
Two days ago, Dodger Thoughts blogger Jon Weisman signed up as a YouTube user and posted footage of Dodger farmhand Clayton Kershaw throwing one spring training pitch — strike three...
Posted March 11, 2008 11:44 PM
It's been a while since LA Observed readers first met math-challenged weather babe Jackie Johnson. If you have always craved just a little bit more, the CBS2/KCAL website has what...
Posted March 4, 2008 10:55 PM
Assemblywoman Nell Soto, the 81 year-old Democrat from the San Gabriel Valley, hasn't been in Sacramento since at least September. She has been out ill. She also hasn't filed the...
Posted March 4, 2008 4:54 PM
Madness has swept KCRW and they're letting me host Politics of Culture today at 2:30 pm — a half-hour of live radio on the blurred lines between journalism and blogging...
Posted March 4, 2008 9:25 AM
Emmy winning writer, director, producer and blogger Ken Levine will do the post-game honors on KABC 790 AM this season. Levine has done play-by-play gigs for the Padres, Mariners and...
Posted March 3, 2008 3:47 PM
News and politics did well in the LATimes.com stats for February, so maybe there's hope yet. Politics blog Top of the Ticket led the pack of in-house blogs in February...
Posted March 3, 2008 3:07 PM
Writer and blogger Tom Teicholz was on the Santa Monica Promenade this afternoon when he spotted a woman strolling naked and preening for a video camera and still photographer. "This...
Posted February 28, 2008 3:20 PM
Last week Joshua Micah Marshall wins journalism's George Polk Award. This week the New York Times feigns surprise that he doesn't blog in his pajamas and has an office. To...
Posted February 25, 2008 6:14 PM
Even poli sci professors, columnists and all-around political pundits are doing it. Raphael Sonenshein, who's all three and the author of books about Los Angeles politics, is writing the Jews...
Posted February 25, 2008 4:49 PM
Media gossip blogger Maggie Shnayerson was let go at Gawker after less than six months. It's all about the ratings, per this item at Radar: An e-mail from Gawker Media...
Posted February 25, 2008 3:56 PM
A lot of sites and media are reacting to the sad news — first posted here at LA Observed early this morning — that Dutton's Books in Brentwood will be...
Posted February 25, 2008 3:11 PM
Jacket Copy, the blog written by the staff of the L.A. Times' books section, today added a new voice: Carolyn Kellogg's. She is the former editor of LAist who left...
Posted February 25, 2008 1:53 PM
Heather and Jessica got a gig live-blogging the red carpet for New York magazine's website, starting at 3 pm Hollywood and Highland time....
Posted February 24, 2008 1:00 PM
Dana Goodyear, the New Yorker's blogging L.A. staff writer, had her own paparazzi encounter recently near the Chateau Marmont that inspired her to check out New York magazine's nudes of...
Posted February 20, 2008 5:57 PM
Talking Points Memo, the Democratic politics blog run by Joshua Micah Marshall, received a prestigious (within journalism) George Polk Award for legal reporting. TPM "led the news media coverage of...
Posted February 18, 2008 9:49 PM
Kareem Abdul Jabbar's blog on the Times website seems to be working its way through his personal African American Hall of Fame — the latest subject is Charlotte E. Ray,...
Posted February 15, 2008 5:19 PM
These didn't occur on Valentine's Day, but they hit the Homicide Report en masse. Got my attention. Athens: Antwan Cole, a 19-year-old young black man, was shot multiple times at...
Posted February 15, 2008 12:47 AM
L.A. Now has gone live on LA Times.com, with posts on the news and the region from the recently hired Veronique de Turenne (yes, that one) and veteran Times staff...
Posted February 14, 2008 12:53 AM
An internal memo leaked out of the Gawker blog empire (which is Defamer here in L.A., plus Wonkette, Gawker, Valleywag, et al) advises writers on what makes a good blog...
Posted February 14, 2008 12:24 AM
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has taken up a blog for the Times. So far he has talked about the Giants' win in the Super Bowl, the video he helped make for Barack...
Posted February 11, 2008 11:52 PM
Mark Lisanti has posted, by his estimate, 9,000 to 10,000 posts since he began as the original, and anonymous, Defamer. This one today was the hardest:...
Posted February 11, 2008 6:50 PM
I know firsthand that media types who mention Paris Hilton (or Britney Spears) are likely to hear harangues from readers/viewers/listeners turned off by all the celebrity worship that's on the...
Posted February 11, 2008 4:12 PM
Count Los Angeles cartoonist Donna Barstow (who writes the blog Griffith Park, Interrupted) unimpressed by this story about minority cartoonists banding together to draw identical panels in yesterday's newspapers. It...
Posted February 11, 2008 2:30 PM
At least two Los Angeles blogs are included in a new book, "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web," edited by the NYT's Sarah Boxer. They are Go Fug Yourself...
Posted February 11, 2008 9:13 AM
The latest report from web executive editor Meredith Artley shows the most important traffic drivers to the Times website are celebrity news and Hollywood. Nothing beats the page view-inflating efficiency...
Posted February 7, 2008 5:40 PM
The novelist and Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist shows up today on the New York Times' books blog, in a weekly feature that posts "a playlist of songs from a...
Posted February 6, 2008 8:59 AM
The Portfolio contributing editor and former LAT writer — she covered the porn beat for a time and did that great West magazine piece on Joe Francis of Girls Gone...
Posted February 5, 2008 6:51 PM
The veteran Times columnist, briefly dumped last year, holds his nose and starts posting on Blogspot: A blog is generally a loathsome, tedious creation of the electronic age, an opportunity...
Posted February 5, 2008 3:23 PM
The talent at Channel 11 has been strongly encouraged to blog for MyFox LA, the branding given the station's website. Reporter John Schwada has taken to it easier than most...
Posted February 3, 2008 12:41 AM
Mark Swed's Jan. 7 LAT review of an L.A. Philharmonic performance of pieces with an urban theme said, among other things: In between came Frank Zappa's 'Dupree's Paradise.' Short, diverting...
Posted January 16, 2008 9:33 PM
If you are Emerald City, the L.A. Times' environment blog, you follow yesterday's post on your friend's bikini crotch with a post today on the underwear your mother gave you...
Posted January 9, 2008 2:40 PM
The Times seems happy with the traffic performance of its national politics blog, which has been covering the presidential races mostly in posts by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. It...
Posted January 7, 2008 9:14 AM
Another posthumous entry from the late Theresa Duncan appeared on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, on Dec. 31. An editor's note in October said it was coming, set...
Posted January 4, 2008 4:10 PM
The internal watchblog that began after Dan Rather's career meltdown has disappeared from the list of CBS News blogs, and Rachel Sklar at the Huffington Post is disappointed. It's a...
Posted January 3, 2008 3:32 PM
Jill Leovy hinted in this month's profile of her in Los Angeles that she would stop writing the Times' homicide blog in the new year. It's one of the most-read...
Posted January 2, 2008 12:37 AM
Marc Germain, the talk radio host formerly known as Mr. KABC and Mr. KFI, has been let go as liberal-talk KTLK's Mr. K. "A total surprise and not my choice...
Posted January 1, 2008 4:30 PM
Ed Boks, L.A.'s constantly embattled animal services chief, is still blogging away. He posts today that the "No-Kill Equation" getting a lot of buzz in the animal welfare community...
Posted December 18, 2007 11:55 PM
A long story at Editor & Publisher.com on newspaper political blogs ledes with the veteran reporter who co-writes Top of the Ticket, the L.A. Times campaign blog. The story muses,...
Posted December 14, 2007 5:43 PM
The memo is out on the additions we told you were coming to the Times' web staff — LAist's Tony Pierce and LAO's Veronique de Turenne — plus a couple...
Posted December 14, 2007 4:31 PM
Sicha and two others editors quit the New York news and gossip site, apparently at least partly over a new pay scale. Romenesko rounds up some links....
Posted December 3, 2007 7:16 AM
All of us at LA Observed Tower congratulate Veronique de Turenne, doyenne of Here in Malibu, who will join the Los Angeles Times staff after the New Year as a...
Posted December 2, 2007 8:56 PM
Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts: People can minimize it all they want, but these round-numbered birthdays are times that I take stock, and looking at myself, I see a complicated...
Posted November 27, 2007 11:24 PM
Commenters on the God Blog have attacked the Jewish Journal for employing a "God-fearing Christian" with the last name of Greenberg to write for the weekly. (Brad) Greenberg explains his...
Posted November 27, 2007 7:42 AM
Long weekend equals time to catch up on some L.A. blog reading. Here's a few; may be more later: Jasmyne Cannick drove down Crenshaw this morning to MLK, thinking she...
Posted November 23, 2007 11:04 PM
OK, just kidding about that. But who knew her older sister is a rabbi on a kibbutz in Israel? I guess you would if you remember Sarah's debut joke on...
Posted November 19, 2007 12:47 AM
The writers strike has inspired a frenzy of non-stop posting by Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily. (I shudder to think of the condition of her office.) Since Friday morning...
Posted November 18, 2007 11:25 PM
An email correspondent caught me up with angryasianman.com by Phil Yu, a 27-year-old Korean American who was the subject of a story last month (!) in the Washington Post. The...
Posted November 18, 2007 2:36 PM
Want to know how editorial cartoonists work? The Daily News' Patrick O'Connor posts early sketches, talks about his process for deciding on a topic and even tells the occasional tale...
Posted November 8, 2007 2:57 PM
Local freelancer Michael Goldstein wonders at his blog, Monday Morning Media Quarterback, if the Huffington Post is getting its money's worth out of unpaid fire blogger Kristen Reeves: Newspapers are...
Posted October 23, 2007 11:10 PM
Michael Schneider at Franklin Avenue puts all the newspaper front pages together side by side — for headlines we've got an Inferno, an Armageddon, a Firestorm and a Hell on...
Posted October 23, 2007 10:40 PM
Lara Loewenstein gave up her gig as the sex columnist for the Daily Bruin last year, graduated from UCLA and now has a blog where she ruminates on that phase....
Posted October 10, 2007 10:27 PM
This could be good — or not. Times Publisher David Hiller, who likes to explain at length his view of the emerging media world, has decided to blog it. But...
Posted October 10, 2007 4:43 PM
Couple of new ones to me, just as Daniel Hernandez prepares to decamp to Mexico City. Abel Salas, who has written for the New York Times, L.A. Times Magazine and...
Posted October 8, 2007 10:51 PM
Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson says the season for newspapers to crank up their Oscars-Globes-etc blogs is fast approaching. She gives a rundown on who's doing what at the big...
Posted October 2, 2007 10:10 PM
Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin and the rest of the very successful Boing Boing blog team launched tv.boingboing.net tonight. Xeni explains on the site: The idea is simple. Explore the same...
Posted October 2, 2007 9:06 PM
Author Denise Hamilton and Eating L.A. blogger Pat Saperstein did a fun road trip recently, visiting many of the local dining spots patronized by Hamilton's lovelorn newspaper reporter protagonist, Eve...
Posted September 27, 2007 9:09 PM
The Times lost its School Me blog and column when Bob Sipchen quit to edit the Sierra Club magazine in San Francisco and co-blogger Janine Kahn went to the OC...
Posted September 19, 2007 11:11 PM
Last week the political anony-blog Claremont Insider posted the pay and benefits totals for a whole bunch of Claremont city employees, based on year-end pay stubs found on the city's...
Posted September 12, 2007 9:06 AM
The city of Beverly Hills wants to poke around in the visitor logs of LAist because of comments to a post last week that detailed an encounter between an angry...
Posted September 10, 2007 6:14 PM
Today's Times Opinion section runs another piece proclaiming the blogosphere lacking — this time in factual political reporting. It read to me as if journalism professor Michael Skube wasn't familiar...
Posted August 19, 2007 9:45 PM
Jason Middleton has something to say about Lesley Balla's dig at LA.com earlier this week. He emails: Normally, I wouldn't respond to a competitor's blog posting, but there are some...
Posted August 17, 2007 9:13 AM
Lesley Balla helped in 2003 to launch LA.com as an informed, even sassy hub of opinionated takes on Los Angeles. She doesn't like what has happened now that the Daily...
Posted August 15, 2007 2:55 PM
Sickcandy has given it up: Sickcandy was a blog published from May 15, 2003-July 4, 2007. It died for several reasons, including (but not limited to) me not wanting to...
Posted August 15, 2007 9:15 AM
The Times has added a whole bunch of filters and details to the new interactive map that goes with Jill Leovy's homicide blog. If you want to just see the...
Posted August 9, 2007 10:28 PM
The Lakers blog still leads the pack — followed by Show Tracker — and the Henry T. Nicholas sex story beat out the Antonio Villaraigosa sex story for visitor traffic...
Posted August 8, 2007 1:45 PM
Michael McLean's first violin concerto was recorded last year at Abbey Road Studios, performed on a 1728 Stradivarius accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. How cool is that? Laurie Niles...
Posted August 8, 2007 10:53 AM
The mother of Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has put up a website to protest development plans for Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills. Peggy Kaus goes for a different style: there's...
Posted August 6, 2007 10:56 AM
Poet and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear has begun Postcard from Los Angeles on the magazine's website. Her first blog post is an homage to the late Elizabeth Stromme,...
Posted August 5, 2007 10:38 AM
When Luke Ford blogged (accurately) in January that Mayor Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding ring and hadn't been seen with his wife in months, the information came from Daily...
Posted August 1, 2007 10:28 PM
Our post earlier this month on Hollywood tabloidist-turned-author Marlise Kast and her pursuit of blissful contentment inspired Luke Ford to interview her for his blog. Or was it the picture?...
Posted July 31, 2007 12:50 PM
Sharon Waxman of the NYT bureau here continues to blog about her book research around the Mediterranean (with a stop for a swim on the Greek island of Paros.) Her...
Posted July 31, 2007 12:31 PM
Editor and writer Glenn O'Brien pens a final entry at The Wit of the Staircase, adding photographs of Duncan and Jeremy Blake and some Steely Dan lyrics that were read...
Posted July 30, 2007 12:52 PM
Paul Karl Lukacs has concluded his traveling sabbatical from the life of a Hollywood lawyer. He blogged from Thailand during the coup, reviewed a book from Jakarta and dropped in...
Posted July 30, 2007 12:17 PM
The L.A. Times got around to chasing last week's story on the suicide of Theresa Duncan and possible death of Jeremy Blake, leading with the angle that other reports have...
Posted July 25, 2007 12:56 AM
San Bernardino Sun sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge seems to have a bit of a thing about Christine Daniels, the transgender sports scribe for the L.A. Times. Oberjuerge encountered Daniels in...
Posted July 23, 2007 11:21 PM
Consecutive reader comments on Gothamist regarding the suicide of Venice blogger Theresa Duncan (and the apparent death of her lover, Jeremy Blake) illustrate the poles of emotion we expect from...
Posted July 22, 2007 1:34 AM
Business Week has a story focusing on more than a dozen bloggers who are making decent money with their sites, including the L.A. women behind the juicy GoFugYourself. "For Heather...
Posted July 18, 2007 12:39 AM
The Daily Dish is blog number 25 at LATimes.com, not counting the phantom USC sports blog that hasn't appeared yet. The DD carries contributions from pretty much all the staffers...
Posted July 11, 2007 11:54 PM
Erik Himmelsbach didn't enjoy last night's fireworks show at CBS Studio City. It set him back thirty bucks and he wants to share the experience: Like most Americans, we believe...
Posted July 5, 2007 7:59 AM
Greg Hernandez writes the only mainstream media blog in town (that I know of) devoted to gay Hollywood. His Out in Hollywood on the Daily News website is also one...
Posted July 2, 2007 12:25 PM
Good California poll numbers for Hillary and Rudy. Top of the Ticket FishbowlLA continues its run of Q-and-A's with LA Observed contributors by throwing 20 questions at Bruce Feirstein....
Posted June 25, 2007 4:19 PM
Now Michelle Delgadillo has business tax problems, but abruptly took care of them Friday in advance of a new round of stories. LAT, DN Popular progressive and previously faceless...
Posted June 23, 2007 12:46 PM
Catherine Elsworth, who holds down the Silver Lake bureau for the Daily Telegraph, would really like to test drive the new iPhone. But she was told by Apple that only...
Posted June 20, 2007 11:56 PM
Melissa Grego, managing editor at TelevisionWeek, posts to a blog-driven column reporting on her lunches with Hollywood figures. She started it up in January and most recently has dished on...
Posted June 17, 2007 11:39 PM
Alan Mittelstaedt, the former LA Weekly news editor guest-blogging for WitnessLA, posts on the issues raised by Mayor Villaraigosa's divorce and his handling of the announcement. Let’s cut a deal...
Posted June 14, 2007 11:52 PM
Producer and author Tom Teicholz hit on a pretty good way to give his next book a shot at a favorable reception. He devoted his column in the Jewish Journal...
Posted June 14, 2007 3:44 PM
Catching up on my feeds, I noticed that Jonah has shut down LA Blogs.com. Franklin Avenue has a suitable tribute to the site that introduced many of the city's fine...
Posted June 12, 2007 10:46 PM
Former editorial writer Andrew Malcolm handles the West Coast, Washington bureau editor Don Frederick the east for Top of the Ticket. What can one more blogger bring to the nation's...
Posted June 11, 2007 1:09 PM
Yes! Sometimes things just work that way. The DN editorial page staff has launched a new blog where editor Chris Weinkopf (from the right), editorial writer Mariel Garza (leftier) and...
Posted June 7, 2007 2:58 PM
The Times' Sacramento blogger Robert Salladay, who took the buyout, signed off this afternoon. Political Muscle will continue in some guise, he writes. From his farewell post: The Political Muscle...
Posted May 31, 2007 5:10 PM
The former CNN and ABC Good Morning America/Sunday anchor will be a HuffPost editor at large overseeing the site’s new Living Now section and help shape overall content. Release after...
Posted May 31, 2007 10:52 AM
The Kinseygram, the L.A. Times blog by Calendar editor Kinsey Lowe that offered a morning roundup of entertainment news, has been quietly killed and the evidence obliterated from the LAT...
Posted May 30, 2007 6:11 PM
"Still the same place, with the same address, the same mission, and the same attitude that has always made HuffPost such a great read," Arianna Huffington says in this morning's...
Posted May 29, 2007 1:29 AM
Four Daily News reporters — Jason Kandel, Brent Hopkins, Rick Coca and Rachel Uranga — are contributing items to It's a Crime, with a Valley bias to the mix. Roll...
Posted May 23, 2007 8:40 AM
This time it's the city of Claremont getting all umbraged up about the Claremont Insider, recounted on the blog of San Garbriel Valley Tribune city editor Edward Barrera. Previous: Foothill...
Posted May 23, 2007 12:34 AM
Today's San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports on the rise of the anonymous Foothill Cities Blog (note new name) and the controversy over its coverage of politics in Pomona. City officials...
Posted May 17, 2007 11:36 AM
L.A. bloggers Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and Callie Miller (Counterbalance) were quoted in a weekend LAT story on the rise — to a point — of books blogs as...
Posted May 14, 2007 2:19 PM
The L.A. Times education blog pioneered by former Current editor Bob Sipchen is going away, but not necessarily permanently. "School Me is going into hibernation for a while...while the folks...
Posted May 14, 2007 8:07 AM
The anonymous Foothill Cities news and gossip blog pulled its recent posts on goings-on at Pomona city hall after receiving a cease-and-desist threat from the Pomona city attorney. The city...
Posted May 11, 2007 11:27 AM
Nikki Finke, apparently a main generator of traffic to LA Weekly's website, seems a mite upset that today's issue credits David Poland's Movie City News with a million visitors a...
Posted May 10, 2007 2:03 PM
For an anonymous dog blog, Skip 365 is pretty witty. Every daily post is a scene from the life of Skip, who my tipster calls a pound puppy in...
Posted May 7, 2007 5:37 PM
Now that 1947 has morphed through 1907 into 1927 (and spawned an L.A. Times imitator blog revisiting 1957), Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak's original website is adding a couple of...
Posted May 7, 2007 9:01 AM
Meredith Artley, the new top editor at LATimes.com, sent a missive to the staff talking up new features on the website and ranking the most viewed stories of the past...
Posted May 3, 2007 1:19 PM
We'll see if this flies. Blogger and Podcaster, published in Maryland, aims to "reduce the learning curve" for new practitioners, writes founder and publisher Larry Genkin. The skew is toward...
Posted April 20, 2007 1:14 PM
FineArtsLA.com is from freelance writer and self-described "arch-dilettante" Christian M. Chensvold and sets as its mission postings on "music, opera, ballet and museums in Greater Los Angeles." Items currently up...
Posted April 13, 2007 8:31 AM
The Daily News politics blog, mostly silent since March, has come back to life. Rick Orlov introduces himself from City Hall in today's Sausage Factory post. Excerpt: In my real...
Posted April 9, 2007 6:12 PM
The author and professor of creative writing at Cornell was born in East Los Angeles, graduated from Garfield High and Immaculate Heart College, and worked as a bottler at...
Posted April 2, 2007 8:15 AM
Reader Lorna Herf and her husband — the ones who walked away from paying cash for a BMW because the dealer demanded a thumbprint — are taking a spin in...
Posted March 21, 2007 8:25 AM
You (and I) weren't crazy: the Times did launch a new enviro-blog last Tuesday and suspend it on Thursday. It will return in early April, though, deputy innovation editor Aaron...
Posted March 19, 2007 2:10 PM
Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index has become a go-to daily blog digest of editorial cartoons. Today, though, he commiserates about the incredible shrinking (except for the new Image section) Los...
Posted March 19, 2007 12:10 PM
Journalist and blogger Cathy Seipp has been bravely and publicly battling lung cancer for many years. (She was not a smoker.) Her daughter Maia Lazar, a student at UC San...
Posted March 19, 2007 10:16 AM
Blogger Lorna Brown was all set to buy a new car at South Bay BMW. She and the sales team agreed on price, trade-in, everything. But when she put down...
Posted March 18, 2007 11:49 PM
Our Morning Buzz post on Tuesday reported the launch of a new L.A. Times blog, Carbon Shift, to cover "energy-related news: climate change, energy security, public health, and business [and]...
Posted March 17, 2007 3:48 PM
Barbara Hansen's TableConversation.com picks up where her ethnic food columns in the Times food section left off. Hansen left the paper last June and since December has been quietly posting...
Posted March 12, 2007 9:13 AM
Mark Frauenfelder, a former colleague of mine at the Industry Standard, who talks about the rise to Internet stardom of BoingBoing in this month's Los Angeles magazine: 1. Be a...
Posted March 1, 2007 9:22 AM
Santa Monica teenager Cory Kennedy, and her mother, come across as less than stable in Shawn Hubler's profile (The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy) in Sunday's West magazine. Still, Kennedy...
Posted February 27, 2007 12:55 AM
Chris Ayres, Los Angeles correspondent of the Times of London, liveblogged the Oscars and found Her Majesty Gwyneth Paltrow's vocal stylings a tad odd. For a Crossroads girl, anyway: "My...
Posted February 26, 2007 11:15 PM
Designer and blogger Marc Grobman (the guy campaigning to de-uglify Donald Sterling's Times ads) became so curious about the crows invading his Santa Monica neighborhood each winter that he went...
Posted February 20, 2007 1:26 PM
Nemesis of Evil posted tonight at 9:01 pm that the bomb squad was outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Weyburn and Gayley in Westwood Village. Then came the...
Posted February 19, 2007 10:05 PM
Jill Leovy's LAT homicide blog now takes note of 99 killings across Los Angeles county so far this year, about three a day. That's lower than last year's daily average,...
Posted February 13, 2007 12:29 PM
Staffing issues blamed, Brian Humphrey posts: "We hope to return to regular postings of significant Los Angeles Fire Department incidents, events and issues soon."...
Posted February 9, 2007 7:26 AM
Results are in for The History Channel’s City of the Future design competition. On-line voters selected Chicago the winner. New York came in second. The Eric Owen Moss design for...
Posted February 8, 2007 9:49 PM
TV and magazine writer Michael Sonnenschein, the erstwhile Fishbowl LA blogger for the Mediabistro empire, is getting back in the game. He is sitting in as guest editor of the...
Posted February 7, 2007 3:55 PM
Ryan Knoll and Scott Schmidt, the Republican political and communication consultants behind RSC Partners, are the new landlords at LA Voice.org. Creator Mack Reed made it official tonight that he...
Posted February 6, 2007 11:55 PM
Convicted and sentenced former Fleishman-Hillard exec Doug Dowie has optioned a screenplay to Jonathan Sanger, a producer on The Elephant Man, The Producers and Vanilla Sky. "It's kind of an...
Posted February 6, 2007 10:55 PM
Sasha Stone has run OscarWatch.com for seven years, but suddenly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has hit her with a cease-and-desist letter over the name. She posts...
Posted February 6, 2007 2:36 AM
Covering murder and mayhem in Los Angeles for the Times, Jill Leovy has been driven crazy knowing that for every homicide that captures the media eye there are others that...
Posted February 5, 2007 8:11 PM
The TypePad service is "currently unavailable," knocking thousands of blogs — including those at the LAT — off-line for the moment. Update: I noticed them back at 2 pm....
Posted February 5, 2007 1:16 PM
Most entertaining blog promo for a friend's project that I've seen in awhile — and nicely retro too — from Mickey Kaus at Slate: In 1969, as a senior in...
Posted February 2, 2007 12:44 PM
As a clicks-generating tactic, LATimes.com could do worse than having op-ed columnist Joel Stein chat live with visitors again. Last week's chat brought in a few readers and some attention....
Posted January 29, 2007 1:02 PM
Local bloggers and web entrepreneurs placed well on the Forbes Web Celeb 25, called "the biggest, brightest and most influential people on the Internet [and]...famous primarily for creating or appearing...
Posted January 25, 2007 5:03 PM
The Sacramento Bee today announced a big new risky online gamble: a premium politics website called CapitolAlert that costs a whopping $499 a year and gives subscribers early access to...
Posted January 24, 2007 10:16 AM
By day Susan Patron is a senior librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library system, where she has worked for thirty-five years. She is also an accomplished author of children's...
Posted January 23, 2007 11:57 PM
After a four-year run, the creator of LA Voice says he has too much going on in his professional and personal life to keep going. He announces in an open...
Posted January 23, 2007 1:28 AM
Govindi Murty, co-founder of the Liberty Film Festival, sits in the guest chair this weekend on "Ebert and Roeper." She joins a lineup that has included Jay Leno, director Kevin...
Posted January 19, 2007 9:54 AM
Dutton's Beverly Hills closed December 31, but the hard feelings continue. At a city council meeting last night the city manager of Beverly Hills apparently made a report blaming the...
Posted January 10, 2007 11:52 AM
Tyler Green's blog-jabs about the high cost of L.A. art seem to have gotten the goat of the folks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Last week, you...
Posted January 9, 2007 3:40 PM
Kevin Bronson's Buzz Bands column in Calendar Weekend is now a blog. He's been doing it quietly since New Year's Eve, but the news just filtered down. Bronson writes of...
Posted January 8, 2007 3:18 PM
Regular readers of Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog, successor to CalPundit, are used to his frequent diversions about his cats. So it's not surprising that his Jan. 4 post, Final...
Posted January 8, 2007 12:16 AM
Michael Goodwin was convicted of murdering his former business partner, Mickey Thompson, and the racing legend's wife in 1988. Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty. CBS2 Alleged details...
Posted January 4, 2007 3:50 PM
Not good, blogs Colleen Cuisine. She didn't go in looking for a gourmet experience but "just hearty good food:" After shuttering its doors for remodeling nearly two years ago, Du-par's...
Posted January 4, 2007 10:57 AM
Eat the Press analyzes how Technorati's somewhat-incestuous Top 100 (which measures not readers or popularity, just inbound links from other blogs) looks different now than it did a year ago....
Posted January 3, 2007 12:09 PM
Right blogger Patterico's fourth annual review of a year in the life of the Los Angeles Times is up. It has become kind of a yearly event for the conservative...
Posted January 2, 2007 5:56 AM
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 KTVX, the ABC-affiliated Channel 4...
Posted December 26, 2006 2:10 AM
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 a friend, Bob Baker faced...
Posted December 18, 2006 12:30 AM
No, not Allen Iverson — not yet anyway. LA Observed contributor Bob Baker has taken over from Rick Cipes as the official, paid Clippers blogger at LATimes.com. He'll be spending...
Posted December 13, 2006 2:34 PM
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 weekend. She was much prettier...
Posted December 13, 2006 1:39 PM
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 National Guard, the same week...
Posted December 12, 2006 11:34 PM
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. Anne Thompson has more at...
Posted December 11, 2006 1:50 PM
Melinda Henneberger, a Newsweek contributing editor who used to be at the New York Times, joins the Huffington Post as political editor and will hire reporters to cover Congress and...
Posted November 30, 2006 10:20 AM
In a column at Slate, Michael Kinsley remembers his shock when a Washington colleague put up a personal website for the first time. Now it all makes sense, he writes:...
Posted November 28, 2006 1:57 AM
Angelenos older than about 40 probably remember signs for Brew 102 as a downtown L.A. landmark off the Hollywood Freeway. Next to the brewery were some giant tanks that as...
Posted November 22, 2006 12:56 PM
Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein is given a page in today's print version of The Envelope to deliver his take on four of the bloggers who occupy his space in...
Posted November 22, 2006 8:59 AM
Brian Stelter is 21, attends Towson University near Baltimore, and through his blog has the ear of just about everyone who matters in television news. Now he also has a...
Posted November 21, 2006 7:53 PM
Does Nissan's new serialized commercial for the Sentra rip off artist Matt Johnson's sculpture Breadface, which was seen all over Los Angeles on banners for the UCLA Hammer Museum's Thing...
Posted November 20, 2006 1:29 PM
Jason Calacanis made a ton of money selling Santa Monica-based Weblogs, Inc. to AOL and for the past year has been working there and running Netscape. Yesterday his mentor at...
Posted November 16, 2006 4:06 PM
New logo, typeface, departments and architecture to the magazine, which celebrates 45 years in December. It's the Power Issue, hitting newstands now with pieces by me on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa,...
Posted November 15, 2006 2:15 PM
In the alley behind Nicole's Bundy Drive condo, two months after Simpson was acquitted....
Posted November 15, 2006 10:44 AM
Veronique de Turenne gives bicyclists their space on Pacific Coast Highway, but asks the same in return. "Share the road, you arrogant cyclists. Sure, it's narrow, sure it's scenic, sure...
Posted November 14, 2006 1:42 PM
If you want to be technical, The Knife is "a blog about restaurants favored by the entertainment industry. Monday through Thursday, The Knife is where to eat and drink in...
Posted November 14, 2006 1:05 PM
Bill Boyarsky, the newest LA Observed contributor, used to be city editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a local column called "The Spin" for many years, and created the...
Posted November 12, 2006 4:59 PM
On the same day that his publisher calls for a new Hispanic business strategy, Bob Sipchen's education column in the Times runs in both Spanish and English on his School...
Posted November 6, 2006 12:28 PM
Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have inked a deal to take over MGM's dormant United Artists film label, Anne Thompson reports at the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz...
Posted November 2, 2006 10:54 AM
The Times' Susan Spano is heading to Asia for a month and turning over Postcards from Paris to a guest blogger, new-to-Paris author Elliott Hester. Spano critic Amy Alkon, writing...
Posted November 2, 2006 9:36 AM
Wilshire & Washington is designed to "highlight the enduring relationship between entertainment and politics. More than a mere curiosity, the intersection of these worlds play out daily in fund raising,...
Posted November 1, 2006 2:00 AM
Paparazzi agency X-17 is making plans to go after celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton for profiting from the company's photos. Radar Online says the agency is talking to other creators...
Posted October 31, 2006 10:12 AM
Franklin Avenue's Mike and Maria turn up on HGTV's "What is My House Worth?" LAist wants Lakers and Clippers bloggers. Dawn at Griffith Observatory. Crazy Wendy at the Santa...
Posted October 26, 2006 6:08 PM
Jessica Coen is posting her final Gawker items today after two years at the blog. On the way out, she's telling a few (blind-item) tales and maybe holding a match...
Posted October 13, 2006 2:55 PM
Those billionaires interested in buying the Los Angeles Times should put their money into creating a new web-based news venture, says Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at...
Posted October 10, 2006 9:44 AM
City Hall beat reporter Duke Helfand is on the mayor's trade trip to China and blogging about it for the Times website. In the first post we learn that Villaraigosa...
Posted October 9, 2006 2:28 AM
Remember in June when entertainment lawyer Paul Karl Lukacs quit the rat race and took off around the world, blogging about it at Knife Tricks? He got as far as...
Posted September 20, 2006 2:47 AM
Perhaps bracing for a premature end to his team's baseball season, Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman has launched Screen Jam. I'll let him explain: As readers of Dodger Thoughts may know,...
Posted September 18, 2006 5:39 PM
Cindy Mosqueda at Loteria Chicana is tired of hearing race-baiters on the right demonize a group that she doesn't recognize. Her blog-rant was triggered by a YouTube video that she...
Posted September 13, 2006 11:24 AM
The anonymous blogger at Los Angeles City Nerd says that Councilman Bernard Parks hosted a Monday Night Football viewing party starting at 4 pm yesterday in the "media room" at...
Posted September 12, 2006 9:05 AM
Mack Reed's site is down temporarily due to a recurrence of hosting problems. 2:20 pm: They are back up....
Posted September 11, 2006 12:45 PM
The Los Angeles Times launched its California Politics website and blog today, four days after it was promised. There are links to today's LAT stories out of Sacramento, video of...
Posted September 11, 2006 9:37 AM
Today's feature in the Times on the Silver Lake home where Rupert Pole lived with the writer Anais Nin is the best chance I'll ever get to link to this...
Posted September 7, 2006 9:55 PM
Changes are happening at LatinoLA.com. The site, billed as "your online guide to LatinoL.A.," gathers together a rich array of community links, articles and event listings each week and has...
Posted September 7, 2006 8:38 PM
Arianna Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work and Life, has morphed instantly into a new feature section at the Huffington Post: "...devoted to promoting fearlessness in all aspects...
Posted September 5, 2006 10:54 AM
Fear of the long knives from Chicago is rampant again in the Los Angeles Times newsroom at First and Spring streets downtown. You know people are skittish when a rumor...
Posted August 31, 2006 3:48 PM
T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau shows up on the blog at the Huffington Post with an entry about the subject of his new book, Blood...
Posted August 31, 2006 12:44 PM
Ten posts from the feed reader... Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth blogs about the Beatles' penultimate road concert, forty years ago today at Dodger Stadium. It was a Bob...
Posted August 28, 2006 6:20 PM
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes extensively on what he sees as the abuses of copyright and the law's dampening effect on free exchange of ideas and art. Just because he's...
Posted August 26, 2006 12:34 PM
Jenny Burman blogs at Chicken Corner that the LA Weekly's David Zahniser is a fellow Echo Parkster and describes the view of gentrification from her corner of the neighborhood. Next...
Posted August 24, 2006 4:42 PM
Blogger Zach Behrens (In the Oaks and LAist) is running for a seat on the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council. He's unopposed, so it looks like he should be addressed in...
Posted August 21, 2006 1:27 PM
After several weeks as resident guests, and some time before that as anonymous visiting bloggers, Mayrav Saar and Kate Coe are official at Fishbowl LA. Mayrav is a former Orange...
Posted August 17, 2006 12:23 PM
Alyssa Shelasky will be posting about her L.A. dating life for Glamour magazine's new website — with a little twist. Apparently, she will ask readers for love advice then put...
Posted August 16, 2006 9:57 AM
You get pretty far into Mary McNamara's LAT piece on Mary-Louise Parker (pegged to tonight's return of "Weeds" on Showtime) before you learn that she is not a happy faux...
Posted August 14, 2006 4:18 PM
The fifteen "InsideSoCal" staff blogs fed mostly out of the newsroom in Woodland Hills — and the absorption of LA.com — were just the beginning for the Daily News' online...
Posted August 10, 2006 12:11 PM
Charles Johnson of the Los Angeles-based war blog Little Green Footballs and co-founder of Pajamas Media got most of the praise due the blogosphere for uncovering the fake documents about...
Posted August 9, 2006 11:46 AM
One of the additions we've talked about at LA Observed — and have been hatching in the background — is encouraging writers to blog occasionally (or more) about the places...
Posted August 2, 2006 12:37 PM
In her blog diatribe about suffering bad service at a Los Angeles area restaurant, visiting Bon Appétit online editor Martha Simon doesn't name the place. But if you suspect it's...
Posted July 31, 2006 12:24 PM
In this week's double issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann struggles to comprehend the rise of blogs as a news source and the boosterish label — citizen journalism —...
Posted July 31, 2006 11:20 AM
David Rensin has been a contributing editor of Playboy since before web browsers came along. He has written more than a hundred interviews for the magazine and devotes most of...
Posted July 27, 2006 5:31 PM
Writer, producer, novelist (and significant other of Helen Hunt) Matthew Carnahan had his personal home page taken hostage by pro-Palestinian hackers. Ray Richmond blogs that Carnahan hasn't written or done...
Posted July 26, 2006 11:28 PM
Former CityBeat columnist Erik Himmelsbach has taken his Valley Boy persona to the blogopshere. In his second post, he talks about the book he is writing about legendary Los Angeles...
Posted July 26, 2006 11:04 PM
Time for a change. A fairly major change, in light of the way things have been done here so far. There won't be a Morning Buzz today so I can...
Posted July 25, 2006 7:20 AM
KCRW thought they had U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad all lined up to guest with Warren Olney on "To the Point" at 1 pm, but the station regrets to...
Posted July 21, 2006 12:08 PM
Some kind of problem at Dreamhost has knocked LA Voice.org off line. We're all hostages to our hosting services, unfortunately. Best of luck to Mack as he gets them straightened...
Posted July 17, 2006 8:25 PM
In addition to running alt weekly ads that brag she's the dopest attorney in Los Angeles, criminal defense lawyer Allison Margolin has taken up blogging on the site of the...
Posted July 16, 2006 3:46 PM
Movie City News has added rough, uncut video interviews to its mix of blogs. Up currently is a three-part chat with Vinessa Shaw, who strolls self-consciously through Palisades Park in...
Posted July 10, 2006 12:51 PM
Regular readers of The Wit of the Staircase know that writer, filmmaker and former video game designer Theresa Duncan lives in Venice and is likely to post about literature, clothes,...
Posted July 5, 2006 4:51 PM
Two of the contributors at Blogging.la are getting married this weekend — and not to each other....
Posted July 5, 2006 11:23 AM
Brad Friedman's Los Angeles-based liberal blog has been all over the vote irregularity issues in the Busby-Bilbray congressional race in San Diego County. Friedman is scheduled to appear tonight on...
Posted June 29, 2006 2:41 PM
Yesterday's Morning Buzz mentioned FishbowlLA's search for a staffer to replace the "guest blogger" who has been holding the fort. Later in the day, this week's guest blogger, one of...
Posted June 29, 2006 9:45 AM
Yesterday's almost entirely positive media story on Nikki Finke gets another day in the news, thanks to her insistence that the piece by Jon Friedman of Marketwatch was "misogynist" and...
Posted June 29, 2006 9:40 AM
Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman got columnist-blogger Nikki Finke to come out to lunchdinner with him in Santa Monica and calls her "a rarity at a time when many entertainment...
Posted June 28, 2006 12:43 PM
Following the news in this morning's Wall Street Journal (and in the Morning Buzz), Rafat Ali makes announcements about his deal for financing at paidContent.org. The site based here covers...
Posted June 26, 2006 11:42 AM
When a non-political blogger actually does some digging to get a story, we applaud. So kudos to Ethan Lindsey at LAist for noticing that the veggie dogs had vanished from...
Posted June 23, 2006 2:52 PM
Mariel Garza has moved her observations about riding the bus from her personal blog onto a sanctioned Daily News spot. Steve Rosenberg, a copy editor on the Daily News features...
Posted June 15, 2006 2:10 PM
This week's Los Angeles Alternative goes where few of us would dare tread: restaurants that earned the health department's dreaded C grade. They wouldn't risk their own staffers, of course—they...
Posted June 12, 2006 1:35 AM
• CityBeat's cover story by Celia Farber delves into the controversy over the possible AIDS death of three-year-old Eliza Jane Scovill, her mother Christine Maggiore's identity as a skeptic of...
Posted June 8, 2006 6:12 PM
Claude Brodesser, who has been flying solo at FishbowlLA since Michael Sonnenschein exited the scene in early April, posts that he is leaving to write the industry column for TMZ.com,...
Posted June 7, 2006 10:59 AM
My favorite blog reading is not about politics or Los Angeles (or even ice hockey.) What I enjoy is eavesdropping on aficionados in some field I know nothing about. Hence...
Posted June 6, 2006 6:57 PM
LAist editor Carolyn Kellogg is leaving our fair city and the blog for the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes in her farewell missive,...
Posted June 5, 2006 12:31 PM
Paperback Mysteries, reviews of new books by Dick Adler, reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly and longtime Los Angeles author and journalist. Add books: Jailed PI Anthony Pellicano...
Posted June 5, 2006 2:45 AM
Blogger Michael Schneider has lived here for ten years now and over at Franklin Avenue he marvels at the changing cityscape. When I got here, no one was talking about...
Posted June 1, 2006 8:44 PM
Seems to me that Michael Walker is doing the whole book-blog synergy the right way, and creating a readable and valuable Los Angeles neighborhood website. (I'd say this even if...
Posted June 1, 2006 7:05 PM
♦ Just how capriciously does the county apply its practice of releasing jail inmates early? Quite, according to DA Steve Cooley. ♦ The Daily News endorsed Cindy Montañez in the...
Posted May 29, 2006 11:57 PM
Behold the late-inning dessert cart for fans who make it into the luxury boxes on the Club Level at Dodger Stadium. Click on the photo for the whole chocolicious scene....
Posted May 25, 2006 10:49 PM
The new blogger at Red Line Diary has made the switch: he's commuting from home in Burbank to the downtown civic center via subway. Not that the MTA makes it...
Posted May 24, 2006 11:13 AM
From an anonymous officer, posted at LAPD Wife: Exhaustion. I have been sleep-deprived for three months now. I kicked the caffeine habit before I ever set foot in The Academy,...
Posted May 24, 2006 2:34 AM
Andrew at Here in Van Nuys blogs about calling 911 after a pickup truck blocked his driveway and a man in para-military garb got out and began throwing things at...
Posted May 23, 2006 2:49 PM
LA Voice.org is having an up-and-down day due to server issues at DreamHost. Looks to be currently...very slow....
Posted May 23, 2006 2:44 PM
In addition to host Lisa McRee's web reports from the show's road trips, the "California Connected" crew at KCET is also posting to a newsroom blog that looks like it...
Posted May 23, 2006 2:31 AM
Guess it was true about Michael Hiltzik landing in Sports when the defrocked Los Angeles Times columnist-blogger returned from suspension. He wrote the Sunday feature on Clipper Elton Brand's "checkered...
Posted May 22, 2006 2:19 AM
♦ "There is no exact moment when the cultural epicenter of the country shifted from New York to Los Angeles," Manohla Dargis writes in the NYT, "just a series of...
Posted May 21, 2006 8:45 PM
It's not every day that a guy goes home from a bad day in federal court—conviction on twelve felonies—and blogs about life. Former Fleishman-Hillard VP John Stodder, of course, has...
Posted May 17, 2006 7:50 PM
Bloggers who use JournalSpace to host their websites have been offline for several hours today. Members are emailing me that they received no warning and still haven't heard from JournalSpace....
Posted May 12, 2006 10:04 PM
More on maggots at the morgue, the sordid conditions inside our jails, Guerdon Stuckey files his report and other news and views after the jump. From late yesterday, don't miss...
Posted May 12, 2006 2:10 AM
The Los Angeles Police Department launched its official blog with a burst of opinion (a rebuttal to an editorial in the Daily News) and a welcome message from Chief William...
Posted May 11, 2006 11:15 PM
How it feels when your dental hygienist somehow gets your number and asks you out, plus Chief Bratton argues for less oversight, Antonio's endorsement of a successor to Jackie Goldberg,...
Posted May 11, 2006 3:10 AM
Arianna Huffington told magazine editors in New York today that the Huffington Post makes money and within two months will spin off a sister site devoted to political satire. Even...
Posted May 9, 2006 10:09 AM
In the two years that LAT travel writer Susan Spano has been living in Paris, I've noticed two kinds of reactions among LA Observed readers. One is envy and resentment...
Posted May 8, 2006 11:57 PM
♦ Answer: Mayor Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Magic Johnson, Natalie Cole, Johnny Grant and Councilman Tom LaBonge. Question: Who shows up when Channel...
Posted May 8, 2006 3:16 PM
Watching Antonio squirm—Dowie and Stodder too, and Dodgers fans, and the art experts at Cal State Northridge who OK'd some suspect Chinese antiquities. Plus a big win for the Mighty...
Posted May 4, 2006 1:51 AM
Not only won't it cost the L.A. schools $2.1 million for yesterday's 27,000-plus protest absences, it pretty much won't hurt at all financially. School Me, the new Times blog on...
Posted May 2, 2006 3:39 PM
There's an extra-long Morning Buzz chock full of good stuff after you turn the page, catching up to the weekend. Of course the news of the day in Los Angeles...
Posted May 1, 2006 1:15 AM
Michael Hiltzik came up, of course, during my interview of Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. He beat me to the punch,...
Posted May 1, 2006 1:07 AM
Media reaction to the Hiltzik blog disclosure, a city budget with money for more cops, some awards, some obits and General Zinni is in town. Much more after the jump......
Posted April 20, 2006 11:50 PM
This notice is posted at the top of Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog on the Los Angeles Times website: The Times has suspended Michael Hiltzik’s Golden State blog on latimes.com....
Posted April 20, 2006 6:11 PM
Liberal L.A. Times columnist-blogger Michael Hiltzik and conservative prosecutor-blogger Patterico have been butting heads and online personas ever since the former joined the blogosphere last October. Even earlier, perhaps, if...
Posted April 20, 2006 2:03 AM
Reacting to the scandal about extortion, horse trading and freebies at Page Six, former Variety columist Army Archerd—whose marketing slogan is "Hollywood's first blogger"—blogs a tale out of his past....
Posted April 10, 2006 11:56 PM
Selective news judgment on Derek Lowe...mysterious illness of a local congresswoman...the mayor and the Chinese vice premier...plus yet another Hollywood media blog, an L.A. blog award, a bloggy romance and...
Posted April 6, 2006 2:42 AM
Some Pellicano news, the start of the Dowie-Stodder trial, a new blogger on the City Council and of course so much more—including a farewell in the Daily News newsroom, a...
Posted April 5, 2006 2:02 AM
♦ David Poland of Movie City News takes 1,400 words to explain why his column The Hot Button is going down to three days a week. It's all about the...
Posted April 4, 2006 5:56 PM
For a little slice of life from below-the-media-radar Los Angeles, check out the personal tributes I'm gathering over at The Valley Observed about the man who ran the newsstand at...
Posted March 31, 2006 6:37 PM
Today's the first official day of original Gawker (and ex-Mediabistro editor) Elizabeth Spiers' new money-backed Wall Street blog, DealBreaker.com. As she describes it, "an online business tabloid and Wall Street...
Posted March 29, 2006 10:25 AM
Had to happen, with the playoffs-bound Clippers turning respectable. ClipperBlog.com is from Kevin Arnovitz and friends. He is the Slate magazine Fray editor who confessed his season-ticket status at Slate...
Posted March 29, 2006 8:55 AM
Looks as if the Daily News and its sister papers have quietly launched Hollywood Babble On, "where our film, music, TV and Hollywood critics dish out their latest thoughts!" I...
Posted March 28, 2006 11:23 AM
Notes from around... ♦ An estimated 5,000 students are protesting outside of school today in San Pedro, Compton, Bellflower and the Valley, according to NBC4. ♦ There's a 1 pm press conference...
Posted March 28, 2006 11:01 AM
Every Los Angeles political story has a backstory. At his blog, John Stodder takes off from the recent news about Sunshine Canyon landfill to reconstruct how, when he was the...
Posted March 22, 2006 11:18 AM
Turn the page for items on Dean Singleton's California strategy, Sheriff Baca's Compton strategy, a Saudi prince gets booed at Town Hall Los Angeles, celebrities at the fashion shows and...
Posted March 22, 2006 12:58 AM
Orange County Register columnist Mayrav Saar writes in the paper today about what she gets from posting at Big Action!, a group blog whose writers include Leslie Gornstein (E! Online's...
Posted March 21, 2006 10:12 AM
♦ New indictment coming in Pellicano case in early April, prosecutor says. ♦ Funny how the fate of Knight-Ridder's Northern California newspapers could be settled by either Ron Burkle or fellow L.A....
Posted March 20, 2006 3:19 PM
I just caught up to the official KTLA blogs written by four of the station's top news anchors. In theory they represent an admirable step in connecting the talking heads...
Posted March 20, 2006 12:03 PM
The Weblog Awards were handed out for the sixth time on Monday at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. I was on the road that day, but some...
Posted March 15, 2006 2:53 PM
Comments by George Clooney on the Huffington Post about being a proud and unabashed liberal created a small blogosphere boomlet this week, but the aftermath may prove more entertaining. Clooney's...
Posted March 15, 2006 12:15 PM
Boing Boing points to a service called TurnYourHead that will make a custom-lathed "pirolette" that contains your profile, "like an MC Escher litho come to life, starring you, you, you."...
Posted March 15, 2006 10:43 AM
Pan and Scan promises everything DVD "from media news and gossip, to the latest release dates and reviews, up-to-minute industry developments, and technology trends, we cover all aspects of digital...
Posted March 13, 2006 11:12 AM
Runoff for school board...more strangeness around the Ferrari Enzo crash...Rob Reiner's campaign chief steps out of the limelight...L.A.'s blogging pet czar blasts the Animal Defense League...while Cardinal Mahony seeks a...
Posted March 8, 2006 1:37 AM
First reviews of the Oscars and Jon Stewart: not good. Also, Arnie Berghoff's diabetes roast gets some scrutiny, the Times finds waste in the local bioterrorism budget, Villaraigosa promises to...
Posted March 6, 2006 1:54 AM
The LA Weekly has created another new blog, "Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily." The kickoff post announces that she will be live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday: Come for the Cynicism...
Posted March 4, 2006 12:48 AM
James Gilden writes The Daily Traveler blog at LATimes.com, but being a Tribune cousin didn't inhibit him from taking a fair shot at the Channel 5 "Morning News" anchors who...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:21 AM
Why the Los Angeles Times may be getting some new window blinds, blog reaction to the death of Otis Chandler, Channel 5's anchors accept a free night at a swanky...
Posted February 28, 2006 1:14 AM
Fed all weekend, with new ones at the bottom... ⇒ Layoffs at the Los Angeles offices of Clear Channel, reports Franklin Avenue. ⇒ West magazine's fourth week is its first...
Posted February 25, 2006 2:24 PM
Full plate for a Friday morning: Plaschke rips the silver from Sasha Cohen's neck, Steve Cooley's least favorite Mexican fugitive is nabbed, the Writers Guild invites Cheryl Rhoden to stay...
Posted February 24, 2006 1:45 AM
Maria Elena Durazo watch begins, the Z Man appears in the LA Weekly, "Ask a Mexican" cracks Column One, questions about Ed Boks—all this and an old murder in Alhambra...
Posted February 23, 2006 9:03 AM
Another near-miss at LAX, Vin Scully signs on for three more years (but that's probably it), chiding Erin Aubry Kaplan on race, the editor of the LAT's Home section moves...
Posted February 22, 2006 2:40 AM
Blogging.la and the rest of the Metroblogging empire this afternoon unveiled a thorough redesign. Gray shades, bigger pictures and bolder text are among the visual changes, plus there are new...
Posted February 20, 2006 6:08 PM
Dave Sifry of Technorati tracks what bloggers link to and notes in his latest report that the New York Times receives by far the most inbound links—and that mainstream media...
Posted February 19, 2006 11:45 AM
Mimosa and Cafe Beaujolais L.A. Ritz Sunshine in a basket LAPD Wife Lebowski Fest West 2006 Sergio Leone & the Infield Fly Rule Official Skunks Document Dump Skunks of Los...
Posted February 18, 2006 9:22 PM
Today's Daily Journal (no link) features a front-page piece on John Stodder, the indicted former Fleishman-Hillard executive turned blogger who I began telling you about last month. Erin Park reports:...
Posted February 17, 2006 12:47 PM
Trevor Butterworth argues in the Financial Times that, as a business model, blogs never were here. Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed...
Posted February 17, 2006 11:07 AM
Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register See/ReadStar-News Read Variety ReadHwd Reporter ReadLa Opinión Read Slate: Today's Papers Terry Christensen wasn't...
Posted February 15, 2006 8:10 PM
Inspired by yesterday's long-lost amusement parks post, Susan at 2020 Hindsight spools out her Pike stories....
Posted February 15, 2006 3:32 PM
Jim Bursch at West L.A. Online is peeved at the Daily News for some language in today's news story about the jaw-dropping cost of extending the Red Line all the...
Posted February 15, 2006 2:51 PM
Tony Mora in North Hollywood posts photos of the wall murals he finds at carnicerias, mariscos emporiums and taco stands. The Valley is his usual canvas, but he has been...
Posted February 12, 2006 1:13 PM
You know it's been a tough location shoot when you get stabbed in the forehead on set and the producers get in a brawl. Second item under Studio City Tales....
Posted February 10, 2006 5:35 PM
An exclusive on the new boss at "California Connected," a $15 million payday for three LAPD cops, Rocky's legal memo to the police commission and more Barry Munitz farewells—plus the...
Posted February 10, 2006 1:20 AM
East Coast blogger Tyler Green seems to have it first, with the email from Getty chairman John Biggs: To all Getty Staff: I wanted to let you know before we...
Posted February 9, 2006 5:26 PM
Chris Ayres, who interprets Los Angeles for the Brits back home as the correspondent here for the Times of London, now blogs about it on the paper's website. So L.A....
Posted February 9, 2006 11:48 AM
LAVoice has taken down a long anonymous entry accusing a Hollywood strip club of various crimes. Mack Reed explains why. He also notes his site's 1,500th post....
Posted February 9, 2006 11:07 AM
Richard Katz reportedly doesn't get the MWD gig, friends of Cesar Chavez turn their legal guns on Marc Cooper, everybody it seems is investigating the SEIU's outpouring for Martin Ludlow,...
Posted February 8, 2006 2:05 AM
⇒ Truthdig.com's Blair Golson contends that Times editor Dean Baquet would not meet with representatives of the United Farm Workers union to hear their challenges to the paper's recent investigative...
Posted February 6, 2006 5:14 PM
I just came from a session where this year's Coro Foundation fellows interviewed me about blogs and the media. Asked to name my favorite L.A. blogs, I mentioned Theresa Duncan's...
Posted February 6, 2006 3:06 PM
Eyewitness News goes hi-def, James Frey has a few words for the LAT, the Downtown News loses patience with Villaraigosa and a former mayor goes in for a tuneup—plus a...
Posted February 6, 2006 2:31 AM
⇒ Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that the Democrats would have reached more Latino voters had Antonio Villaraigosa given the English-language State of the Union response: "the ethnic politics behind...
Posted February 5, 2006 12:30 PM
Jack Weiss makes his ambition more or less official, Anthony Pellicano comes back to town, the Ambassador gets a proper send-off, Channel 13 News adds a comic, more bad news...
Posted February 3, 2006 8:56 AM
That Los Angeles Magazine piece by RJ Smith on Pajamas Media is now online, along with Smith's cover story on George Clooney ("The sexiest man Bill O'Reilly loves to hate...
Posted February 1, 2006 11:16 AM
Brian Flemming gives a good argument for why a bunch of bloggers taking a freebie to Amsterdam is not a big deal. (Scott Olin Schmidt, writing at Spot-On, views it...
Posted February 1, 2006 10:55 AM
Franklin Avenue has further details, including that KTLA paid $5,000 for the video of that Chino shooting by a sheriff's deputy and managed to get some of the footage on...
Posted February 1, 2006 10:35 AM
In the news this morning, the FBI looks at that videotaped shooting by a deputy in Chino...misreading Los Angeles...quitting James Frey...buying off Stuckey...and Hollywood's gay thing analyzed from a couple...
Posted February 1, 2006 2:21 AM
Character actor Charles Lane turned 101 last week. Jon Weisman counts 322 roles on his Imdb credits, including more than two hundred movies before he became a familiar face on...
Posted January 31, 2006 3:48 PM
Tony Pierce and Brian Flemming are among 25 bloggers—including Ezra Klein, AmericaBlog's John Aravosis and the gossipists at Jossip and Perez Hilton—who have accepted free airfare, five free nights in...
Posted January 30, 2006 5:10 PM
Since the last time I looked, CBS 2/KCAL 9 has added The Reporter's Blog by veteran Paul Dandridge and In the Field by news photographer Bryan Frank. Dandridge is using...
Posted January 28, 2006 1:21 AM
In the February issue of Los Angeles magazine, RJ Smith examines Pajamas Media to ask whether it is a fledgling media phenomenon or a blip with $3.5 million in seed...
Posted January 27, 2006 10:25 PM
⇒ Three Los Angeles-based blogs—perennial number one Boing Boing, plus The Huffington Post and Crooks and Liars—are in Technorati's Top 10 based on link popularity. ⇒ Remember the USC cheerleader...
Posted January 26, 2006 11:51 AM
While the right continues to hammer Joel Stein for his "I don't support the troops" op-ed column, and bloggers channel his possible response, Tabloid Baby thinks the piece was a...
Posted January 25, 2006 12:57 PM
Meruelo rejected...AOL targets Beverly Hills...spotting old Three Stooges locations...the end of DVD Exclusive...plus some blogs observed, the front pages of eleven newspapers and more after the jump....
Posted January 25, 2006 1:44 AM
A new week begins with happy birthday greetings to the mayor, a glitch at KPCC, the Defamer-in-chief in Vanity Fair and a dustup between Cathy Seipp and a New York...
Posted January 23, 2006 3:09 AM
Some goodies from here and there. Late adds will go at the bottom. ⇒ Former LAT syndicated columnist Norah Vincent's book on going undercover in the male world, Self-Made Man:...
Posted January 22, 2006 2:25 AM
The Huffington Post Contagious Festival is a new exercise in traffic building and also, in their words, "a unique opportunity for talented designers, political activists of any persuasion, filmmakers and...
Posted January 22, 2006 2:13 AM
The mayor draws a crowd in Sherman Oaks, the UCLA controversy, bunch of reporter moves at the Times and Long Beach cops still can't find their shotguns...that and much more...
Posted January 19, 2006 4:21 AM
The attempt by a conservative website to out and possibly intimidate UCLA professors who espouse political views has media legs, at least today. Shawn Steel, the former California Republican Party...
Posted January 18, 2006 1:56 PM
In the morning news rodeo, op-ed newcomer Erin Aubry Kaplan dumps on Herb Wesson, what the Golden Globes could do to slow immigration, why you won't see many A380's at...
Posted January 18, 2006 1:32 AM
LAist's Carolyn Kellogg extends kudos to whoever made Bill Cosby appear in the BloodRayne billboard on Fletcher Drive....
Posted January 17, 2006 1:42 PM
My choice is Defamer. The scene, the parties and the gossip viewed from slightly askew. They also anoint Isaac Mizrahi as the new king of red carpet dish. I didn't...
Posted January 17, 2006 12:43 PM
Smelly beaches in the South Bay, no new Wal-Mart in the Valley, horny females on Channel 2 and the winners of the Golden Globes—plus where Alex Padilla will eat breakfast...
Posted January 17, 2006 2:21 AM
The House that Jack Kent Cooke Built might be no more, air rights are hot again downtown (and so is Richard Meruelo), Tad Friend expounds on Los Angeles car chases...plus...
Posted January 16, 2006 3:43 AM
Susan Kitchens at 2020 Hindsight stayed up through the night to post about the return of the comet-exploring spacecraft Stardust: "Look, I can understand all this middle-of-the-night stuff when Mars...
Posted January 15, 2006 7:07 PM
Another Pellicano case guilty plea, Arnold's illegal problem, Patterico and Hiltzik go mainstream, DA Cooley wants to reform three strikes—plus the end of the UFW series, Michael Eisner, Mack Reed,...
Posted January 11, 2006 1:24 AM
The UFW urges emails to the editor of the L.A. Times, Chick and Romer cozy up, one less obstacle for New Times and a stalwart of the Los Angeles Rams...
Posted January 10, 2006 1:30 AM
Turn the page for the fill-in on Gov. Schwarzenegger's fat lip, the latest on the Times' UFW investigation, Eric Garcetti week at the city council, Sheriff Baca's defense of Compton,...
Posted January 9, 2006 2:11 AM
Today's LAT editorial page delivers on its Rose Bowl wager to say something nice about Texas: "Any state that gave us Lance Armstrong, Lyle Lovett and Larry McMurtry can't be...
Posted January 6, 2006 1:47 AM
We're number two! USC lost the Rose Bowl and the national championship to Texas 41-38. Thirty-two of those points came in the last quarter. Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read...
Posted January 5, 2006 1:04 AM
Today's Food section of the LAT waded into the subject of blogs about food that can be found around the web, to a mixed reaction from the locals. Deep End...
Posted January 4, 2006 9:13 PM
I don't know whether Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik is the paper's designated hitter or just is being allowed to take his Golden State blog wherever he feels it naturally...
Posted January 4, 2006 12:38 AM
The New York Observer says that Ana Marie Cox is moving on and that the principal new Washington gossip for the Gawker empire will be David Lat, recently outed as...
Posted January 3, 2006 9:25 AM
Welcome back to work. Since it's been awhile, I'm letting it run long... Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register...
Posted January 3, 2006 3:02 AM
If they are not there already, later today I'll be adding these noteworthy new participants in the L.A. blogosphere. Bill Bradley is the California political analyst with the mostest Schwarzenegger...
Posted January 3, 2006 1:52 AM
Newest adds at the bottom... ⇒ KNX 1070 reporter Michael Linder's website details his background as a KTLA reporter, creator of "America's Most Wanted" and "The Jesse Jackson Show" and...
Posted December 30, 2005 1:44 AM
⇒ New managing editor at the Long Beach Press-Telegram: it's John Futch. Also, Jason Gewirtz becomes city editor for business and John Canalis moves to the editorial/opinion pages. ⇒ A...
Posted December 29, 2005 11:31 AM
Los Angeles blogger Jeremy Hermanns and his fiancee were on the Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Burbank that lost cabin pressure at altitude, causing a scary time for everyone...
Posted December 28, 2005 11:28 PM
⇒ Only in L.A. quote of the day: "Just 2,200 square feet—it's practically an apartment" — Screenwriter Naomi Foner, mother of Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, complaining in the LAT that...
Posted December 28, 2005 11:53 AM
Variety's review today of the Fun with Dick and Jane remake coulda and probably shoulda said that one of the executive producers is none other than reviewer Justin Chang's boss,...
Posted December 21, 2005 5:59 PM
At the Hollywood crew blog Totally Unauthorized, "Peggy Archer" tells the story of a mean-looking power juicer who got drafted into a scene as a security guard because the guy...
Posted December 20, 2005 9:59 AM
⇒ The Daily News' Beth Barrett takes off from last week's nugget (and follow-up) about City Council time off to compare the L.A. council's pay and perks to other cities....
Posted December 18, 2005 11:04 PM
L.A. blogger Tim McGarry grew up with the Ambassador Hotel in his life. He accepts that the new schools will be a good thing and he likes where Koreatown is...
Posted December 16, 2005 11:33 AM
A major technical malfunction has thrown blogs on the TypePad service from Six Apart—all of them, apparently—back to their older backup versions. Bloggers can't log in nor can readers add...
Posted December 16, 2005 10:59 AM
The L.A. Times is dropping the shell that remains of its national edition. Once a full-scale newspaper sold on the street in Washington and New York as part of a...
Posted December 14, 2005 12:52 AM
It's Carolyn Kellogg, who blogs on her own time at Pinky's Paper Haus. She replaces Jason Toney, who took over in February. * Today's LAist Interview: Adrienne Crew puts questions...
Posted December 12, 2005 2:28 AM
Tookie Williams has asked for a stay of execution by the state Supreme Court. No word yet. (* Also: Gov. Schwarzenegger won't divulge his ruling on clemency until Monday, his...
Posted December 11, 2005 3:42 PM
LAT watcher Brady Westwater has been watching closely to see how long it will take for the Times to correct a story that said Los Angeles was incorporated as an...
Posted December 9, 2005 2:10 AM
Public Radio International's Tavis Smiley interviewed condemned Crips founder Tookie Williams by phone on San Quentin's Death Row. Calls are limited to fifteen minutes, so it took two redials to...
Posted December 8, 2005 2:25 AM
Franklin Avenue has begun a fun blog exercise. He's seeking nominations for the treasures of Los Angeles that are getting up in years and will be missed when if they...
Posted December 7, 2005 11:18 PM
All these newspaper awards show site creators ought to get together before choosing their brand names. The New York Times' new online effort announced today is called Red Carpet, same...
Posted December 7, 2005 11:14 AM
Los Angeles has posted the top stories from the December issue, including Steve Oney's feature on Defamer Mark Lisanti and the rise of online gossip. The most influential and intimidating...
Posted December 6, 2005 10:38 AM
She hasn't posted since the Kings began their annual fade in the standings, but actress Elisha Cuthbert is on board as the L.A. hockey team's blondest, most exclamation-pointed official blogger....
Posted December 6, 2005 3:30 AM
LA Weekly Deputy Editor Joe Donnelly had a pleasant enough interview with Mike Lacey, the New Times co-founder who will soon be in charge of the Weekly (and its OC...
Posted December 5, 2005 11:33 AM
The Daily News feature staff has started a blog called Red Carpet. It apparently began a test run last month with Fred Shuster posting from the American Music Awards. In...
Posted December 2, 2005 3:25 AM
Scott Martelle has the cover piece in the Weekend Calendar section on local blogs: "In an odd synchronicity, as the pervasiveness of the Internet and mass media homogenizes mass culture,...
Posted December 1, 2005 11:23 AM
In the classroom and panel discussions I've been having lately about blogging, someone always asks whether blogs can be believed. I usually give a spiel on knowing who to trust...
Posted November 30, 2005 2:47 AM
Hollywood will add jobs this year and next, but the overall picture is still cloudy says a report to be released today by the L.A. Economic Development Corp. Advancers in...
Posted November 29, 2005 2:20 AM
Nearly a dozen posts made their way onto the blog during the so-called holiday break, including the first (exclusive) list of which familiar names look to be leaving the L.A....
Posted November 28, 2005 2:20 AM
Sports columnist T.J. Simers claimed in Thursday's Times column that he just noticed his paper's month-old, Daily News-citing Lakers blog—and says the Times should have gone with the other NBA...
Posted November 25, 2005 11:59 PM
The board of directors met today and decided on a split vote to let me start roasting their turkeys a few milliseconds early, provided I make up the time later....
Posted November 22, 2005 6:03 PM
Would-be blog moguls Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson have jettisoned the OSM identity they took when they jettisoned Open Source Media, the name that replaced their original working title...
Posted November 21, 2005 11:50 PM
Joining the gossip-fray at Defamer is invitation only, to a point: "We’ll be sending out a first round of invitations to frequent tipsters, assistants, bloggers, loose-lipped craft servicepeople, etc etc...
Posted November 17, 2005 3:08 PM
The new blog collective that yesterday called itself Open Source Media responded today to the accusation that the name was already taken. The explanation is that the site's trade name...
Posted November 17, 2005 11:32 AM
♦ Yeah, curator Marion True shouldn't have taken that $400,000 loan from two wealthy art collectors right after the Getty acquired their collection. Today's front pages New York Times See/Read Washington...
Posted November 17, 2005 2:19 AM
Item 1: Items from five Gawker Inc. blogs, including Defamer, will be featured on Yahoo! News. The Huffington Post already has a deal with Yahoo. Item 2: Open Source Media,...
Posted November 16, 2005 12:18 PM
♦ Reacting to the Times' series on abuses by conservators for the elderly, the Board of Supes formed a task force and an L.A. judge ordered an investigation into one of...
Posted November 16, 2005 2:15 AM
The fledgling blog and advertising network to be launched Wednesday by Los Angeles bloggers Roger L. Simon (the novelist and screenwriter) and Charles Johnson (operator of the controversial Little Green...
Posted November 14, 2005 11:09 PM
Bob Scheer's dis-invite from the Times op-ed page resonated all day: ⇒ Email from ex-Timeser David Crook: "Re this line in Scheer's au revoir: 'My only regret is that my...
Posted November 11, 2005 8:41 PM
♦ Today's Jewish Journal cover features a large noose and the question: Should Tookie Die? Today's front pages New York Times See/Read Washington Post See/Read LA Times See/Read Daily News See/Read...
Posted November 11, 2005 2:10 AM
The venerable and recently retired Variety columnist began posting yesterday and says that Michael Hiltzik's blog in the L.A. Times inspired him to take the plunge. "I'll avoid the obvious,...
Posted November 10, 2005 9:46 AM
♦ You know how Washington Mutual has been letting anyone take cash from their ATMs for free? Not anymore. ♦ To see whether Jose Huizar eked out a clean win in the...
Posted November 9, 2005 2:49 AM
Lornamatic needed to lose a guy in a hurry. Starbucks came through....
Posted November 5, 2005 11:23 PM
The blogger at The Mess That Greenspan Made heard reports that the Hummer dealer in Westlake Village was having big trouble moving inventory. Talk had it that the dealer was...
Posted November 5, 2005 12:37 AM
♦ A senior Times editor says the paper checked out Mickey Kaus' second-hand report of a big Halloween gang rumble in Brentwood—just a few blocks from Editor Dean Baquet's residence—and was...
Posted November 4, 2005 1:56 AM
In addition to the newsy posts below about Nissan and Chief Bratton, here are some morning nuggets... ♦ The City Council approved an unusual tax-exempt bond scheme that could be worth...
Posted November 3, 2005 1:57 AM
Mickey Kaus reports at Kausfiles that he was told of a large gang fight on Halloween night at the corner of San Vicente and 26th Street on the border of...
Posted November 2, 2005 2:06 PM
♦ A new network city blog launched here Tuesday. Curbed LA, an offshoot of New York's Curbed, says it will "look at the changing face of our fair city and its...
Posted November 2, 2005 1:09 AM
Yes, some tweaks to the look and the front pages box. The latter drove the former. The box now has separate links to view the actual front pages (where available)...
Posted October 31, 2005 2:52 AM
The Los Angeles-based website Violinist.com covered a pretty cool event this weekend. Every member of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina and the later submersion of...
Posted October 30, 2005 11:28 PM
The L.A. journalist revealed her secret today at her blog, Cathy's World: Because sure, breast cancer is no fun; I’ve had friends who’ve died of it. But it also has...
Posted October 28, 2005 6:36 PM
Business page columnist Michael Hiltzik will be the next Times staffer to start blogging. Golden State is already up on the paper's website, leading with an entry on publisher Michael...
Posted October 27, 2005 11:51 AM
The Rob Barrett-Joel Sappell-Richard Rushfield team at LATimes.com has a lineup of new blogs and other projects in the wings, nearly ready to hit the public stage. First out into...
Posted October 26, 2005 10:12 PM
Former New Times Los Angeles reviewer Luke Y. Thompson is optimistic that the return of NT through the LA Weekly will be good. He even flew the colors last night...
Posted October 26, 2005 1:33 PM
Not everything, but a little something to get the day going... ♦ Chief Bratton says he'd like to stay around for a second term, starting in 2007. ♦ City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo...
Posted October 26, 2005 2:20 AM
General Zod's campaign platform: When I first came to your planet and demanded your homes, property and very lives, I didn't know you were already doing so, willingly, with your...
Posted October 25, 2005 4:59 PM
The LA Weekly has embraced Fashion Week in a big way. On the website there's a busy blog of items from the shows and parties by Linda Immediato, Caroline Ryder,...
Posted October 19, 2005 5:54 PM
Just hours after I posted below about the OC Register's Lakers blog, the Times sends a news release about the launch of a blog following the team on LATimes.com. From...
Posted October 19, 2005 10:59 AM
♦ Variety is ending the VLife experiment. Last issue is Feb. 1. I believe Mike at FishbowlLA was first up with the news. ♦ Daily Breeze music writer Corey Levitan announced that...
Posted October 16, 2005 8:30 PM
Angels fans are bananas over the strange call by umpire Doug Eddings that gave the White Sox an extra out to win last night's game. If you missed it, the...
Posted October 13, 2005 3:58 PM
♦ Robert Iger and Steve Jobs make nice, and will start making ABC shows available on the new video Ipod. ♦ Add a new pro to the ranks of local bloggers about...
Posted October 13, 2005 2:15 AM
Oops, sorry about the day (the headline said 'Wednesday' for the first nine hours or so. We think ahead around here...) ♦ Whispers in the wind say that Times editor Dean...
Posted October 11, 2005 1:47 AM
Since Columbus Day is not one of our two dozen company-paid holidays here at LAObserved LLC... ♦ The Supreme Court hears oral arguments this week in Garcetti v. Ceballos, the case...
Posted October 10, 2005 1:45 AM
Follow-ups, catch-ups and clearing off the desk for Columbus Day... ♦ Sunday's L.A. Times fronts a Steve Lopez column about his violin-playing street person, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, taking in the stage...
Posted October 9, 2005 1:15 PM
President Bush said yesterday said that a serious terrorist threat to the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles (now called US Bank tower) was thwarted sometime since 9/11. Just how serious...
Posted October 7, 2005 10:29 AM
♦ Mayor Villaraigosa nearly filled the Tom Bradley Room on the top of the City Hall tower with media there to hear him recite the accomplishments of his first 98 days...
Posted October 7, 2005 2:58 AM
Weblogs Inc., the collection of 85 blogs and about fifteen full-time employees started two years ago by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, has been bought by AOL, PaidContent.org reported last...
Posted October 6, 2005 10:07 AM
♦ Marc Weingarten reports in today's New York Times on a bitter lawsuit here in L.A. between singer Leonard Cohen and the manager he says looted millions from his accounts while...
Posted October 6, 2005 1:54 AM
Kim Day got the offer she couldn't refuse to leave as head of LAX personally from Mayor Villaraigosa's in-house counsel Thomas Saenz and deputy chief of staff Marcus Allen, according...
Posted October 1, 2005 10:43 PM
♦ Tempers flared during the ten hours the city council locked itself in to finally select Gerry Miller as the CLA to replace Ron Deaton, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily...
Posted September 29, 2005 2:14 AM
In that blog poll about George Bush being conducted by Professor Bainbridge, "he's drinking again" has pulled way ahead. Here's yesterday's setup....
Posted September 28, 2005 10:53 AM
In today's New York Observer, Bruce Feirstein attempts to help Gothamites understand why on his block in upscale, literate Democratic-voting Hancock Park, only three of twenty homes get the Pulitzer-winning...
Posted September 28, 2005 1:35 AM
UCLA Law scholar and well-read local blogger Professor Bainbridge is running a reader poll titled "What's up with Bush?" George Bush has always elicited divergent views, but lately some of...
Posted September 27, 2005 3:23 PM
Matt Szabo has been in the campaign trenches as a communications guy with Bob Hertzberg and others. He blogs today that Arnold Schwarzenegger's standing ovation last night on Jay Leno...
Posted September 27, 2005 3:11 PM
♦ St. Vincent's did a liver transplant on a Saudi national who was #52 on the waiting list, collecting $339,000 from the Saudi Arabian embassy and screwing a patient at UCLA...
Posted September 27, 2005 1:26 AM
Pajamas Media has scheduled Nov. 16 as launch day in New York for its right-leaning (but perhaps not entirely) blog news service and advertising combine. The leaders are high-traffic political...
Posted September 26, 2005 11:55 PM
Claude Brodesser did indeed join FishbowlLA this morning, as reported last week. The former Variety reporter looks like a nice addition to the lineup. He will help out regular fisheye...
Posted September 26, 2005 10:39 AM
♦ Rachel Uranga reports in the Daily News on the phenomenon of L.A. immigrants skipping English to learn whatever is spoken in their neighborhood: "Peruvian immigrant Miguel Aliaga always knew that...
Posted September 26, 2005 1:34 AM
US Weekly's WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE NEWS BULLETIN on the wedding of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher runs three paragraphs and carries eight credit lines for "exclusive reporting." People confirms the news...
Posted September 25, 2005 6:22 PM
Light day on the blog. I'll be at USC judging the Online News Association awards for this year. ♦ I know a true con man never stops conning, but this is...
Posted September 23, 2005 1:14 AM
Joe Scott blogs today about the Warren Beatty-for-governor rumors, which are being fed by the actor's political speeches around the state. Beatty told ABC last week that he won't rule...
Posted September 22, 2005 12:05 PM
Elizabeth Spiers, editor in chief of mediabistro, emails that Claude Brodesser will not be starting a new blog for them. She says Brodesser will begin guest-blogging about film and entertainment...
Posted September 21, 2005 12:48 PM
Happy Wednesday... ♦ DWP workers got the big raises they were demanding: up to 28% over five years. The Council voted 10-3 to go along. DN, LAT ♦ Bill Burke withdraws from...
Posted September 21, 2005 12:55 AM
A sampling of starters for the day... ♦ Simon Wiesenthal died in Vienna at age 96, the center on Pico Boulevard announced. Standing ovations in every temple in L.A. on Friday...
Posted September 20, 2005 1:54 AM
"The Los Angeles Lunar Society advocates the secession of Venice from the city of Los Angeles, and does not preclude the use of revolution to achieve this end. However, many...
Posted September 18, 2005 1:20 PM
• Looks like Gov. Schwarzenegger announces Friday that he will run for reelection, the Times says. Also, La Opinión says its reporter was denied entry to the governor's recent community meeting...
Posted September 15, 2005 1:26 AM
• Expect an announcement today from Times publisher Jeff Johnson that Michael Kinsley has been formally replaced as Editorial and Opinion Editor. The editorial page, Op-Ed and Current will report to...
Posted September 13, 2005 2:58 AM
Mark Treitel, one of the writers chosen to shoot an NBC pilot for the Bravo reality show Situation: Comedy, guest-blogs about it all today at Breakfast at Tiffany's. Right now...
Posted September 9, 2005 11:48 AM
Posting will be light today... • Mayor Villaraigosa safaris out to Tujunga this morning to unveil his appointees to the Fire Commission. If you don't know where that is, well, it's...
Posted September 9, 2005 12:58 AM
Good morning, everybody. Here are some observettes... • Gov. Schwarzenegger says through an aide that he will veto the gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature, citing the earlier vote of...
Posted September 8, 2005 1:18 AM
Local website Cinemocracy has redesigned and launched a cool new service: video-on-demand of selected classic (or at least old) "politically relevant" films, free of charge in MPEG2 format. The first...
Posted September 7, 2005 5:07 PM
• Screenwriter Tom Benedek shoots his own unproduced scripts—literally, with a .45-caliber pistol—and mounts them as art. His exhibition "Shot by the Writer - Works on Paper: 1982-2004" opens this month...
Posted September 7, 2005 2:15 AM
Summer isn't really over, it just feels that way. • Some Katrina links: Los Angeles blacks feel New Orleans' pain...LAist found a server at Swingers who did her part... la.foodblogging on...
Posted September 6, 2005 2:45 AM
Laura lost her battle with cancer on Saturday night. Her sister Celia blogs about her loss with love and a heavy heart at 5th and Spring. I never met Laura...
Posted September 5, 2005 11:47 AM
Some appetizers: • Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly and the Nation will be the guest host on KCRW's Left, Right and Center, today at 2:30 and 7 p.m. It's his...
Posted September 2, 2005 1:04 AM
The political blog Mayor Sam's Sister City is not anonymous any longer. Two of the ring-leaders came out of the closet in a post today, after the Times asked them...
Posted September 1, 2005 6:22 PM
Colleen Wainwright reports at Blogging.la that an L.A. Times circulation clerk offered her a lower price to take the paper for more days, if only she would not switch to...
Posted August 31, 2005 5:51 PM
I just caught up with the new blog of screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, Black Dahlia), and now I can't get any work done. He calls it I...
Posted August 31, 2005 4:02 PM
A little morning briefing... • Brian Cullen, the suspected killer of model Iryna Singerman, was found dead in a Tijuana motel room. Authorities say he killed himself with a bullet to...
Posted August 31, 2005 2:18 AM
• KCAL and KTTV each won nine local Emmy Awards on Saturday night. Among the top honors, KCBS won for best daytime newscast ("CBS2 News" at 6 a.m.) and best daily...
Posted August 29, 2005 1:22 AM
Tim Rutten's Saturday column in the LAT, nominally about the declining audience for Republican radio, posits that "While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers claim to have a quarrel...
Posted August 27, 2005 12:40 AM
• Jill Murphy, the Getty's 33-year-old chief of staff with no art background, is leaving and apparently won't be missed. Her mentor since college at Cal State Sacramento, Barry Munitz, concedes...
Posted August 26, 2005 2:12 AM
The 1947Project, the creative blog trip through a year in L.A. crime culture by Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak, has thrown in with Rodger Jacobs' 8763 Wonderland to jointly bring...
Posted August 22, 2005 11:40 PM
Brian Flemming is back in the news—at least in the L.A. Times—with a "Beliefs" page feature on his new hour-long documentary questioning the existence of Jesus Christ. The God Who...
Posted August 20, 2005 11:25 AM
Mack Reed has gotten his blog back online. LAVoice.org....
Posted August 17, 2005 11:30 AM
The community blog run by Mack Reed is still offline this morning grappling with a hacker attack. It looks like Mack has finally been table to take down the page...
Posted August 17, 2005 9:52 AM
Some anonymous jerks keep hacking Mack Reed's blog LAVoice.org. He's offline now (except for RSS feeds, which are getting through), and may be for awhile. He's asking for help from...
Posted August 16, 2005 10:12 PM
I've posted before about Laura, who blogs about her tribulations with oropharyngeal cancer at Kevin's Dead Cat. The intro banner there now reads: "After surgery sliced off an entire tumor...
Posted August 16, 2005 6:21 PM
Longtime local conservative blogger Xrlq posts that he has been summarily banned from posting comments at Hit and Run, the blog of (loosely) Los Angeles-based Reason magazine. Spotted at Patterico's...
Posted August 15, 2005 1:12 AM
* Newest at the bottom • Will Campbell blogs revealingly about the anticipation of meeting his estranged 15-year-daughter for the first time in five years. She happened to pick a Chili's...
Posted August 14, 2005 12:54 PM
Hollywood's sound stages and location crews are swamped these days. At her blog Totally Unauthorized, Peggy Archer regularly posts about what it's like from the working stiff vantage point. In...
Posted August 12, 2005 2:29 PM
Mack Reed's website LAVoice.org already stood apart among local blogs as a place that welcomes disparate voices to have their say about whatever is on their minds. He writes more...
Posted August 10, 2005 11:41 AM
Still catching up to the backlog... • CityBeat's current "Real. Best. LA" theme issue is the largest yet at 108 pages. Fun tidbits include the revelation that some King Tut treasures...
Posted August 9, 2005 1:41 AM
Both LA.com and Defamer got some credit in Sunday's New York Times Travel section for shining light on the excessive celebrity-and-hipster sucking-up going on at the Hollywood Roosevelt. It's a...
Posted August 8, 2005 1:41 AM
Defamer's Mark Lisanti is "the newest and hottest foot soldier on the front lines of the celebrity takeover of modern culture," Rachel Abramowitz writes in Sunday's LAT. "He's the witty...
Posted July 31, 2005 1:51 AM
Getting an early start on the weekend. It is summer, you know—and I've already posted ten times today. As new shorts are added, they will be appended to the bottom....
Posted July 29, 2005 5:19 PM
Downtown blogger Eric Richardson doesn't much care for the editorial "we" style used by the folks who write and edit LAist and the other Gothamist websites. So he created an...
Posted July 29, 2005 10:33 AM
* Newer shorties at the end... • Big cover story on "self-described Jewish hustler" Dov Charney and his views of sex with underlings in the new Jewish Journal. The boss of...
Posted July 28, 2005 1:29 AM
L.A. Observed is one of the Los Angeles-based blogs named in Forbes.com's Best of the Web. The other locals are The Elegant Variation for literary blogs, Metroblogging in the city...
Posted July 26, 2005 3:46 PM
It will start up in the next few months and likely focus on local politics, an exec of the L.A. Newspaper Group tells James Nash in the L.A. Business Journal...
Posted July 24, 2005 6:52 PM
The Blogometer, the new-ish daily roundup of the political blogosphere from the folks at The Hotline, puts its "blogger spotlight" on the LA Weekly's and The Nation's Marc Cooper. When...
Posted July 20, 2005 2:22 AM
Summer is a time for guest bloggers, and at Kevin Drum's Political Animal (written in SoCal but affiliated with Washington Monthly), L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is taking a whirl...
Posted July 19, 2005 1:39 PM
• The Daily News lost Sports Editor Michael Anastasi to the Salt Lake Tribune not too long ago and now is losing another his successor. Doug Jacobs is leaving to be...
Posted July 18, 2005 4:15 PM
The Hollywood manager and the blogger have been going at it since at least 2002, when Ford profiled Wald on his website. Ford then posted the transcripts of Wald's angry...
Posted July 18, 2005 3:51 AM
• American Media CEO David Pecker confirms in the New York Times that part of the controversial magazine deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger was that the tabloids would lay off when he...
Posted July 18, 2005 3:47 AM
If you're coming to L.A. this summer, you probably don't want to stay at the new Hollywood Roosevelt....
Posted July 11, 2005 1:30 PM
Hollywood freelancer (for the New York Times and others) Ross Johnson has fallen into the blogging web. And for his first meaty entry at The Ross Files, he names names...
Posted June 23, 2005 10:23 AM
Luke Ford reports at his blog that Andrew Breitbart, the West Coast editor for the Drudge Report until he left in April to help launch the Huffington Post, returned to...
Posted June 22, 2005 11:27 PM
FishbowlLA turns sleuth and checks on the cred of a semi-anonymous trendy mentioned in last Thursday's New York Times Styles section. The trail leads, possibly, to Alexandra Kerry. Fishbowl also...
Posted June 21, 2005 12:40 PM
Mondays are always so busy... • This news won't help the layoff jitters sweeping the LAT's newsrooms this week. Tribune Company stock was downgraded Monday to "neutral" from "buy" by brokerage...
Posted June 20, 2005 8:08 PM
Tyler Green, reviewer for Bloomberg News and the blogger at Modern Art Notes, lives on the East Coast but keeps up on museums out here. He has posted scoops on...
Posted June 17, 2005 10:57 PM
• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect until July 1, of course....
Posted June 17, 2005 2:11 AM
• Times feature writer Roy Rivenburg is going legit, transferring to the Metro staff in Orange County. Writes Style editor Rich Nordwind, in a memo to the staff today: "The O.C....
Posted June 14, 2005 5:40 PM
* Never fails. Something new comes in every time I post one of these shorts lists. Fresh shorties at the bottom. • The Times live-blogged the runup to the Michael Jackson...
Posted June 13, 2005 3:59 PM
Readers of Mickey Kaus's blog at Slate know he's no fan of the local paper, but the Times really got him going this week. On Wednesday he blasted the LAT's...
Posted June 11, 2005 11:54 PM
Over at the Huffington Post, former L.A. television news anchor (now actress, production exec and blogger) Bree Walker takes a shot at ex-husband (and likewise ex-anchor) Jim Lampley. Maybe. It...
Posted June 5, 2005 12:37 AM
An evolving post, with the newest items at the bottom: • If true, this will open up some movement in local politics. According to email from a senior staffer at City...
Posted June 4, 2005 5:08 PM
• Bob Hertzberg, chairman of the Villaraigosa transition team, will be on KPCC's Talk of the City Friday at 2 p.m. with guest host Jon Beaupre. • Mayor-elect Villaraigosa has signed on...
Posted June 2, 2005 5:55 PM
• Sean Bonner at blogging.la discovers a parking meter scam run by street people in the toy district downtown. • Tim McGarry, a frequent commenter on L.A. blogs (and here when I...
Posted May 31, 2005 11:43 PM
Ever heard of Angelo Mozilo? He is chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., and king of the L.A. Business Journal's list of highest-paid local executives. His take last year:...
Posted May 31, 2005 1:18 AM
Here are some items from the week. Posting over the weekend will be sporadic at best. • Los Angeles magazine celebrated this month's comedy issue last night with drinks, schmoozing and...
Posted May 27, 2005 6:36 PM
Laura at Kevin's Dead Cat has lost a third of her tongue and undergone surgery and radiation. Last week she had a second tracheostomy (announced by her new husband), but...
Posted May 25, 2005 10:52 AM
In addition to editor Katrina Dewey, whose resignation letter was posted on L.A. Observed last Friday, four other veteran staffers are about to leave the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Melissa...
Posted May 24, 2005 12:51 AM
Last week the Ventura County Star got some press for shutting down the increasingly nasty comments being posted by the public on the paper's news blog. The L.A. Times followed...
Posted May 23, 2005 4:01 PM
First, from the swirl of politics. Newsweek puts Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover of Monday's issue, using his landslide election as the peg for a story about Latino power. An...
Posted May 23, 2005 1:40 AM
It's kind of rough and thin on compelling content, but at least LATimes.com is trying some new stuff. Snapshots from Election Day have been posted so far from four separate...
Posted May 17, 2005 3:20 PM
• Pierce College out in Woodland Hills is offering a course this summer that could be the answer to high gas prices. Fundamentals of Mule Driving, also known as Equine...
Posted May 10, 2005 8:38 PM
* Fresh items are at the bottom, as usual... • This is anniversary week (the second) for L.A. Observed, a fact that the Downtown News dug up and turned into a...
Posted May 9, 2005 1:00 PM
The first day of the Huffington Post offers blog items from Laurie David, Michael Isikoff, David Frum, David Mamet, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, Mike Nichols and the husband-and-wife team of...
Posted May 9, 2005 8:04 AM
• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if Monday's launch of the Huffington...
Posted May 6, 2005 2:27 PM
• Friday's City Council meeting was cancelled so those who wish can attend the funeral of slain LAX police officer Tommy Scott. Why do I expect it will be a mayoral...
Posted May 5, 2005 8:20 PM
• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. He left KABC in...
Posted May 4, 2005 10:39 PM
One of the assumptions skeptics seem to have made about the Huffington Post is that the celebrity contributors will, inevitably, use their assistants, advisers and agents to polish or even...
Posted May 4, 2005 1:12 PM
Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca, the Daily Journal says...The Times...
Posted May 1, 2005 7:42 PM
• Zankou Chicken in Glendale was vandalized with red paint after the owner chose to stay open last Sunday, the day commemorating the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey...
Posted April 29, 2005 4:34 PM
Andrew Breitbart's career shift from the Drudge Report to a key role with the upcoming Huffington Report must be so surprising in his circle that he has issued a statement,...
Posted April 27, 2005 12:12 AM
The cover of Business Week's May 2 issue advises the corporate (and media) world that their customers and competitors are figuring out where blogs fit in, so they better jump...
Posted April 26, 2005 10:03 AM
Long but terser-than-usual roundup, due to a books-filled weekend away from the computer. It was great to chat with old friends, new readers, media people and bloggers and to hear...
Posted April 24, 2005 8:32 PM
The exact form that will fit with journalism standards is still being discussed, says San Francisco Chronicle managing editor Robert Rosenthal, but the paper will launch some kind of blogs...
Posted April 22, 2005 3:01 PM
Councilman Eric Garcetti uses his blog mostly to keep the 13th district informed about local happenings. This week there are items on a visit by Gen. Tommy Franks and a...
Posted April 21, 2005 11:36 PM
Marc Cooper reviews the pricey new field level seats at Dodger Stadium and finds them, as I suspected, not worth $100 — or even $10 — if you like to...
Posted April 21, 2005 1:06 AM
Kim at the 1947 Project observes that "for as long as there’s been a highway into the hills, young lovers have gone up into Angeles National Forest on Saturday nights...
Posted April 20, 2005 11:11 PM
Alex Ben Block, the editor of Television Week and former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, will be on Larry Mantle's Airtalk tomorrow at 11 a.m. on KPCC to talk about...
Posted April 20, 2005 11:54 AM
FishbowlLA threw its Mediabistro-sponsored launch party tonight at Pearl in West Hollywood. The blog's Michael Sonnenschein posted his thanks at 10:40 p.m., apologizing for some "rough patches" and passing along...
Posted April 18, 2005 11:59 PM
Her intentions are not quite as grand in scale as Walking in L.A., but mixed-media artist Lisa Salem says she will leave her Echo Park home in May and walk...
Posted April 18, 2005 9:00 AM
The Bear Flag League, an association of eighty California bloggers, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that case up north where Apple is demanding that a website identify its sources...
Posted April 15, 2005 10:30 AM
Free tickets to hear panels at this month's L.A. Times Festival of Books can be grabbed on Ticketmaster starting at noon Sunday. Authors who will be speaking include Madeleine Albright,...
Posted April 14, 2005 11:57 PM
Longtime ESPN baseball columnist Peter Gammons lifted a few lines Wednesday from a Steve Henson piece in the L.A. Times about Dodgers centerfielder-slash-reformed head case (and potential team leader?) Milton...
Posted April 14, 2005 1:05 PM
Couldn't find any fresh media mentions of Xeni Jardin today, but there are these things to know (updated at the bottom): • Local websites nominated for Webby awards from the International...
Posted April 13, 2005 11:31 AM
Not exactly, but Mark Glaser at USC's Online Journalism Review delves into the subject of how commercial blogs like Defamer and Wonkette pay their writers, and finds that the money...
Posted April 13, 2005 7:19 AM
• Tracks magazine has gone on hiatus after a little more than a year, while management pursues "new financing support with the goal of relaunching the magazine in the future." • The...
Posted April 10, 2005 11:58 PM
Sean Bonner's item a couple of days ago at Blogging.la about Star Wars nerds lining up at Grauman's Chinese Theatre — the movie isn't scheduled to screen there, but they...
Posted April 8, 2005 12:57 AM
• Denise Hamilton's newest Eve Diamond novel, Savage Garden, hits the shelves on May 3. There's a Jayson Blair-like subplot swirling around our favorite fictional LAT reporter. • Tim Brown, the LAT's...
Posted April 6, 2005 4:04 PM
Gawker today is launching a new blog, Sploid.com, that will try to push into the Drudge Report's news space with a British tabloid style and politics "between the whiny left...
Posted April 6, 2005 1:23 AM
You may be hearing that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is going to vote on an ordinance that would require election bloggers to register and report expenses, as if...
Posted April 4, 2005 4:31 PM
It's Pulitzer showdown day between the Times and OC Register: both have series up for the Public Service medal. The prizes start posting at noon L.A. time. Also: Some new,...
Posted April 4, 2005 2:39 AM
Drex Heikes, recently replaced as editor of the LAT Magazine [actually, he was doing the #1 job from the #2 slot, with the top editor job vacant], becomes deputy editor...
Posted March 29, 2005 9:14 PM
The Defamer item below reminded me it's been a year since I checked in on the popularity rankings of local blogs. On Technorati.com's Top 100, which ranks based on how...
Posted March 27, 2005 12:48 AM
Mark Lisanti and Defamer get nice front-page treatment in the new L.A. Business Journal. The story goes into Lisanti's background and blogging ethos—"he tries to distinguish between credible information and...
Posted March 26, 2005 11:18 PM
LAist's Josh Strike says that ex-mayor and current education secretary Richard Riordan was humbled yesterday at LAX. With about 500 people in the security line at Terminal One, Riordan tried...
Posted March 25, 2005 3:25 PM
Imagine a blog that does nothing but noirishly count off the days in 1947 Los Angeles, felony by bloody felony. Stabbings, gunshots, suicides, interspersed with photographed visits to the scenes...
Posted March 23, 2005 11:12 PM
Catching up with some reading and email after a slow online day: • Venice gets the 36 Hours treatment in Friday's NYT Escapes. Janelle Brown has the gig and visits the...
Posted March 18, 2005 12:45 AM
Some local blogs were honored with 2005 Bloggy Awards announced this afternoon at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. Boing Boing won for weblog of the year and...
Posted March 14, 2005 2:10 PM
Updated occasionally, newest at the bottom. • Bob Hertzberg tells the Daily News he's undecided about what the future holds for him. • That Friday Times piece on Estrich v. Kinsley is...
Posted March 13, 2005 1:17 PM
Catching up on my reading: • LA.com catches Susan Estrich un-wowing at the William S. Paley Television Festival. On her website, Estrich sort-of apologizes for bringing up Michael Kinsley's health in...
Posted March 10, 2005 3:35 PM
Let the Oscar speeches begin. Updated from time to time, newest at the bottom: Sharon Waxman: Jon Friedman at CBS Marketwatch participates in the Sharon Waxman book tour. Interview excerpt:...
Posted February 25, 2005 3:50 PM
Remember my post on Tuesday about blogger Steve Smith's grandmother and her broken ankle? Brian Humphrey, the blogging public information officer for the L.A. Fire Department, visited Smith's site, read...
Posted February 24, 2005 10:26 PM
Hilary Kaplan of the website The Next American City sits down with D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and the new Where We Are Now: Notes from...
Posted February 23, 2005 2:18 AM
Who knew that blogger Mickey Kaus' call for the L.A. Times to run more gossip about the private lives of politicians would have such legs. First John Carroll used the...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:53 AM
Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law professor and columnist Susan Estrich...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:03 AM
As expected, the name of Carlos Vignali has surfaced in the mayoral race. But this time it came from Bernard Parks, who charged that Jim Hahn's TV spots about Vignali...
Posted February 13, 2005 2:36 PM
The Sunday Opinion feature "Outside the Tent" seems in love with bloggers as the critics of the Times that count. Today it's Patterico's turn. Writing as Patrick Frey, he argues...
Posted February 13, 2005 1:22 PM
Updated through the weekend Lesbian chic: Screenwriter and "L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken is profiled in Sunday's NYT Arts section. "In 1999, after writing a magazine article about same-sex couples...
Posted February 6, 2005 12:58 PM
Finishing off Monday's queue and looking into Tuesday: • LA.comfidential takes a look at the pro-Bush, anti-Hollywood billboards that Citizens United is buying near the Kodak Theatre in time for the...
Posted January 31, 2005 11:33 PM
Mack Reed's site is temporarily down and he sends this word: A public announcement to LAVoice users: The site has been moved to the new host, but the database isn't...
Posted January 31, 2005 6:18 PM
Mediabistro is striking off in a new direction with media gossip blogs focused on New York, Los Angeles and Washington. Fishbowl LA launched officially today, written by Michael Sonnenschein, a...
Posted January 31, 2005 4:46 PM
L.A. Observed reported back in September that the Times had promoted Tim Rutten to the new post of Associate Editor of Features and gave him authority over the Sunday Book...
Posted January 31, 2005 2:39 PM
The Los Angeles Press Club has established an entry for weblogs in the online category of its journalism awards this year. Here is the entire category, from the entry form...
Posted January 31, 2005 12:33 AM
LA.Comfidential has an item about Luna Park, the restaurant on the ground floor of the Wilson Building at Wilshire and La Brea, claiming that its C grade from county health...
Posted January 27, 2005 11:08 PM
Walking in L.A. took a stroll this month along, over and in the Los Angeles River in Burbank and Glendale. He has put up a batch of photos and...
Posted January 27, 2005 2:06 AM
There seem to be two leading schools of opinion about Michael Kinsley's impact on the Times as a voice of Los Angeles. One group believes that in striving to be...
Posted January 25, 2005 1:25 AM
Scanning the Sunday Opinion section yesterday, I completely missed that Hugh Hewitt wrote the second installment of the Times' new commentary spot, "Outside the Tent." That's where the editors intend...
Posted January 24, 2005 11:08 PM
What is it with City Hall and websites that encourage people with gripes to vent anonymously without standing behind their assertions? Yet another new anonymous site, Blog City Hall, has...
Posted January 24, 2005 2:20 PM
• The L.A. Times has an obit today on Marcus Arnold, who rocketed to Internet stardom as a 15-year-old legal expert on AskMe.com. Turns out Arnold died back on May 1,...
Posted January 13, 2005 1:54 AM
Short items for a new week: WeHo mayor: BoifromTroy comments on West Hollywood mayor John Duran buying a share of Frontiers, which bills itself as "California's gay biweekly." Hewitt book:...
Posted January 10, 2005 2:59 PM
Sean Bonner at blogging.la has a beef with the County Museum of Art. He says the museum put a firewall on its computer system that blocks staff members from reading...
Posted January 4, 2005 11:20 AM
A roundup of items in the news: Prostate cancer: Channel 7 weatherman Dallas Raines disclosed his disease on the air and underwent surgery today. The station website has video of...
Posted January 3, 2005 10:06 PM
L.A. blogger Patterico has split his annual year-end rant from the political right about the Los Angeles Times into two installments. Part one finds liberal bias rampant in the paper's...
Posted January 3, 2005 9:39 PM
The actress donated $1 million to the American Red Cross for tsunami relief efforts in Asia and Africa. She had previously sent a million to the Red Cross after the...
Posted January 3, 2005 4:14 PM
Both Monday political notes columns glance at Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign website, which was relaunched last week. Rick Orlov in the DN says that Villaraigosa is borrowing from the Hertzberg play...
Posted January 3, 2005 1:58 AM
Posting will be light through New Year's Day. But I will probably add a few notes here during the coming week, with the freshest at the bottom. See you all...
Posted December 24, 2004 11:18 AM
The Los Angeles Fire Department's media relations staff has started a blog with releases on incidents in the city. It went up yesterday and reports on four structure fires. There's...
Posted December 22, 2004 12:17 PM
LAVoice.org has competition for its series keeping tabs on the web presence of the five top candidates for mayor. In the Downtown News, Jon Regardie submits their websites to expert...
Posted December 19, 2004 10:12 PM
On her blog, radio personality and voice actor April Winchell has posted an MP3 file of an on-air tiff (audio she wants you to listen to it from her blog,...
Posted December 14, 2004 9:10 PM
The link to the Third Floor View blog from inside the L.A. Times goes this morning to a "not found" error page. There's no indication whether the blogger is giving...
Posted December 14, 2004 10:00 AM
Joe Scott wrote a notes column called "The Body Politic" that ran on page two of the Herald Examiner during the 1980s. It was a must-read for politics junkies. Before...
Posted December 14, 2004 2:08 AM
Upstate in San Jose, the Mercury's longtime technology writer, Dan Gillmor, is leaving the paper to start up a "citizen journalism" venture. Here's the Mercury's announcement and Gillmor's short-on-details blog...
Posted December 10, 2004 10:40 AM
The website LA.com has been based on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, somewhat close to the trendy shops, clubs and restaurants that its writers frequent. But this week, they and their...
Posted December 8, 2004 9:06 AM
Regular readers of New York's Gawker and its L.A. spinoff Defamer may have noticed a certain fascination with gossip about teenager Lindsay Lohan on both blogs (and with her nipples...
Posted December 7, 2004 9:41 AM
* Updated all weekend, newest posts at the bottom • A new (to me) blog of L.A. street photography: The Streets are Alive, by Nitsa of Streets of Los Angeles, where...
Posted December 4, 2004 9:48 PM
Eric Spiegelman at Cinemocracy treks to the wilderness of Beverly Hills—"or, as I usually refer to it, across the street"—to check out the odd monument to film celebrities that rises...
Posted December 2, 2004 4:52 PM
Ken Reich reported for the L.A. Times for 39 years until last spring, when he was allowed to retire after bullying a newsroom aide. Now he has started a blog...
Posted December 2, 2004 11:01 AM
Xeni Jardin posts at Boing Boing that the old-fashioned paper blog is a "handwritten journal attributed to a woman who lived in Boston in 1878. It's filled with talk of...
Posted December 1, 2004 1:40 PM
Editor Laurie Pike of LA.com writes that the city guide site is rolling out a second blog, Clothes Hoarse. The underline: "What's Worn. What's Scorned." The first several items mention...
Posted November 30, 2004 10:19 PM
* Updated through the day • Mark Schubb reads the LAT website closer than most, and finds another case of promotional copy for a car dealer being posted as a news...
Posted November 19, 2004 12:18 PM
Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum calls on Michael Kinsley to stop publishing conservative pundit John Lott on the Times op-ed page. The man is a fraud and the Times demeans...
Posted November 16, 2004 9:28 PM
• Remember that MVP buzz around the Dodgers' Adrian Beltre? Didn't happen. The amazing Barry Bonds won his seventh trophy (no one else has more than three) and became the oldest...
Posted November 15, 2004 6:30 PM
The Online News Association conference began at Hollywood and Highland yesterday and wraps tonight with presentation of the awards I helped judge a few weeks back. There's a substantial barrier...
Posted November 13, 2004 5:09 PM
A national Gallup Poll of people who don't live in Los Angeles—and by the looks of it have never visited—rates L.A. as the third most unsafe big city in America....
Posted November 13, 2004 1:01 PM
Janelle Brown gives downtown the 36 Hours treatment in today's New York Times Escapes section. Chinatown galleries, dinner at Ciudad, Saturday morning at the flower market, a walking tour with...
Posted November 12, 2004 10:25 AM
The Times reports today on that mini Internet dustup about tanks supposedly intimidating demonstrators at Tuesday's Westwood protest. The cops agree that, as already pointed out here and elsewhere, the...
Posted November 12, 2004 10:16 AM
Who didn't see this divorce coming? The left-leaning weekly apparently cut conservative columnist Cathy Seipp's freelance rate and asked that her local media pieces stop being rewrites of her blog....
Posted November 10, 2004 1:04 PM
During today's hostage situation at the Mexican consulate near MacArthur Park, Brian Flemming shot video of the SWAT team moving in from his apartment. On his blog he describes dealing...
Posted November 9, 2004 8:47 PM
Dutton's warns anyone who comes to see Tom Wolfe at the Brentwood store next Monday that the author has laid down a few ground rules. Violate them and, I guess,...
Posted November 9, 2004 3:27 PM
The LAPD press room at Parker Center is named for Norman "Jake" Jacoby, who reported on the cop beat from 1935 to 1991 for City News Service, the Los Angeles...
Posted November 8, 2004 10:12 PM
Lloyd Grove, the New York Daily News gossiper, reported this morning (followed by an LA.com item) that the December issue of Esquire will unmask the anonymous blogger Defamer as Mark...
Posted November 4, 2004 11:46 AM
Regarding that pledge of blue-red civility and support for the president that blogger Jeff Jarvis made over the weekend, Reason magazine's Matt Welch dissents on his personal blog: To split...
Posted November 4, 2004 10:14 AM
If you want to read blog accounts of other people's experiences at the polls today (long lines, fairly smooth procedures), they are up at LAVoice, Blogging.la, Defamer, LAist, BoifromTroy, Franklin...
Posted November 2, 2004 11:46 AM
High profile New York blogger Jeff Jarvis, reacting to the last wave of "spit and bile and venom" from ultra-partisans as the presidential campaign comes to a close, posts this...
Posted November 1, 2004 2:55 PM
The late Richard Avedon's portraits of the election season run for 32 pages in this week's New Yorker. They are great. A slide show can be entered at this page,...
Posted October 28, 2004 9:53 PM
It's been awhile since I checked in on Variety's experiment with free weblogs outside the trade's online subscriber wall. The newest, called Stylephile (spotted at Franklin Avenue), is about shopping...
Posted October 27, 2004 11:37 AM
Metrofeed LA is a new website that does nothing but use RSS to pull together postings from various Los Angeles-centric blogs that actually "create content," as the techies say. Today's...
Posted October 25, 2004 11:44 AM
Both LA.com and LAist have items today announcing that Madame Wu's has closed in the Grove and will be replaced soon with a Cheesecake Factory. The latter blog likes CF...
Posted October 21, 2004 2:42 PM
The blog Nick Nolte's Diary isn't by the actor, and he's pissed. E! Online News reports that aspiring screenwriters Christian Newton and Casey McAdams came up with the site. They...
Posted October 21, 2004 1:36 PM
The anonymous City Hall blogger has decided the job risk isn't worth it. After some lengthy discussions, and a few cocktails, it has been decided that the now infamous blog...
Posted October 21, 2004 10:14 AM
Councilman Bernard Parks let the 4th Floor know by email tonight that he was not pleased with a recent item. After dishing out some (gratuitous to me) insults, Parks concluded...
Posted October 20, 2004 11:47 PM
• Will Campbell at blogging.la called out councilman Eric Garcetti in a Monday morning post that complained about getting no answer to his plea for help to clean up a homeless...
Posted October 19, 2004 12:37 AM
The Editor-in-chief of LA.com is the subject of today's LAist Interview by Jessica Ritz. 9. What's your favorite LA-based movie or TV show? Mildred Pierce. LA is all about reinvention,...
Posted October 18, 2004 1:40 PM
He says that journals are for sissies but Hemingway kept a diary, so that's what his website is called. He writes about being at home in Malibu and getting into...
Posted October 13, 2004 1:16 PM
Gawker Media's troubles staying online Tuesday (affecting the blogs Defamer, Gawker, Wonkette et al at various points in the day) were due to a credit card snafu at Network Solutions....
Posted October 13, 2004 12:24 AM
• John Gabree, the author and former Newsday book reviewer who created Santa Monica's late L.A. (The Bookstore), writes a wide-ranging blog that he calls Impractical Proposals. He noted yesterday that...
Posted October 12, 2004 11:58 PM
LAist, one of the local New York-owned city blog offshoots, has found a new way to generate buzz about itself. Publisher Jake Dobkin (Gothamist) posted a chart showing LAist has...
Posted October 11, 2004 11:42 AM
I only caught the end of their exchange on Friday, but it didn't sound like the new guy on KCRW's "Left, Right and Center" panel was playing nice with station...
Posted October 11, 2004 1:30 AM
Xeni Jardin reports at Boing Boing on the return to the web of writer-about-sex Susannah Breslin. Her new website, The Invisible Cowgirl, offers an excerpt of her forthcoming semi-autobiographical novel...
Posted October 7, 2004 12:05 PM
Sacramento Bee opinion blogger Dan Weintraub passes along two new polls that pick up a slide in Kerry's lead over Bush among California voters. In one, the Democrat's edge is...
Posted October 5, 2004 10:16 PM
On his other blog, Mack Reed exorcises the pain that devoured his summer. A sample: The most horrible, vicious, ice-pick pain of my life rips slowly across my skull, and...
Posted October 5, 2004 9:47 PM
Analyzed at Cinemocracy: You’ve got a three-act structure (four if you include the vice presidential encounter), recurring characters, and a narrative line driven by the ups and downs of the...
Posted October 5, 2004 10:30 AM
Rick Orlov writes prominently about the City Hall insider blog in today's Daily News. The 4th Floor has yet to disclose much in the way of inside dish, focusing more...
Posted October 4, 2004 2:33 AM
Last week it was Stacey Grenrock Woods, Daily Show wractress and Esquire sex columnist. Today the other guilty party behind L.A. Innuendo, Richard Rushfield, quips his way through Gawker's 5x5...
Posted September 30, 2004 3:45 PM
Even bloggers do those annual lists now. Blogging.la's favorites for 2004, posted today, tend to the Silver Lake-Los Feliz-Melrose side of things, but not rigorously. One contributor even endorses the...
Posted September 30, 2004 1:51 AM
Ana Marie Cox, the Washington, D.C. writer who blogs about politics with a splash of sex as Wonkette, has signed on to be the keynote lunch speaker when the Online...
Posted September 29, 2004 8:56 PM
Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg was first out of the gate with a website, ChangeLA.com, and a blog. The content has not been scintillating, but since the last time I looked...
Posted September 28, 2004 4:16 PM
At 3:30 in West L.A., the bamboo is wilting, the cat is pawing the walls, my wife's sinuses are cooked and the sounds of the city and passing planes are...
Posted September 22, 2004 3:36 PM
Conservative critiques of Robert Scheer are about as newsworthy as a Scheer blast at George Bush or Rush Limbaugh. But Kevin Drum, the SoCal-based house blogger for the Washington Monthly,...
Posted September 22, 2004 1:19 PM
Local bloggers Roger L. Simon, Patterico, Hugh Hewitt and Little Green Footballs have been all over the CBS debacle and receiving varying levels of credit in the blogosphere. Simon, for...
Posted September 21, 2004 1:55 AM
Los Angeles Times Books apparently had one more in-house compilation in the works. Ninety collected columns by the late editor and writer Frank del Olmo have been pulled into a...
Posted September 16, 2004 11:06 PM
The new City Hall blog 4th Floor reprints a terse email from Mayor Jim Hahn reminding staffers who drive city cars to obey parking signs and pay their tickets. It...
Posted September 16, 2004 12:18 PM
Digital media maven Jason Calacanis today pronounces L.A.-based Metro Blogging, founded by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo of Blogging.la, "the largest local blog network in the world." They added Tokyo,...
Posted September 15, 2004 2:31 PM
4th Floor is named for the level in City Hall where all of the elected city council members have their offices. The floor teems with ambitious aides who know what's...
Posted September 14, 2004 9:54 AM
• Architecture: The owner of Santa Monica Place is in quiet talks with the city to raze the Frank Gehry-designed shopping center and build an open-air adjunct to the Third Street...
Posted September 13, 2004 10:43 AM
Jon Weisman's appreciation of the troubled and now late local phenom Willie Crawford continues to bring in comments at Dodger Thoughts. Some samples of the latest: • I also always liked...
Posted September 9, 2004 1:30 PM
KCAL-9 news photographer Bryan Frank blogs about his work and life (with his wife) at beFrank. He gives an interesting glimpse at the unpredictable day of a TV news shooter....
Posted September 9, 2004 12:26 PM
Publishers Marketplace, the site that issues Publishers Lunch, has added blogs to its menu of services to authors and others in the book world. Mark Sarvas of the local literary...
Posted September 9, 2004 10:22 AM
The anti-Bush sign poster who calls himself the Freeway Blogger plans to put up 100 signs over L.A. freeways today "protesting the war in Iraq and the failure to find...
Posted September 7, 2004 11:23 AM
Easterner-turned-Angeleno Ruth Shalit's wedding blurb in the lead spot in last Sunday's New York Times is attracting some blogospheric notice. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott writes, "the recent nuptials of former...
Posted September 7, 2004 10:58 AM
Sure the media (and of course, we bloggers) wrote about them a lot, but Paul Colford writes in the New York Daily News that the anointed convention blogs didn't attract...
Posted September 3, 2004 10:28 AM
Joseph Mailander writes that his anti-Bush blog Martini Republic is getting lots of links and traffic today for reporting that Zell Miller's speech at the Republic convention drew heavily on...
Posted September 2, 2004 11:32 AM
CityBeat columnist Erik Himmelsbach loses his day job and gets in touch with how much he loathes personal blogs. Before I went on forced employment hiatus a few weeks ago,...
Posted September 2, 2004 12:55 AM
Reason's convention blogger Matt Welch catches up with former California AG Dan Lungren and, in a Madison Square Garden stairway, with Pat Buchanan. An excerpt of his encounter with the...
Posted September 1, 2004 12:19 AM
After a night of parties, the Republicans get going today in New York. KCRW's Warren Olney goes on the air from the convention at 1 p.m. with "To The Point"...
Posted August 30, 2004 12:44 PM
Some things to note from while I was gone: • Larry McCormick: The co-anchor of the KTLA "News at Ten Weekend Edition" began at channel 5 as a weatherman in 1971....
Posted August 30, 2004 12:37 AM
Lee Watters tried to register for CalendarLive. It didn't go well. He emails: I registered. They sent me the confirmation email. I logged in. They sent me to the screen...
Posted August 9, 2004 4:18 PM
Choire Sicha of Gawker.com is being promoted with the title of Editorial Director of all the websites at Gawker Media, including Defamer here in L.A and Wonkette. Sicha had replaced...
Posted August 9, 2004 9:19 AM
Fark is one of the most popular blogs that links to stories, but competitor (see comments) Jason Calacanis tells Wired News that the site asked him for money in exchange...
Posted August 6, 2004 9:29 AM
Mark Glaser writes in USC's Online Journalism Review that more newspapers are cooperating with bloggers to link stories and drive readers to the paper. The prime example is the Wall...
Posted August 6, 2004 12:59 AM
The headline is from Franklin Avenue, the blog by Michael Schneider and Maria Villar that is having a good week. Their top item today is about this morning's L.A. Times...
Posted August 4, 2004 6:58 PM
Not here, not yet — despite some recent talk in various comment threads. But Michelle Malkin, the former L.A. Daily News editorial writer and current syndicated columnist who blogs, has...
Posted August 4, 2004 12:19 PM
Starting Sunday, craigslist will charge $25 for placing job ads on the website in Los Angeles and New York. The cheapskates who want models, actors and artists to work for...
Posted July 30, 2004 9:07 PM
Roger Friedman, the gossip columnist at Fox News, wraps up his backstage view of the Democrats' gathering with this zinger: Did we learn anything in Boston? Yes. For one thing,...
Posted July 30, 2004 10:49 AM
Local music writer Kate Sullivan writes on her blog about trying to interview Pamela Anderson and David LaChapelle recently. It didn't go well. The interview was probably the most emotionally...
Posted July 29, 2004 1:04 AM
While local blogger BoifromTroy enjoys his stint as the guest Wonkette, the starting quarterback for his favorite football team has begun to blog. Matt Leinart's website reports on media day...
Posted July 29, 2004 12:46 AM
Edited and updated Rick Orlov in the Daily News notes that both the L.A. City Council and the county's Board of Supervisors shut down for the week because a majority...
Posted July 26, 2004 9:15 AM
Ken Layne, no longer in Los Angeles, but of the place. He co-founded L.A. Examiner.com with Matt Welch, wrote for the Online Journalism Review at USC and began blogging four...
Posted July 24, 2004 5:15 PM
Local blogger with attitude BoifromTroy says he will be filling in as the guestblogger at Wonkette when Ana Marie Cox takes her amusing shtick to MTV for the Democratic Convention....
Posted July 23, 2004 11:34 AM
L.A.-based French radio journalist Emmanuelle Richard has resumed her bilingual blog with a new design, following a long hiatus. She writes that the break was partly due to the insatiable...
Posted July 21, 2004 6:20 PM
The Juxtaposition is less a blog than a showcase of occasional essays by the two local writers who share the space. In La Ciudad, Scott O'Malley muses on the specialness...
Posted July 18, 2004 1:53 PM
Tim Rutten considers in the Times why Roger L. Simon would call the former ambassador-turned-author Joseph C. Wilson "a deeply evil human being" and other blogger obsessions, in a piece...
Posted July 17, 2004 11:07 AM
That micro-controversy over whether or not the L.A. Times erred in making the point Tuesday in a front page story on Paul Bremer that he left Iraq without speechifying has...
Posted July 9, 2004 12:30 AM
A couple of bugging devices were found and removed from Michael Eisner's office on Disney's Burbank lot this past weekend, the anonymous Industry blogger A Fly on the Wall says....
Posted July 7, 2004 8:55 PM
Marc Cooper turns his blog today over to a correspondent who has something to do with the Department of Homeland Security and who has a different take on the border...
Posted July 7, 2004 1:31 PM
Mickey Kaus takes a break from being unhappy about Kerry's strength to lead his Slate blog with a recitation of L.A. Times stories out of Iraq that he says have...
Posted July 7, 2004 11:02 AM
Phototopia blogs pictures of the town's first Kerry-Edwards fundraiser, a turnout of lesser stars Tuesday night at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. The sisters Kerry (Alex and Vanessa, pictured)...
Posted July 7, 2004 2:38 AM
Rick Orlov's lead story in today's Daily News also tops the Daily Breeze that's on the street, if not on the website. It looks at Mayor Hahn's conundrum — he's...
Posted July 6, 2004 12:43 PM
The blogger and frequent L.A. Observed commenter Joseph Mailander is now part of a group blog with three friends called Martini Republic. Their mission: "To say things without regret about...
Posted July 1, 2004 12:28 AM
Caryn Coleman of art.blogging.la and the sixspace gallery is profiled in this week's Downtown News, with photo by Gary Leonard. It's part of a series on young movers in the...
Posted June 22, 2004 9:08 AM
That is, the founders of blogging.la, Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo, have launched a network of similar group websites under the label of Metroblogging. Today L.A., New York, San Francisco...
Posted June 17, 2004 12:04 AM
Not on the right (of course they still loathe him), but on the left. From Marc Cooper's blog, chiding liberals who feel good about Bill Clinton, on the eve of...
Posted June 16, 2004 3:02 PM
"Six Feet Under" writer and supervising producer Jill Soloway emails Tiffany Stone, thanking her for some blog praise and revealing how Soloway came to be quoted in an L.A. Times...
Posted June 14, 2004 10:02 AM
• BoifromTroy was out at a California League of Conservation Voters meeting and swears he heard L.A. councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, the John Kerry campaign co-chair, say: "After all, let's face it....
Posted June 12, 2004 1:30 PM
Blogger Greg Dewar writes that the Screen Actors Guild has been besieged with complaints that Ronald Reagan's portrait is not displayed with other past presidents of the guild. Except that...
Posted June 12, 2004 12:26 PM
Lonewacko screen grabs Drudge and suggests he give the flashing banner ads a rest for one day:...
Posted June 10, 2004 10:16 PM
Next time your guy announces that he is halting campaign events to honor a deceased prez, make sure no pro-Bush bloggers are around. A Moxie scoop (provided her sources are...
Posted June 9, 2004 12:36 AM
In this media crazy world, some people consume too much news — and some people evidently too little. A woman who lives in Santa Monica thinks the Ronald Reagan funeral...
Posted June 7, 2004 5:29 PM
A Fly on the Wall has made a quick name for his/herself since catching the blogging bug last month. The site posted the news of Julia Roberts' pregnancy a day...
Posted June 4, 2004 6:48 PM
Joz at blogging.la posts on the case of the UCLA student who says she was raped by three Carson High School students who got into the dorm. Last week, a...
Posted June 4, 2004 10:58 AM
Richard Rushfield is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, the co-creator of L.A. Innuendo and the author of On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood. His JournalSpace site launched yesterday;...
Posted June 3, 2004 9:15 PM
Prints the Chaff was a blog for copy editors written by Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News. Archives that he felt deserved saving are now at his personal...
Posted June 2, 2004 9:24 PM
The woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape won't be referred to in jury instructions as the "victim" -- only as a "person" or by her name. Jeff at the...
Posted June 1, 2004 10:57 PM
Last week it was Patterico shedding the relative comfort of anonymous blogging to reveal he is a local deputy district attorney. Now the former Armed Liberal has let it be...
Posted June 1, 2004 11:16 AM
The organizers of that joint L.A. Press Club-American Cinema Foundation event on Saturday night — the one with all the brouhaha over Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs — have...
Posted May 29, 2004 12:23 AM
Freelance writer Nancy Rommelmann is shutting down "Leaving Los Angeles," the blog about her wilder years in L.A. and her final year before moving to Oregon with her new husband....
Posted May 27, 2004 9:57 AM
"Lindsey" writes on her blog that she is a Los Angeles escort -- and no, she doesn't take email or business calls off the site. The blog is her private...
Posted May 27, 2004 12:08 AM
The latest Online Journalism Review column by Mark Glaser explores the impact that bloggers are having on mainstream media. One of his main examples is the case of the Los...
Posted May 26, 2004 12:40 PM
Some L.A. Observed commenters were concerned last week by the ideological makeup of Saturday's L.A. Press Club panel on bloggers and politics. Panel organizer Cathy Seipp heard the cries and...
Posted May 25, 2004 4:19 PM
Kate Lee is a 27-year-old assistant at International Creative Management in Manhattan who pals around with some New York bloggers. The New Yorker's Ink column this week also credits her...
Posted May 24, 2004 10:17 AM
If you've followed the scandalette of the week in D.C., catch the end as Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox has a drink with the most famous (now ex-) anonymous sex blogger...
Posted May 23, 2004 6:38 PM
Blogads, the people who sell and serve up the ads that run on the right side of L.A. Observed and several dozen other blogs, collected an unscientific survey this week...
Posted May 22, 2004 3:55 PM
Hollywood screenwriter Robert J. Avrech (Body Double, The Devil's Arithmetic) has started a publishing company, Seraphic Press, to encourage novels written for religiously observant Jewish children. The project is in...
Posted May 21, 2004 12:12 PM
Some of you may remember last year when Michael Schneider of the blog Franklin Avenue wrote about his parked Honda being crashed into on Franklin near the Shakespeare bridge—for the...
Posted May 21, 2004 11:41 AM
UCLA law prof and blogger (mostly about law, wine and religion) Professor Bainbridge tells the group blog Crescat Sententia what he sees as Los Angeles' best pluses: Woody Allen famously...
Posted May 18, 2004 1:36 PM
The anony-blog A Fly on the Wall posts that UPN is considering a new "reality" series from Nash Entertainment in which real families would be shown grieving after being tricked...
Posted May 13, 2004 11:22 PM
The Los Angeles group blog started in November by programmer Jason DeFillippo and designer Sean Bonner gets a nice feature (sub. required) in today's LAT Weekend Calendar. The early posts...
Posted May 13, 2004 6:17 PM
LAVoice.org has a neat little counter that lets visitors know just how many times a blog entry has been read in its entirety. Last week's item on the Midnight Special...
Posted May 11, 2004 3:44 PM
Monday on "Day to Day" from the show's website: "America's shallowest Online 'blog' launches a new site about what some consider America's shallowest city -- Los Angeles. We'll talk to...
Posted May 10, 2004 5:40 AM
Ubiquitous L.A. freelancer and personally revealing blogger Nancy Rommelmann is now about six weeks from Leaving Los Angeles. She's been coming to peace with her impending move to Portland on...
Posted May 7, 2004 1:32 PM
Gawker Media's long-rumored L.A. blog Defamer joins the party Tuesday morning. It's said to be mostly about Hollywood. The company run by online veteran Nick Denton is also behind Gawker...
Posted May 3, 2004 11:34 PM
L.A. Brain Terrain: "A SoCal-based blog recording upcoming intellectual activities for Angelenos interested in more than just driving, f*cking and (net)working!"...
Posted May 1, 2004 12:23 AM
Yesterday's final entry of Gregg Easterbook's blog sucked up, as he puts it, to everybody from George W. Bush to John Kerry to the New York Times. As of today,...
Posted April 28, 2004 2:36 PM
In the May/June issue of Mother Jones, George Packer writes that there is "something peculiarly stale and tired" about political blogs. He reads them anyway. First, a confession: I hate...
Posted April 27, 2004 1:42 PM
Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus dings the LAT's Mark Z. Baraback over some political analysis, and predicts that Wonkette (and by extension the other Nick Denton-run gossip site, Gawker) could...
Posted April 20, 2004 11:12 PM
Lake Elsinore blogger Kynn Bartlett (Shock and Awe) has begun writing a column every other week for the Californian in Riverside County. His first this week is about supporting the...
Posted April 20, 2004 8:04 AM
That's a hot Hollywood rumor about the pseudonymous Rance, says Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin....
Posted April 10, 2004 12:28 PM
LGF is a Los Angeles-based warblog by Charles Johnson that generates 3,000 comments a day and invites strong opinions about the war, Islam and questioners of Administration policy. Critics consider...
Posted April 8, 2004 12:20 AM
The LA Weekly's (and the Nation's) Marc Cooper has a new blog. Next! * And: Jon Wiener too. It's mostly the lineup for his weekly show on KPFK, audio archives...
Posted April 6, 2004 1:31 AM
On her new blog, Arianna Huffington pledges not to cash her $494.20 car tax refund but to turn it over to the California State University Foundation. In order for me...
Posted April 3, 2004 2:04 PM
Yesterday's Christian Science Monitor tossed up a little feature on Wonkette Ana Marie Cox: A political blogger, untamed, rattles cages in D.C. Previously at LAO: Wonkette revealed...
Posted April 3, 2004 1:32 PM
Rosanna Mah at the L.A. Independent discovers (and clearly adores) Tiffany Stone. The headline calls her "Princess Tiffany: Bridget Jones of the Blogs" and a great photo of the blogger...
Posted March 31, 2004 11:33 PM
Mediabistro hangs out at last weekend's overdue launch party for Wonkette.com in Washington (graced by bi-coasting Venetian Mickey Kaus) and sits down to find out all about the woman behind...
Posted March 30, 2004 7:02 PM
The Juxtaposition actually expends bandwidth, intellectual and digital, suggesting that I offer an official L.A. Observed coffee mug. Hmm, maybe someday. [Just do it. Accepting that ad for the immortals...
Posted March 30, 2004 12:22 AM
Jonah at LABlogs.com arranged an open gathering of Los Angeles bloggers last night at Farmers Market and reports on the good-sized turnout here. He links to others' postings about the...
Posted March 28, 2004 12:45 PM
Michael Schneider reports in Variety that Tony Hernandez has been let go by Channel 5. His last day is April 16, if he makes it that long after ragging on...
Posted March 24, 2004 3:15 PM
Mack Reed at LAVoice.org has some fun with celebrity campaign contributions via the database at fundrace.org, which lets you search Federal Elections Commission records by name, address or zip code....
Posted March 24, 2004 1:19 PM
Last week's plane crash and house fire on Mar Vista Hill -- a few blocks from the L.A. Observed bunker, in a neighborhood that's home to several journalists -- has...
Posted March 22, 2004 11:37 PM
Robert Tagorda adds some perspective to the Claremont McKenna College hate crime/hoax episode as an alumnus of the tight-knit school. Meanwhile, Tagorda announced last week that he and his wife...
Posted March 22, 2004 1:37 PM
He's now posting fulltime as Political Animal at the Washington Monthly site. The old Calpundit locale will be used only occasionally for personal items, he says. Previously: L.A. blogger goes...
Posted March 19, 2004 11:44 AM
Boing Boing, the group blog co-written by Mark Frauenfelder and Xeni Jardin in Los Angeles (as well as others), cleaned up in the 2004 Weblog Awards, or Bloggies, announced today....
Posted March 15, 2004 5:01 PM
Jack Shafer, Slate's media critic, clicks on Gawker and Wonkette a dozen times a day but hates to admit it. He wishes the Nick Denton experiments in blogging for profit...
Posted March 12, 2004 12:15 PM
High-traffic liberal blogger Kevin Drum will be writing Calpundit for money for the Washington Monthly, starting as soon as the new URL comes down. Yes, I have sold out to...
Posted March 8, 2004 2:19 PM
Timm Herdt, newly linked on the left, is state bureau chief for the Ventura County Star. He blogs mostly about politics on the Star's site, and in a recent item...
Posted March 8, 2004 12:26 AM
The blog host went down earlier today to upgrade, putting up a notice that it would be back in service by noon L.A. time. The promise later changed to 1...
Posted March 7, 2004 2:28 PM
As the Martha Stewart case goes to the jury, UCLA law prof Stephen Bainbridge argues in a column at Tech Central Station that criminal charges never should have been brought....
Posted March 1, 2004 10:44 PM
Matt Welch poses a question that every presidential candidate should be asked: if God loves the United States, does he love the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and American...
Posted March 1, 2004 2:57 PM
Blogger Brooke Schreier Ganz, better known online as Asparagirl, recently moved to Los Angeles to be with her new (as of November) husband, Scott Ganz. They blog together at The...
Posted February 25, 2004 6:34 PM
L.A. author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon has been a prominent "former-lefty-turned-Bush-supporter" on his blog, but he wrote this week of his disappointment over the president's move against gay marriage...
Posted February 25, 2004 11:13 AM
The Ventura County Star today announced that Howard Owens, one of the journalist-bloggers linked in the left rail, has been named the daily's director of New Media. Owens has been...
Posted February 24, 2004 6:29 PM
There's a new journalist blog in town and on the list of links down the left side of this page. Tony Castro, Beverly Hills book author and columnist for the...
Posted February 23, 2004 9:59 PM
Jonah has redesigned the look of LABlogs.com and added a spot to run ads. Fear not, his impressive roll of the L.A. blog community remains, just moved to the left...
Posted February 22, 2004 7:48 PM
I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just make their own guacamole, but if you need a reason to stop using the store-bought goo that passes for the real thing, here's...
Posted February 22, 2004 1:23 AM
Earlier this month, Brian Flemming threw together a bunch of photos and puckishly invented the speculation that President Bush had gotten a nose job. Last night, the nose job rumor...
Posted February 20, 2004 8:02 PM
Kynn Bartlett, a website designer and host who blogs at Shock and Awe, Inland Anti-Empire, Next of Kynn and Maccessibility - and who comments occasionally here - is teaching an...
Posted February 17, 2004 10:45 PM
Rip Rense wasn't going to write about the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' appearance on American TV, but he couldn't resist. His position is clear. The Beatles are only the...
Posted February 9, 2004 4:22 PM
Dan Weintraub is the Sacramento Bee opinion columnist who began to blog last April, just about the time the Gray Davis recall effort took off. His California Insider broke news...
Posted February 9, 2004 3:50 PM
Justene Adamec at Calblog feels the urge to call her mother, who would have been 64 this month, and say "OK, 12 years, you've been dead long enough. Stop fooling...
Posted February 6, 2004 11:45 AM
The cover story in this week's Ventura County Reporter is an interview with Venice-based advice columnist Amy Alkon, who blogs here. (Thanks to Emmanuelle for the tip)...
Posted February 5, 2004 2:03 PM
Blogger and occasional Salon writer John Gorenfeld is all over the case of the Downey mayor -- and former L.A. County Republican chairman -- who he says speaks at events...
Posted February 5, 2004 12:33 AM
My practice on links in the right-hand rail is to err on the generous side. I don't "trade" links as such. If its local and I think enough readers might...
Posted February 5, 2004 12:10 AM
Stephen Reinhardt is the judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who the left likes most and the right most despises. He is married to the former ACLU...
Posted February 2, 2004 12:39 AM
Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles has been on the ground on the campaign trail (on Slate's dime) for a couple of weeks, getting back in touch with his inner Democrat. Good stuff,...
Posted January 29, 2004 2:28 PM
Jon Weisman, who writes the Dodger Thoughts blog, will be a guest on "Which Way L.A.?" with Warren Olney tonight at 7 p.m. on KCRW (89.9 FM). The topic: Frank...
Posted January 29, 2004 12:20 PM
Matt Haber, half of the duo that writes the very readable blog Low Culture, had a piece in yesterday's New York Times' Arts and Leisure section on Sidney N. Laverents,...
Posted January 26, 2004 12:03 PM
Journalist RiShawn Biddle throws off the gloves on his blog and declares, "Why I Can Never Be a Conservative (Ever Again)." It's complicated, but here's a snippet: As Berlau notes,...
Posted January 21, 2004 11:59 PM
LA.com, the city guide website being jointly produced by Gannett, Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group and Stephens Media Group, has a new blog up: LAComfidential. Most of the recent posts are...
Posted January 20, 2004 2:34 PM
A couple of blogs mostly rooted in Los Angeles, Slate's Kausfiles and the Volokh Conspiracy, were finalists in the Blogger of the Year category of the first Opinion Awards given...
Posted January 14, 2004 11:47 AM
UCLA professor Mark A. R. Kleiman uses some pointed blogger critiques of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chicago professor Daniel Drezner to make interesting points about the clash...
Posted January 8, 2004 12:18 AM
Jeff A. Taylor at Reason's Hit and Run blog argues it's OK for Maria Shriver to report for NBC and help to govern California, which she's been doing by pressuring...
Posted January 7, 2004 3:46 PM
"Advice Goddess" Amy Alkon shows up in the new Psychology Today quoted as a member of The Brights, described in the piece as "a growing group of atheists, humanists, and...
Posted January 6, 2004 5:58 PM
L.A. journalist Joseph Mailander recounts on his blog (Joyrides Without Maps) how he got caught up in yesterday's cancellation of that Aeromexico flight to LAX, due to fears of Al-Qaeda....
Posted January 1, 2004 10:15 AM
Four months, 10,000 miles and many blog posts later, the Lonewacko blogging tour of America concludes. And he'd like some coin in his Amazon tip jar to show for it....
Posted December 18, 2003 11:14 PM
It's been a busy, and fruitful, blog week at Joyrides Without Maps. Check out Joseph's short ode to Playa del Rey (as viewed from The Shack): "If you've been in...
Posted December 18, 2003 12:06 AM
CityBeat media columnist (and blogger about L.A.) Cathy Seipp is taking on an added blog gig -- she will opine from the right once a month about New York Times...
Posted December 15, 2003 5:53 PM
Law professor Eugene Volokh uses the web traffic stats compiled by The Truth Laid Bear to argue that there is no solid evidence the blogosphere slants to the right politically....
Posted December 15, 2003 2:43 PM
Indefatigable L.A. blogger Robert Garcia Tagorda ("Priorities and Frivolities") has changed his address. He's now the proud owner of www.tagorda.com. Check out his clean new design....
Posted December 9, 2003 11:35 AM
Variety.com has added more blogs since I last looked. The new ones are on porn's crossover to the mainstream and trends in the comic book world. The site's first two...
Posted December 8, 2003 1:28 AM
I never knew or even heard of author and Daily News book editor Bruce Cook until posting his obituary early last month, but plenty of people liked him. Another praising...
Posted December 4, 2003 2:03 PM
In addition to the reconstruct of the Times' Arnold stories, the new issue of American Journalism Review has a piece on newspaper blogs. In it, Dan Weintraub says his California...
Posted December 3, 2003 12:18 AM
UCLA Law's Eugene Volokh explains in a long post why the popular Volokh Conspiracy group blog does not allow visitors to post comments. Excerpts: 1. The first is esthetic, which...
Posted December 2, 2003 1:02 AM
Moxie points to Blogging.la, a site put together by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo. Contributors include Xeni Jardin, Wil Wheaton and Moxie. And speaking of blogs...the L.A. Times Calendar section...
Posted December 1, 2003 11:08 AM
Longtime USC journalism professor (and former CBS correspondent) Murray Fromson has put up a blog. The Fromson File is doing longer pieces, the current one a remembrance of the night...
Posted November 22, 2003 11:54 PM
Roger Simon got his first batches of Academy screeners today, but he didn't have to sign for them and three films from Lions Gate came on DVDs. All of which...
Posted November 21, 2003 4:40 PM
"60 Minutes" on Sunday is doing a double-length segment on the $10-billion pornography business, and apparently the Steve Kroft piece will spend a lot of time here in the Valley...
Posted November 21, 2003 12:03 PM
L.A. blogger Arthur Silber, who had to shut down when the MTA strike cost him all his work, was helped out financially by a number of other bloggers and now...
Posted November 19, 2003 1:09 AM
Orange County blogger Xrlq is taking the point position in defense of Justene Adamec at CalBlog, who has been threatened with legal action over comments posted on her site. The...
Posted November 17, 2003 1:20 AM
Jim Evans blogged from his perch as managing editor of California Journal, but he's taking a job covering the business of government for the Sacramento Bee and sends word that...
Posted November 14, 2003 11:33 AM
Rip Rense says if he ran a newspaper he'd bring back typewriters and paper just to make the environs seem less bizarro. I had a tour of the San Francisco...
Posted November 13, 2003 12:30 AM
L.A. blogger Arthur Silber is shutting down because the lingering MTA strike here has pummeled his finances, despite his predicament getting some attention in the blogosphere. (Hat tip to Matt...
Posted November 12, 2003 1:18 AM
The two-month-old blog low culture catches New York Times film reviewer Elvis Mitchell adoring Zooey Deschanel...and again...and again. Now other NYT fanboys -- er, make that male reviewers -- are...
Posted November 9, 2003 1:20 AM
Joseph Mailander at Joyrides Without Maps could do without Virginia Postrel's free market philosophy, but it's her writings on style that really frost him:Ms. Postrel, in short, like most economic...
Posted November 8, 2003 11:52 PM
Journalists Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair and their two young daughters have returned to Los Angeles from Rarotonga in the South Pacific. Mark posts at bOINGbOING, which he co-founded: We'd...
Posted November 8, 2003 10:03 PM
Eugene Volokh usually teaches law and posts to his blog at UCLA, but this semester he's in a strange and alien place far, far away. I've noticed that the trees...
Posted November 6, 2003 2:44 PM
Robert Tagorda at Priorities and Frivolities recycles this quote from former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. Did she have certain bloggers in mind? Beware the politically obsessed. They are often...
Posted November 5, 2003 12:25 AM
After five days of testimony in the Scott Peterson prelim, lawyer blogs on the left (Talk Left) and the right (SoCalLawBlog) agree: so far they got nuthin' on him....
Posted November 4, 2003 11:39 PM
A couple of liberal politics blogs, Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Atrios, are publicly pondering the pros, cons and blog ethics of taking candidate ads. Atrios already accepts them,...
Posted November 3, 2003 11:49 PM
The Seattle-based City Comforts blog -- "cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance" --...
Posted November 2, 2003 11:02 PM
Rip Rense is feeling so down on L.A. these days that today he ripped off a second Riposte column for the week. He calls it "This Town is Toast." His...
Posted October 31, 2003 11:56 PM
L.A. Observed makes the cut at Relevant or Irrelevant?, where the slogan is "I decide."...
Posted October 29, 2003 6:11 PM
Prompted by the Gregg Easterbrook flap, Mickey Kaus offers a long defense of unedited blogs. In the course of it, he manages to compliment Luke Ford....
Posted October 28, 2003 2:37 AM
"Tony Rafael" at In the Hat, the website where he writes about L.A. gangs and crime, posts a lengthy observation spurred by Jill Leovy's Slate diary on the way bad...
Posted October 24, 2003 12:14 AM
Responding to the continuing and heated criticism of his post about Kill Bill and Jews at the studios, Gregg Easterbrook has put up a long explanation and apology at his...
Posted October 17, 2003 1:15 AM
Tony Pierce is singled out for writing "L.A.'s most entertaining Web log" in the graphic that runs with James Verini's story on Los Angeles-centric websites in today's LAT Weekend Calendar....
Posted October 16, 2003 4:37 PM
At the end of a long screed against Quentin Tarantino over Kill Bill, New Republic blogger Gregg Easterbrook suddenly singles out Harvey Weinstein and Michael Eisner because they are Jewish....
Posted October 15, 2003 1:06 PM
A New York Times' Week in Review story today on the ethics of phonecams includes an anecdote and photos from members of the Los Angeles-based photo blog community Buzznet.com, which...
Posted October 12, 2003 2:19 PM
Hollywood writer-producer Roger L. Simon declares on his blog that the backlash against the MPAA's no-DVDs policy begins with him: This Academy voter (and film lover) is not going to...
Posted October 3, 2003 10:47 AM
In a small group discussion tonight during a USC gathering hosted by the Online News Association and OJR, I praised Kausfiles' handling and prescient call on the LAT groping story....
Posted October 2, 2003 11:11 PM
The New York Times covers the issue of newspaper sponsored blogs with a small Business section piece that contains an interesting tidbit: the Dallas Morning News does not pre-edit the...
Posted September 29, 2003 1:38 AM
Writer Nancy Rommelmann (LA Weekly, Los Angeles mag, lots of other stuff) plans to depart Los Angeles for Portland next June when her daughter finishes middle school. She is writing...
Posted September 28, 2003 3:55 PM
Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, began posting items on the paper's site in August. He conferred with the Sacramento Bee's Dan Weintraub first, and worked out with...
Posted September 26, 2003 3:59 PM
Dr. Kaus puts Huffington on the couch to figure out why she got so peeved by Arnold's needling. I've noticed this distressing character trait in Huffington, who can be extremely...
Posted September 26, 2003 2:58 AM
Jeff Jarvis, who started Entertainment Weekly and was Sunday editor of the N.Y. Daily News, has some interesting format ideas for the "post-Internet newspaper." He goes beyond "shorter stories" and...
Posted September 25, 2003 12:29 PM
CalPundit's Kevin Drum posted the following message and got 26 comments: I'll be spending the day in lovely El Segundo today. Blogging will resume this evening. One of the comments...
Posted September 25, 2003 12:28 AM
Dan Weintraub tells Mark Glaser at the Online Journalism Review that the shift in his editing regime at the Bee is a minor deal. "Obviously I liked it the way...
Posted September 24, 2003 3:48 AM
Kudos to Mickey Kaus for getting the Bee's executive editor on the phone to talk about the Weintraub blog, and for correcting the always far-fetched notion that the Bee's editors...
Posted September 23, 2003 2:44 AM
I see that the always smart Justene Adamec at the pro-recall conservative CalBlog joins me in saying let's wait to see IF Dan Weintraub's freedom to blog away has in...
Posted September 22, 2003 3:22 PM
This is an inside baseball kind of post for the journalists and writers who come here, and long, so I'll break it up into two sections. There's a small but...
Posted September 22, 2003 2:26 AM
His bosses at the Sacramento Bee have ordered Dan Weintraub to submit his California Insider blog items to a high-level editor before posting. Tony Marcano, a former LAT editor who...
Posted September 21, 2003 8:00 PM
Remarks by 9th Circuit liberal jurist Harry Pregerson in Henry Weinstein's story in the L.A. Times on Saturday have legal types talking. Pregerson was on the three-judge panel that blocked...
Posted September 21, 2003 1:25 AM
Jill Stewart's latest anti-Gray Davis column from Sacramento is being aggressively fact-checked by liberal-leaning lawyer Steve Smith at his blog and in the comments to a Matt Welch post at...
Posted September 20, 2003 3:52 PM
The L.A. Times today takes its turn trying to figure out Mickey Kaus -- "a brainy, iconoclastic dart-thrower." The widely read, Venice-based blogger for Slate tells Bob Baker that he'll...
Posted September 20, 2003 1:19 PM
Syndicated columnist Amy Alkon wrote a remarkable piece for the Los Angeles Times a few years ago (I think in the magazine) about tracking down the creep who stole her...
Posted September 16, 2003 11:52 AM
Boy, that Mickey Kaus has some nerve. He keeps violating the blogger code by actually leaving his computer to report stories. Couple of weeks ago he went to the gym...
Posted September 15, 2003 1:48 AM
Cathy Seipp's media column in CityBeat this week is about her pal Mickey Kaus and his runaway success as a blogger (gets paid by Slate, draws 20,000 hits a day,...
Posted September 13, 2003 11:23 AM
Richard Karpel, the head of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, takes issue with Matt Welch's piece on blogs in Columbia Journalism Review (recommended by me here). He doesn't object to...
Posted September 10, 2003 12:21 AM
Brian Linse, who blogs at Aint No Bad Dude, has up a nice tribute to his friend Warren Zevon....
Posted September 9, 2003 6:15 PM
Local blog Shock and Awe recently took a fair shot at Snopes.com (the Urban Legends Reference Pages, also SoCal based) for a screed against Michael Moore over his remarks about...
Posted September 9, 2003 5:04 PM
SoCal blogger Lonewacko is driving across country and filing brief reports with photos. Over the weekend he posted a picture from the highest point in Kansas, Mt. Sunflower. In actual...
Posted September 8, 2003 10:15 PM
Writing for an audience that is not primarily other bloggers, and some who don't visit many websites of any kind, I get a lot of questions about the form and...
Posted September 4, 2003 10:58 AM
Dan Weintraub feels compelled today to explain that as a politics blogger for the Sacramento Bee, as well as the paper's opinion page columnist, he is above all else an...
Posted September 3, 2003 11:17 AM
The unusual L.A. blog In the Hat has caught the eye of Danish television, which sent a crew to get the tour of Eastside gang turf from "Wally," who monitors...
Posted September 3, 2003 9:46 AM
The Aesthetic wonders, reasonably: Something that has always puzzled us, particularly now that gas prices have gone through the roof, is why the price of gas isn't cheaper in El...
Posted September 2, 2003 1:37 AM
The back story of how Arnold Schwarzenegger's Oui magazine interview about smoking hashish and having group sex got into the news is in a short L.A. Times article by Carla...
Posted August 29, 2003 2:10 AM
Rip Rense writes an appreciation of his neighbor Pete, a third-grade teacher who still likes his job but who needs to rant. He leaves his West L.A. home every morning...
Posted August 27, 2003 6:46 PM
Roger L. Simon is linking on his blog to the good news -- outside of Switzerland, the best place to be a worker with a Big Mac craving is here...
Posted August 22, 2003 1:50 PM
This one is by Dennis Romero in LA CityBeat. The first question asks how Weintraub likes all the attention he's gotten with via the recall: It's helping me promote my...
Posted August 21, 2003 3:24 PM
Elizabeth Spiers, the editor of Gawker, has been in Los Angeles for a few days and posting her observations back to New York. In the latest she shares a list...
Posted August 13, 2003 6:19 PM
Mickey Kaus' lead item today muses on the possibility of Arianna dropping out of the recall race in favor of Arnold, but the good stuff is he digs up old...
Posted August 8, 2003 10:55 AM
Don't feel confident that the recall ballot won't run into Florida-style snafus, election law professor and blogger Rick Hasen warns on the L.A. Times op-ed page....
Posted August 8, 2003 1:13 AM
Roger L. Simon suggests it as a way to breathe some life into too-predictable columns....
Posted August 7, 2003 12:08 PM
Bob Morris, the Valley-based writer of Politics in the Zeroes, resigned from the Green Party council in Los Angeles County and explains why in a long post here. I have...
Posted August 7, 2003 10:45 AM
UCLA professor of public policy (and serious blogger) Mark A. R. Kleiman argues in a piece at Slate.com that a faith-based prison program favored by President Bush and conservatives actually...
Posted August 7, 2003 1:41 AM
The Los Angeles media column about the blogging life and political demons of Slate's Mickey Kaus got the L.A. Observed treatment awhile back here (with some reaction here) and is...
Posted July 30, 2003 6:44 PM
Eliot Javdan, class of 2002, was the stand-up guy secretly behind the website pushing the home phone, address and email and even satellite photo of the house where Kobe Bryant's...
Posted July 24, 2003 7:20 PM
But his accuser's are now, and so is her name, her photo and where she goes to college. Some L.A. bloggers, including Luke Ford, are linking to the site that...
Posted July 21, 2003 9:10 PM
Our report last night on the Mickey Kaus profile in Los Angeles magazine is fueling some robust comments among the liberals over at CalPundit....
Posted July 21, 2003 2:03 PM
The Mickey Kaus cachet, writes R.J. Smith in the August issue of Los Angeles magazine: ...comes from being a liberal willing to attack liberals...He's an elite journalist speaking to the...
Posted July 20, 2003 7:57 PM
A few more worthy L.A. based blogs have come to my attention: The Juxtaposition is by two young guys in the South Bay, writing about freeways and other aspects of...
Posted July 20, 2003 4:10 PM
At the Writers Guild of America website, Ross Johnson's interview with L.A. author-blogger-screenwriter Roger L. Simon contains this painful admission: Simon lost $1 million of his own scratch on an...
Posted July 17, 2003 4:45 PM
Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th-Century Fox unit behind the Internet marketing hit 28 Days Later, launched a Blogspot site over the weekend. The blog is "covering" media reports friendly to...
Posted July 17, 2003 12:52 AM
Oren Kerr, one of the regular writers on the UCLA-based Volokh Conspiracy blog, has to stop contributing because he is now a clerk to Supreme Court justice David Kennedy. The...
Posted July 15, 2003 9:41 AM
Kevin Drum at CalPundit wonders out loud how long it will be before pundit blogger Andrew Sullivan turns on new NYT editor Bill Keller. I have been wondering the same...
Posted July 14, 2003 4:58 PM
After a furious month of posting on his Sacramento Bee blog, Daniel Weintraub hasn't added an item on the Davis recall -- or anything else -- since 7:34 Sunday morning....
Posted July 14, 2003 10:39 AM
Michael at Franklin Avenue called directory assistance to get the number for Wahoo's in the mid-Wilshire area, and the voice from somewhere else in the country politely asked: "Sir? Can...
Posted July 13, 2003 7:53 PM
He doesn't blog often, this Joseph at joyrides without maps -- subtitle "notes on a reprehensible way of life" -- but I'm wishing he would. I read every word of...
Posted July 10, 2003 12:09 AM
© 2003-2009 • About LA Observed • Email the editor
| AEG Live, promoter of the Michael Jackson shows in London, stands to recoup a big chunk of its investment, thanks to insurance and two golden opportunities.
| Banks were far more accommodating in 1992, the last time warrants had to be issued, and that laissez-faire stance might have delayed cutting a deal.
| News of Michael Jackson's death -- along with about a dozen satellite trucks -- prompted a gathering outside UCLA Medical Center on Thursday.
The "Right of Way" rewrite is underway. Collaborator Marvin Wolf has already refined the project down to two documents, including a 25-page treatment, while finding time to knock out a novel or two on the side.
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