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Topic Archive: Los Angeles Times
Jim Newton relinquishes the top spot to go ahead and write his book on Dwight Eisenhower. He'll serve as an editor-at-large. Nick Goldberg ascends from deputy to be editor of...
Posted September 17, 2009 11:53 AM
The long-time education writer at the LAT was 80. From the Times obit: At The Times, where he was a reporter for nearly 30 years starting in 1964, Trombley was...
Posted September 10, 2009 2:06 PM
Exactly an hour after praising his staff's fire coverage online and off, Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton sent a memo announcing the departure of managing editor for online Meredith...
Posted September 4, 2009 2:42 PM
While local television has been skimping on fire coverage, the L.A. Times has been going all out. I'm planning to give props in my KCRW segment today (4:44 p.m. at...
Posted September 4, 2009 12:37 PM
I received a few emails yesterday from people wondering why their usual Tuesday Ralphs coupons weren't in the printed Los Angeles Times. Todd Everett blogs that he may have some...
Posted August 26, 2009 9:40 AM
The female orgasm story from 2008 has made it to the number one spot on today's most viewed and most emailed lists at the Los Angeles Times website....
Posted August 21, 2009 11:53 PM
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and the L.A. Times' Andrew Malcolm, who increasingly seems like a Fox News embed writing the paper's main politics blog, are going at each other. I have...
Posted August 21, 2009 10:05 PM
Los Angeles Times editor in chief Russ Stanton acknowledges in an interview that "I don't see us as a direct competitor to the New York Times any more. They have...
Posted August 21, 2009 7:57 AM
Scott Martelle and Brett Levy are the former Los Angeles Times journalists running The Journalism Shop, the new co-op in which they and a selected group of other ex-LAT staffers...
Posted August 20, 2009 10:11 PM
These corrections are notable mostly because 1) they are both about stories that ran in 2006, 2) both corrections were not published until this month, and 3) both ran in...
Posted August 19, 2009 7:06 PM
John Cherwa left the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to become sports editor of the Chicago Tribune. Most recently he has been in Orlando, but now he's returning to the...
Posted August 17, 2009 4:46 PM
Former Los Angeles Times reporters are key players in Zester Daily, which bills itself as "the latest news and information from around the globe about all aspects of food and...
Posted August 16, 2009 11:04 PM
Mark at LA Biz Observed picked up this morning's news out of Chicago about Tribune Company creditors trying to delete Sam Zell from any reorganization that comes from the bankruptcy....
Posted August 14, 2009 11:07 AM
Managing editor for online Meredith Artley used to work at the International Herald Tribune site, in the New York Times system. The new serif typeface — Georgia — will look...
Posted August 12, 2009 7:42 PM
Tomorrow's correction today from a post on radio personality Don Imus at the L.A. Times' Show Tracker blog: Recently, he has devoted time on the air to discussing his prostrate...
Posted August 10, 2009 9:10 AM
I got home from dinner and found a couple of emails pointing out that there's a bylined story about the Chino prison riot on the front page of New...
Posted August 9, 2009 8:39 PM
The LAT's Richard Rushfield has posted his final entry on the Idol Tracker blog where he's been spending most of his time the past couple of years. He's headed to...
Posted August 4, 2009 11:10 AM
Publisher Eddy Hartenstein has memoed this afternoon on some tweaks in his executive lineup at the Los Angeles Times. Prominent is the rise of Scott McKibben to a new post...
Posted August 3, 2009 6:48 PM
Couple of weeks ago it was former Los Angeles Times photographers starting a service to offer their freelance expertise. Now it's reporters and former associate editor Leo Wolinsky. "Highly skilled...
Posted August 3, 2009 12:32 AM
Today's L.A. Times follows on our Thursday night news about the Festival theater closing and adds a triple whammy of bad news for Westwood: Mann is giving up its leases...
Posted August 1, 2009 1:44 PM
The Times and Register have announced a deal in which L.A. Times delivery people will deliver both papers. The Register will thus become the Times' largest commercial delivery client. If...
Posted July 29, 2009 11:57 AM
L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein has turned to the San Diego Union-Tribune for his newest executive. The post is a hybrid that carries the title of Executive Vice President/Business and...
Posted July 29, 2009 9:15 AM
The L.A. Times does Ted Kennedy no favors with this one: Sen. Kennedy: An article in Sunday's Section A about Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's role in Congress' healthcare debate said...
Posted July 28, 2009 1:54 PM
An LA Observed reader grabbed this screen shot of the half-digested front page that appeared on the Los Angeles Times website when he clicked print edition this morning. Still no...
Posted July 28, 2009 9:55 AM
Gawker just put out the word that the site's new West Coast editor will be Richard Rushfield, currently at LATimes.com. The note from Gawker's editor in chief is below (and,...
Posted July 27, 2009 12:52 PM
When Jack Klunder returned to the Los Angeles Times in 2005 to run circulation, the crowing from Spring Street was that he was a brilliant choice to turn around the...
Posted July 27, 2009 12:17 PM
The memo to the sales and marketing staff says it's Steve Gellman. External announcement to come later, tied to a launch (finally?) of the Los Angeles Times magazine website. Remember,...
Posted July 27, 2009 11:52 AM
L.A. Times coverage of the Los Angeles Kings is the poster child in a Sports Business Journal examination of waning sports reportage in newspapers and how worried pro sports teams...
Posted July 21, 2009 10:10 PM
I mentioned in last night's ESPN item that the Times was about to name a new editor for sports. It's Mike James, a veteran of the LAT's sports desk. The...
Posted July 20, 2009 2:24 PM
Remember Sam Zell's chief innovation officer, the irrepressible Lee Abrams? Turns out he has been a pilot since he was 17, and like many hobbyist pilots across the U.S. he...
Posted July 19, 2009 9:11 PM
Pro Photography Network is a new business offering photo services from recently departed Los Angeles Times photojournalists, including Pulitzer winner Annie Wells. From today's release: A funny thing happened on...
Posted July 15, 2009 4:43 PM
Tina Daunt, who writes the Cause Celebre political column for the L.A. Times' Calendar section, posted on her blog that she's taking time off to care for her ailing father....
Posted July 14, 2009 12:21 PM
John Arthur left the L.A. Times newsroom Friday, eight days after being told that a masthead reorganization meant his services as executive editor were no longer needed. Staffers, including managing...
Posted July 12, 2009 11:11 AM
Her husband Eric Weisbard posts on Facebook that he will be teaching in Tuscaloosa. Powers says in a Facebook note that she will continue to write as L.A. Times pop...
Posted July 9, 2009 1:22 PM
In a move to save space, the Los Angeles Times weather page dropped 43 international cities, 16 U.S. cities and four California locales — Blythe, Mt. Wilson, Rialto and Santa...
Posted July 5, 2009 10:27 PM
Newsroom groups are being informed right now that John Arthur is out as Los Angeles Times executive editor — that's number two on the paper's masthead. Sports editor Randy Harvey...
Posted July 2, 2009 3:21 PM
TMZ may have won the breaking news competition, but the Los Angeles Times is happy with the web traffic brought in by Michael Jackson's death. It's a new record for...
Posted June 26, 2009 6:25 PM
Tuesday's L.A. Times, dateline San Francisco, emphasis added: On her first visit to California as first lady, Michelle Obama on Monday helped volunteers construct a school playground here on a...
Posted June 23, 2009 11:54 PM
Borzou Daragahi reports out a very good story in the Los Angeles Times on Neda Agha-Soltan, who was 26 when she was gunned down Saturday on a street in Tehran...
Posted June 22, 2009 2:52 PM
Life magazine says the Iranian photographer who submitted this photo of protests in Tehran is now missing and probably arrested. Here is a gallery of the photographer's work with...
Posted June 21, 2009 12:05 PM
While I was out, Jill Stewart defended her work at the LA Weekly that was panned this morning by Times media writer James Rainey. Stewart's email response was posted by...
Posted June 19, 2009 2:53 PM
L.A. Times media writer James Rainey has not previously talked about the transformation of the LA Weekly from lefty cultural organ known for hard-hitting pieces into pursuer of Jill Stewart's...
Posted June 19, 2009 10:23 AM
Paul Watson is still listed on the Los Angeles Times staff roster as the paper's man in Jakarta, but he's headed to the Toronto Star. Note to the staff there:...
Posted June 19, 2009 12:46 AM
Today's print edition of the Los Angeles Times was wrapped in an ad for the HBO series "True Blood" — an ad page that included the Times' regular flag and...
Posted June 12, 2009 10:26 PM
Nice story for tomorrow's L.A. Times talking to co-workers and friends of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and especially nice to see the Times finally acknowledge that it's a...
Posted June 10, 2009 4:35 PM
The longtime columnist who was squeezed out of the Los Angeles Times (again) this year now runs in the Daily News. Martinez's debut DN column is about his daughters, one...
Posted June 8, 2009 11:26 PM
Mark Ficarra is stepping down as publisher of the Daily Breeze to become a VP at the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Register has lost investigative reporter Norberto Santana Jr. and...
Posted June 8, 2009 12:41 AM
Intriguing story out of the Chicago Tribune (via Romenesko) says that negotiations with big creditors of the bankrupt Tribune Company could lead to chairman Sam Zell losing his role. Details...
Posted June 7, 2009 8:33 PM
Just got a few emails observing with raised eyebrows that the top of the L.A. Times web home right now is devoted to a fluff piece on Conan O'Brien's second...
Posted June 3, 2009 4:25 PM
In the June issue of Los Angeles, our own Mark Lacter takes a look behind the sagging fortunes of the L.A. Times and finds a set of multifaceted challenges. The...
Posted June 2, 2009 9:40 AM
I've now read and thoroughly enjoyed Michael Connelly's latest book. In today's Times review, Tim Rutten calls "The Scarecrow" Connelly's best since "The Poet," and also the first novel to...
Posted May 27, 2009 11:53 PM
I just started reading Michael Connelly's latest Los Angeles mystery "The Scarecrow," and it feels hot off the presses. He's got the Rocky Mountain News shut down in Denver, newspapers...
Posted May 25, 2009 12:13 PM
Federal court oversight of the LAPD that was agreed to in a consent decree nine years ago "has been a resounding success, and it should at last be allowed to...
Posted May 25, 2009 11:09 AM
The second publisher has departed LA, the monthly magazine inserted in the Los Angeles Times by the ad side's editorial staff. And the new weekly insert LAetcetera is suspending publication...
Posted May 22, 2009 9:47 AM
Gov. Schwarzenegger leads the news at the top of today's Los Angeles Times front page, while an ad for the newest Terminator movie takes up the bottom of the page....
Posted May 21, 2009 9:26 AM
Today's New York Times food story on our legendary local Sriracha Chili Sauce has been the subject of some chatter on blogs and Twitter, and I even got an email...
Posted May 20, 2009 6:35 PM
With lots of careers ending today at William Morris and Endeavor, Hollywood writer Michael Oates Palmer gives a shout out to his now-unemployed agent: palmermix My agent was a casualty...
Posted May 18, 2009 4:25 PM
Former Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller has been appointed president and chief executive of Chicago's McCormick Foundation, which has been the charitable arm of the Tribune Company. Hiller worked...
Posted May 18, 2009 2:56 PM
I keep getting notes from readers about mistakes in the L.A. Times and on its website, including today's subhead gaffe saying the Hubble Space Telescope got new* telescopes rather than...
Posted May 16, 2009 12:25 PM
Ben Fritz has been freelancing for the L.A. Times for about a month and will be a general assignment reporter on entertainment, writing the Sunday box office roundup and items...
Posted May 12, 2009 1:14 PM
What we blurbed about in March is now official. L.A. Times reporter Tina Susman is moving from Baghdad to the paper's national bureau in New York. The memo from national...
Posted May 5, 2009 1:24 PM
"The Soloist," which I saw Saturday night in Los Feliz, worked well enough for me as entertainment, as a Los Angeles movie and as paean to the best role newspapers...
Posted May 4, 2009 12:14 AM
You might think the Los Angeles Times would do pretty much anything to keep the loyalty of possibly the last teenagers in L.A. who still consume news in print. But...
Posted April 27, 2009 11:34 PM
Editor in chief Joanne Lipman broke the news to the financial magazine's staff this morning, citing financial reasons at Advance, the parent of Conde Nast. The mag's media blogger Jeff...
Posted April 27, 2009 8:21 AM
Times staffers Jessica Garrison and Kim Christensen went big on Sunday's page one with an expose on oft-accused L.A. slumlord Frank McHugh. Money grafs: For more than 50 years, McHugh,...
Posted April 27, 2009 12:38 AM
An amalgam of observations and reports from the L.A. Times Festival of Books, held Saturday and Sunday at UCLA: There were really long lines to have books signed by children's...
Posted April 26, 2009 11:56 PM
How times change. Steve Wasserman, the former books editor at the Los Angeles Times, presided for years over the LAT Book Prizes soiree at UCLA's Royce Hall. He didn't even...
Posted April 25, 2009 9:57 AM
Add L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan to those reporting back with lukewarm reviews of "The Soloist," despite wanting to like it. I could back up and write all this in...
Posted April 24, 2009 9:14 AM
Longtime Los Angeles Times journalist Annette Haddad has died of cancer. Here's the newsroom announcement by editor Russ Stanton: From: Stanton, RussSent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:57 AMTo: yyeditallSubject: Annette...
Posted April 22, 2009 11:40 AM
The L.A. Times city desk has found a new use for its Twitter account: correcting its mistakes. Tweets have been circling around the details of Los Angeles restricting lawn watering:...
Posted April 22, 2009 10:52 AM
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
Los Angeles Times Metro staff writers Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting, announced today in New York. The prize is for their Big Burn...
Posted April 20, 2009 12:22 PM
Gustkey's byline appeared in the L.A. Times sports section for more than three decades, most notably on stories about boxing, the outdoors and the WNBA. "He was a sports editor's...
Posted April 19, 2009 11:38 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
Variety columnist and blogger Brian Lowry wasn't impressed by L.A. Times columnist-blogger Patrick Goldstein's recent critique of the trade paper and Peter Bart. Lowry's open letter to Goldstein gets a...
Posted April 16, 2009 12:18 PM
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took his campaign for state propositions 1A through 1F to the Los Angeles Times building tonight, telling an invited crowd of opinion shapers and readers that "the...
Posted April 15, 2009 11:05 PM
Peter H. King has been the Los Angeles Times city editor, California columnist, roving reporter and a writer of big stories over almost 30 years at the paper. He's jumping...
Posted April 15, 2009 10:25 PM
Jerry Gillam covered California government and politics for 40 years, most of that time in the Sacramento bureau of the Los Angeles Times. He left the Times in 1995. Gillam...
Posted April 13, 2009 8:30 PM
As expected, Sunday's four-page advertorial section for "The Soloist" in the Los Angeles Times is being talked about as the second act of the controversy that began with last week's...
Posted April 13, 2009 12:57 AM
Kinsey Lowe left the L.A. Times Calendar editing staff in one of the 2007 contractions, telling colleagues "I have the highest hopes for all of you and for the Los...
Posted April 10, 2009 2:52 PM
It has become a sadly familiar syndrome: L.A. Times ownership or management betrays readers in some new way, gets panned, then the paper reports and publicly reflects on the controversy....
Posted April 9, 2009 11:07 PM
Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein is addressing the newsroom this afternoon about the uproar over his decision to put an NBC ad designed to look like a news story on a...
Posted April 9, 2009 4:12 PM
Getting some more details on the debate inside the Los Angeles Times about today's front page ad for NBC. Newsroom sources say that as of Tuesday, publisher Eddy Hartenstein had...
Posted April 9, 2009 12:10 PM
Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein's latest split with his editors (and possibly some ad people) is over his advocacy of a front-page ad for tonight's NBC debut of "Southland"...
Posted April 9, 2009 12:49 AM
The annual awarding of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes has been moved from UCLA's Royce Hall, scene of a fairly copious free dinner and open bar for authors, invited...
Posted April 8, 2009 1:19 AM
An LA Observed reader spotted this latest headline goof on the L.A. Times website: Obama makes unexpected visit to Iran By Ned Parker, Laura King and Christi Parsons | 7:03...
Posted April 7, 2009 9:41 AM
Writer-producer Stu Kreisman has taken the Los Angeles Times for three decades, and he knows the paper still has some top writers. But management decisions to dilute the paper got...
Posted April 6, 2009 3:10 PM
This photo ran big on the front of the Los Angeles Times Sports section today with a caption reading in part "Kobe Bryant, left...tries to shoot over the Clippers' Fred...
Posted April 6, 2009 11:07 AM
In today's printed paper, the L.A. Times acknowledges its mistake (see Tomorrow's correction today?) in saying that a lesbian sought to become a priest of the Presbyterian church. "The church...
Posted April 1, 2009 11:35 AM
Regarding an unbylined item in today's L.A. Times about a lesbian Presbyterian seeking to be ordained as a minister (or priest, as the Times put it), an LA Observed reader...
Posted March 30, 2009 9:59 PM
This time it's Aaron Curtiss, the former innovation editor at the Los Angeles Times, moving over to the crisis PR shop run by Michael Sitrick. I had an item last...
Posted March 30, 2009 1:55 PM
The Times is moving "celebrity justice reporter" Harriet Ryan from Metro downstairs to the newly ascendant entertainment team. The former Court TV senior correspondent will be "part of our expanded...
Posted March 30, 2009 11:38 AM
Author and Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has several friends at the Los Angeles Times, but for years he has been advocating the demise of the paper — partly in the...
Posted March 28, 2009 9:58 PM
The L.A. Times recently gave the Calendar section a later copy deadline, made possible by the killing of the California section. But when you axe too many copy editors, stuff...
Posted March 27, 2009 9:47 AM
Hoy, the Spanish-language paper that reports to the marketing side of the Los Angeles Times, is switching from daily to weekly. The Times' Sunday magazine will narrow its circulation to...
Posted March 26, 2009 11:55 AM
Sigh. The website for the L.A. Times' new weekly tabloid for light readers, called Brand X, is already dysfunctional. Word from an insider is that it was "blocked inside the...
Posted March 25, 2009 11:52 PM
Unfortunate choice of names, perhaps, but the L.A. Times is officially calling its new weekly tabloid Brand X. It's the latest grasping at straws down on Spring Street and replaces...
Posted March 25, 2009 4:28 PM
From what I hear, some Los Angeles Times newsroom reporters and editors are still discussing with higher-ups whether to leave and under what conditions. So it's a developing situation. Here...
Posted March 25, 2009 9:27 AM
I asked Bruce Wallace, the L.A. Times' Foreign Editor, to detail the moves affecting his correspondents in the wake of today's announcement that the staff is combining with the Chicago...
Posted March 24, 2009 4:49 PM
This week's mix of voluntary departures and layoffs from the Los Angeles Times includes (in addition to those reported earlier) these staff veterans: William C. Rempel, a reporter and editor...
Posted March 24, 2009 4:24 PM
Editor Russ Stanton just sent the newsroom the word that the L.A. Times foreign staff will now be a Tribune operation, run out of Los Angeles with reporters from the...
Posted March 24, 2009 2:43 PM
The Roundup picks up that reporter Jordan Rau is leaving the L.A. Times Sacramento bureau, apparently not as part of today's layoffs. Presuming that Rau won't be replaced, the Sacto...
Posted March 23, 2009 4:34 PM
L.A. Times staffers affected by today's cuts began getting calls at home yesterday, with one of them transportation writer Steve Hymon. He posted confirmation of his layoff on his LAT...
Posted March 23, 2009 10:45 AM
Staffers in the Los Angeles Times newsroom expect the the next wave of forced departures to come down today, along with revelations of colleagues who choose this moment to retire...
Posted March 23, 2009 12:42 AM
Times media columnist James Rainey wrote over the weekend about how political pros love one unintended consequence of the wane of mainstream news outlets and the rise of blogs —...
Posted March 22, 2009 11:43 PM
Morley Safer did a nice piece on the connection between L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers, with some reportage on the Downtown street musician's former life as a...
Posted March 22, 2009 8:05 PM
For the past few years, Times reporter Hugo Martin has hiked, skied and soaked in hot springs for the Travel section. No more: now he's going to the Business section...
Posted March 20, 2009 7:48 AM
Tina Daunt says in the Times that President Obama bedded down at the Century Plaza. The Beverly Hills Courier, however, reports that he was at the Beverly Hilton and has...
Posted March 19, 2009 11:58 PM
David Lauter was promoted to L.A. Times assistant managing editor. "This appointment reflects David's skilled leadership of our largest and most important news-gathering operation, the local and California report," says...
Posted March 18, 2009 11:49 AM
Bob Dylan's neighbors in Malibu are up in arms over his porta-potty. Bob Pool at LA Times.com: How sweet is life when you live next to a celebrity in Malibu?...
Posted March 16, 2009 4:55 PM
I don't typically flag routine media typos — never have, and less so these days — but this error on the L.A. Times website today seems to have bothered people....
Posted March 13, 2009 3:45 PM
In a "Blowback" piece on the Times' opinion web page, former LAT staffer Allan Jalon goes into the controversy that ensued after Jim Bellows let Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber...
Posted March 13, 2009 12:54 PM
A promotional video from 1993 [? see below] for the Los Angeles Times Valley Edition — an almost stand-alone newspaper put out by dozens of reporters, editors and other journalists...
Posted March 11, 2009 9:45 PM
Rick Wartzman is not some Twitter-happy newbie who naively pimps New Media and technology. He's the former Business Editor at the Los Angeles Times, and was the editor of the...
Posted March 11, 2009 6:31 PM
Melissa McCoy is the Los Angeles Times deputy managing editor for copy desks, standards and the editorial library. She's decided to leave at the end of the week. Her email...
Posted March 10, 2009 4:14 PM
The KFI talk hosts helped draw an estimated 8,000 people to a tax revolt rally in Orange County on Saturday. (Here's the Register story, and the Orange Juice blog.) The...
Posted March 10, 2009 12:15 AM
Rick Wartzman, the former editor of the LAT's own West magazine, is a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book prize in the history category for "Obscene in the Extreme:...
Posted March 2, 2009 12:52 PM
The New York Times' latest ad pitch to gather up defecting L.A. Times readers shows stories out of here on the Lakers, Eli Broad, William Bratton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney,...
Posted March 1, 2009 9:28 PM
While Los Angeles readers will mostly have to just look elsewhere in the paper to find the news that used to appear in California, for those in Orange County this...
Posted February 26, 2009 11:28 PM
John Corrigan succeeds Sallie Hofmeister as editor of the Los Angeles Times Business staff. Here's this afternoon's newsroom memo from editor Russ Stanton: Colleagues, John Corrigan, deputy business editor for...
Posted February 26, 2009 2:38 PM
The L.A. Times editorial board, in a slap to the mayor and City Council, recommends a no vote on Measure B: Set aside, for a moment, the secretive and rushed...
Posted February 26, 2009 8:56 AM
For the first time, Times reporters and editors covering entertainment in Calendar will work alongside the Business staffers who cover the harder news side of Hollywood. A new masthead job...
Posted February 25, 2009 1:50 PM
When the L.A. Times kills the California section and moves local news inside the A section next week, the result will be less versatile space for news, fewer feature stories,...
Posted February 25, 2009 8:32 AM
Even before last week's new round of departures from the Times, the paper's once-signature foreign staff had shrunk. The bureaus in Tokyo, Paris and Rome have been listed as vacant...
Posted February 24, 2009 12:53 AM
Phil Willon, the L.A. Times City Hall reporter whose beat is mostly Mayor Villaraigosa, delivers a pre-election analysis that declares the mayor's record mixed. Villaraigosa gets credit from Willon for...
Posted February 22, 2009 11:57 PM
The Times unveiled its Mapping L.A. effort to identify Los Angeles neighborhoods yesterday and has been getting lots of online reaction and suggestions at the paper's website. A story that...
Posted February 20, 2009 9:14 AM
Monica Corcoran, a staff writer in the L.A. Times Image section, was on the front page this morning with a co-byline on a piece about Oscar fashion being toned down...
Posted February 19, 2009 5:17 PM
Los Angeles-based tech writer Joseph Menn has been on book leave. In a note to the Times newsroom that I've heard described as "droll," Menn announces that he's moving back...
Posted February 19, 2009 4:11 PM
I'm told now that the pending wave of departures from the Los Angeles Times newsroom will be split into two phases: with voluntary departures and a relatively small number of...
Posted February 19, 2009 8:58 AM
Abigail Goldman, who told colleagues that she raised her hand to leave the Los Angeles Times, was the last remaining member of the four-reporter team that won the Pulitzer Prize...
Posted February 18, 2009 1:12 AM
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
Joe Mathews, who left the Los Angeles Times last year to write and be a New America Foundation fellow, says in the New Republic that reading the paper these days...
Posted February 17, 2009 8:57 AM
Staffers who had been preparing for the axing of 70+ co-workers today are now expecting the newsroom to get hit on Thursday....
Posted February 16, 2009 5:55 PM
The Times' L.A. Now blog, in reporting Chris Brown's apology, locates the incident with Rihanna in "the Westside neighborhood of Hancock Park." Well, I guess it is west of the...
Posted February 16, 2009 12:44 AM
The next big wave of journalist departures from the Los Angeles Times is due to start Monday — and continue at the end of the month, apparently — but Metro...
Posted February 13, 2009 4:41 PM
Newsroom staffers at the Los Angeles Times have been told to expect the newest layoff taps to be delivered Monday, amid talk that the numbers to be let go are...
Posted February 12, 2009 2:25 PM
The Los Angeles Times editorial pages don't get as much use out of their website as I expected — the blogroll would have been light in 2006, for instance —...
Posted February 12, 2009 1:54 PM
The Huffington Post says the L.A. Times was the first major media outlet to identify Rihanna as the victim of Sunday's early morning domestic violence, "despite the LAPD's refusal to...
Posted February 9, 2009 11:00 PM
Relaunch of L.A. Now is in the works, plus the much-needed redesign and more links to blogs and other free non-Times content: "simply doing a better job of linking to...
Posted February 4, 2009 4:30 PM
The pressmen's union at the L.A. Times has been told it looks as if 63 of the 244 workers at the printing plants downtown and in Costa Mesa will be...
Posted February 4, 2009 2:30 PM
The New York Times has a series of nicely done Flash ads running on LATimes.com playing off the popularity of Obama coverage and offering, among another things, a "weekender" subscription...
Posted February 3, 2009 10:18 PM
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
County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky just sent a letter to Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein urging him to reconsider his decision to fold local news into the A section and...
Posted February 2, 2009 4:43 PM
Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, is answering questions from readers this week on the NYT website. He extolls the virtues of good journalism and explains the...
Posted February 2, 2009 12:36 PM
Readers have pointed out this tagline at the end of the Times' Super Bowl ads story in today's paper and online: Editor's note: This review has been ended because of...
Posted February 2, 2009 11:44 AM
Los Angeles Times staffers were told Friday by resigned editors that publisher Eddy Hartenstein realized there would be a sizable public backlash against his decision to kill the local news...
Posted February 1, 2009 11:52 PM
* Saturday updates are down below There's been a lot of email, blog and Facebook traffic reacting to my report this morning that the publisher of the Los Angeles Times...
Posted January 30, 2009 11:14 PM
With the news out about killing of the California section, Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein and editor Russ Stanton have sent around their memos announcing the latest round of...
Posted January 30, 2009 12:42 PM
Publisher Eddy Hartenstein has ordered the California section killed, leaving the L.A. Times without a separate local news front for the first time since the paper's early decades. The publisher...
Posted January 30, 2009 12:45 AM
Hollywood apparently isn't impressed that the new Los Angeles Times thinks the cutting-edge way to cover Sundance is to give a print reporter a cheap cellphone camera and have him...
Posted January 29, 2009 9:50 PM
Maybe this has been up for awhile, but it was just pointed out to me today. The L.A. Times website has a little photo slide show feature called: "Are you...
Posted January 26, 2009 11:23 AM
The Los Angeles Times staffers I've heard from seem pretty convinced there will be a new round of newsroom bloodletting next week, with many fearing the firing starts Monday. A...
Posted January 23, 2009 8:20 PM
I'm glad to see the most emailed L.A. Times story right now is the one I enjoyed the most in yesterday's paper — Food Editor Russ Parsons' guide to caramelizing...
Posted January 22, 2009 1:03 PM
The Los Angeles Times has a thick book of style conventions that seem more and more to be ignored, especially online — same with past work by in-house committees to...
Posted January 22, 2009 12:45 AM
Rumors have been swirling at the Los Angeles Times about lists being pulled together for the next round of newsroom cuts, but there's been a lack of solid numbers and...
Posted January 19, 2009 8:52 PM
Copies of the Nov. 5 edition of the Los Angeles Times cost 50 cents on the street the day after the election. Today at the Martin Luther King Day parade...
Posted January 19, 2009 12:21 PM
Dropped again as a Times columnist, Al Martinez writes his final column for the paper: Actually, this is my second final column. I wrote one a year or so ago...
Posted January 19, 2009 2:14 AM
Those supposedly secret reader survey panels convened by the Los Angeles Times to provide feedback on proposed changes — thanks for the posts, guys — are no more. An email...
Posted January 15, 2009 9:43 AM
The New York Times is a forming a team of seven reporters from several desks to ramp up its coverage of environmental issues and news. The team includes former L.A....
Posted January 13, 2009 11:55 AM
Invitation-only forums and salons hosted by media outlets are becoming more common. The L.A. Times has one tonight to talk about the Obama transition, with an eclectic mix of speakers...
Posted January 13, 2009 11:25 AM
Author J. Michael Walker didn't mind that three brochures for local arts institutions — REDCAT, the L.A. Art Show and the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage — tumbled out his...
Posted January 13, 2009 12:07 AM
The street sale price of the Los Angeles Times went up to 75 cents (from 50) all over town today, judging by my email....
Posted January 12, 2009 11:34 AM
David Lauter, California editor of the L.A. Times, has been replying to readers upset at the latest dropping of Al Martinez' column. Lauter's reply was posted online by the paper,...
Posted January 12, 2009 12:27 AM
Word, unconfirmed, out of 1st and Spring is that Metromix Los Angeles is shutting down — the Tribune pub's staff will merge with the staff of The Guide at the...
Posted January 9, 2009 8:43 PM
L.A. Times Editor Russ Stanton sent the staff a note about the approaching re-departure of Al Martinez from the columnist ranks. Here's the LAO exclusive from Wednesday. Stanton's note today...
Posted January 9, 2009 8:28 PM
Traffic was up an average of 83% over last year, with local readership up 54% and overall page views up 47%, says the year-end memo from LATimes.com executive editor Meredith...
Posted January 8, 2009 8:58 AM
This time the editors mean it: Al Martinez's last column is scheduled to run in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 19. He asked to go until his 80th birthday...
Posted January 7, 2009 3:52 PM
Doug Frantz, one of the many senior Los Angeles Times editors to depart in recent years, has been named chief investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under new chairman...
Posted January 7, 2009 11:05 AM
These two items aren't really related, but they came in at the same time and are both about the new Los Angeles Times. First, right now the story at the...
Posted January 6, 2009 10:45 PM
This year the L.A. Times didn't fall back into the trap of reporting the old canard that a million spectators watched the Rose Parade. But the editor in charge of...
Posted January 6, 2009 6:45 PM
There's been plenty of drama at the Los Angeles Times the last couple of years — and now there's a documentary. "Inventing Los Angeles: The Chandlers and their Times" hits...
Posted January 6, 2009 3:32 PM
Everyone in power at the Los Angeles Times vowed that 2008 would be the year the paper stopped making news for the wrong reasons — remember how unbelievable 2007 seemed?...
Posted January 3, 2009 11:12 PM
To save a very small number of bucks, the Los Angeles Times has again decided to close the building's historic entrance — and to block public access to the carefully...
Posted December 29, 2008 12:26 PM
Friday was the last day at the paper for Times Poll director Susan Pinkus and assistant director Jill Darling. The latter sent around the newsroom an email saying the poll's...
Posted December 20, 2008 9:59 AM
At yesterday's discussion of Tribune's bankruptcy and other journalism cuts at USC, L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton was asked by one of his staffers about the latest newsroom gossip that...
Posted December 19, 2008 8:07 AM
California Editor David Lauter rebutted former reporter Anita Busch's comments yesterday in court tying the L.A. Times to convicted private eye Anthony Pellicano. Lauter, who emailed the response to Patterico,...
Posted December 16, 2008 9:39 PM
The Los Angeles Times website is dropping the MyLATimes feature for organizing stories as of Dec. 22....
Posted December 16, 2008 10:48 AM
At today's sentencing of Anthony Pellicano, former Los Angeles Times Hollywood reporter Anita Busch — she's also the ex-editor of The Hollywood Reporter — accuses the Times of collaborating with...
Posted December 15, 2008 9:15 PM
I guess it was personal with Carina Chocano. [Or not. See note.] Two months after laying her off, the Los Angeles Times today named a new second film critic to...
Posted December 15, 2008 11:41 AM
Just about everybody, says law professor and former political consultant Susan Estrich in her column at the Cagle Post: The once mighty Times has managed to give almost everyone in...
Posted December 10, 2008 12:08 PM
If the Los Angeles Times owes you money, you might have to wait a long time. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein told the staff yesterday that the Chapter 11 filing freezes pending...
Posted December 9, 2008 8:26 AM
Matthew Garrahan, the Financial Times' man in Los Angeles, updates the U.K. readership on all this hand-wringing out here about the L.A. Times. Excerpt: The speed of cuts implemented first...
Posted December 8, 2008 10:06 PM
With all that's gone down at the L.A. Times on Sam Zell's watch, it's good to point out that the paper has retained most of its foreign-based staff writers (even...
Posted December 8, 2008 2:41 PM
From Tribune's internal Q-&-A on the impacts of today's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing: How are severance payments affected? All ongoing severance payments, deferred compensation and other payments to former employees...
Posted December 8, 2008 12:46 PM
The L.A. Times has dusted off the dormant title of Metro Editor and moved veteran Steve Clow into the role as number two on local coverage. Most recently he had...
Posted December 4, 2008 2:31 PM
Hard science coverage, which the L.A. Times has been gradually downgrading for years, takes a back seat to health coverage. Space reporter John Johnson moves to National rather than go...
Posted December 3, 2008 5:25 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
David Willman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 investigation into the FDA's approval of some deadly drugs, is one of the solid reporters to recently leave the former...
Posted December 3, 2008 12:44 PM
I hate to think what fresh traffic generation gimmicks these stats might encourage at LATimes.com, but the numbers are surprising. Even after all the photo galleries, reader pets, Oscar speculation...
Posted December 2, 2008 6:41 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
In this month's installment of the new Los Angeles Times Magazine, editor Annie Gilbar explains: I think pessimism is a bummer. It is also kind of irresponsible, because it's infectious....
Posted November 30, 2008 10:46 AM
Don Heckman has been the unofficial jazz critic of the Los Angeles Times since hall of famer Leonard Feather died in 1994. But Heckman blogs today that he thinks he...
Posted November 22, 2008 10:19 PM
Eric Ulken, who recently left as editor for interactive technology at LATimes.com, shares some lessons learned with USC's Online Journalism Review. His main case study is the project to develop...
Posted November 22, 2008 2:07 PM
Longtime L.A. journalist (and former LA Weekly media columnist) Marc Cooper was disappointed last night to find that the Los Angeles Times website's main story was a feature rather than...
Posted November 21, 2008 8:59 AM
The Los Angeles Times, which never had trouble making gobs of money until very recently, is loving the Obama phenomenon so far. The paper's hawking of front pages and other...
Posted November 20, 2008 1:52 PM
Retired USC Annenberg professor and CBS News correspondent Murray Fromson writes at the Huffington Post that Sam Zell has gotten off too easy for destroying the Los Angeles Times Washington...
Posted November 20, 2008 10:23 AM
The Los Angeles Times features — not in the good way — in a Columbia Journalism Review critique of science reporting that makes too credulous use of news releases written...
Posted November 19, 2008 2:19 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
First, some good news. Remember Lauren Beale, who edits the Times' real estate section? Though her name made the list of the 75 editorial employees cut from the newsroom last...
Posted November 16, 2008 1:00 PM
Chief Tribune innovation honcho, Lee Abrams, was in town this week for a Press Club event and, in addition to this YouTube video, left a flurry of news stories...
Posted November 15, 2008 12:17 PM
There's a cottage industry of black humor and killer irony at the Times thanks to Lee Abrams' smug memos, with their hefty helpings of hubris tinged with Tourettes. Here's one...
Posted November 14, 2008 12:07 PM
Talk about a power vacuum. The LA Times Washington bureau is no more. What we get instead is a Tribune Washington News Bureau which, as Kevin blogged earlier, will feed...
Posted November 14, 2008 11:11 AM
Here's another body blow for our hometown paper -- Virginia Ellis, the Times' Sacramento bureau chief, is retiring. She'd been planning to leave last year but, when asked to please...
Posted November 13, 2008 3:37 PM
Assistant national editor Millie Quan will become the new Column One editor at the Los Angeles Times, not the senior editor in Features as announced in August. Of course, the...
Posted November 12, 2008 10:25 AM
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
The Washington Post is doubling the size of its White House beat and including a web person, "The Fix" online columnist Chris Cillizza. Romenesko Meanwhile, today's naming of Cissy Baker...
Posted November 7, 2008 3:25 PM
As expected, Tribune just announced that it's merging the Washington bureaus of the Los Angeles Times and its other papers and placing the bureau under Cissy Baker, vice president/news operations...
Posted November 7, 2008 11:36 AM
The lead movie review in today's print Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times isn't by lead critic Kenneth Turan (his review of Stranded gets second billing.) Or Carina Chocano,...
Posted November 7, 2008 9:56 AM
Tongue-in-cheek Q-and-A with the Jewish Journal. Excerpt: JJ: How does it feel to write for The L.A. Times when they're so publicly crumbling? JS: It's not a happy place. It's...
Posted November 6, 2008 11:58 PM
Newspapers across the country are selling out today and in some cases going back to press. Kudo email to the staff from Tribune chief Randy Michaels says the Los Angeles...
Posted November 5, 2008 2:37 PM
Los Angeles Times editors had decided, weirdly, not to run Garry Trudeau's vantage point on the election in tomorrow's Doonesbury strip because he assumed a victory by Barack Obama. Editors...
Posted November 4, 2008 3:47 PM
There were two prominent stories at the top of Sunday's Los Angeles Times front page, but only one of them was reported by Times staffers. The other — the one...
Posted November 2, 2008 8:57 PM
Word from Sacramento is that Bill Stall, the Los Angeles Times' Pulitzer-winning editorial writer, died today after suffering from emphysema. The Times is working on an obituary, and colleague Karin...
Posted November 2, 2008 5:22 PM
The Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, one of the last pre-Tribune strengths of the paper still mostly intact, has been told that Chicago will announce this Friday that the bureau...
Posted November 2, 2008 12:58 PM
Critic Christopher Knight found LACMA's exhibit of celebrity portraits by Vanity Fair a curious choice for an art museum — "a vanity exhibition, plain and simple" — especially since it...
Posted October 31, 2008 9:12 AM
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
There had been speculation that Marjorie Miller might leave the Los Angeles Times after stepping down in June as Foreign Editor, but instead she's moving downstairs to be an editorial...
Posted October 30, 2008 12:23 PM
The L.A. Times admirably sent out an email bulletin to website subscribers right after the Phillies won the World Series. Alas, they got the opposing team wrong. Thrice. From: Los...
Posted October 29, 2008 8:04 PM
Daniel Hernandez is a former L.A. Times staff writer now working on a book in Mexico City. He's watching the continued outflow of talent from the paper and wonders, as...
Posted October 29, 2008 10:24 AM
Yesterday's newsroom cost-cutting is shaping up as the biggest single downshift in content and staff depth in the history of the Los Angeles Times — with big hits in Washington,...
Posted October 28, 2008 11:10 AM
With the 75 job cuts yesterday, which was another 10% of the staff, the newsroom has eliminated at least 250 positions this year, the paper's story says. The editorial staff...
Posted October 28, 2008 9:24 AM
Eddy Hartenstein, the L.A. Times' rookie publisher, cheerleads in a memo to the paper's entire staff. I can just hear them muttering bullshit throughout the building. From: Hartenstein, Eddy Sent:...
Posted October 27, 2008 5:44 PM
As per my usual practice, I'll list staff departures from the Los Angeles Times who put out the word that they're leaving or whose exit I'm able to confirm. They...
Posted October 27, 2008 3:58 PM
The film reviewer who was billed as such a big hire when she replaced Manohla Dargis a few years ago confirmed to Mayrav Saar at Fishbowl LA that she was...
Posted October 27, 2008 12:48 PM
This morning's email memo from editor Russ Stanton on layoffs in the Los Angeles Times newsroom: From: Stanton, Russ To: yyeditall Sent: Mon Oct 27 08:31:50 2008 Subject: Newsroom job...
Posted October 27, 2008 9:39 AM
A friend who was listening to the L.A. Kings telecast from St. Louis the other night called to tell me the team's longtime, much-honored and very mild-mannered broadcaster, Bob Miller,...
Posted October 26, 2008 10:20 PM
When the Los Angeles Times tinkered with its design this week, the Sports section stopped producing the long-standing Morning Briefing feature. Papers all around the country used MB in their...
Posted October 23, 2008 4:07 PM
Jonathan Dobrer is an author and professor of comparative religion at American Jewish University, but the subject of his post today at the Daily News' Friendly Fire opinion blog is...
Posted October 21, 2008 11:55 PM
The final word on this wave of newsroom layoffs at the L.A. Times — and on whose buyout offers are accepted — may not come until next week, but in...
Posted October 21, 2008 4:36 PM
Michael Whitley, assistant managing editor for design and graphics, talks about the visual tweaks that appeared in the Los Angeles Times this morning over at the Society for News Design's...
Posted October 21, 2008 3:53 PM
Not much to say about today's lite redesign of the Los Angeles Times. They added the color to the nameplates that I told you about, moved "Times Staff Writer" to...
Posted October 21, 2008 9:26 AM
Eighteen month after writing a column about becoming Christine Daniels, veteran sportswriter Mike Penner has quietly returned to work at the Los Angeles Times, according to multiple sources close to...
Posted October 20, 2008 6:02 PM
The Los Angeles Times won't unveil its top to bottom redesign until Tuesday's paper, but Tribune innovation dude Lee Abrams shared his thoughts with the staff. He sounds kind of...
Posted October 20, 2008 1:30 PM
In a long blog post at Opinion L.A., editorial page editor Jim Newton says the paper's editorial supporting Barack Obama has gotten a near-record response and was written wholly without...
Posted October 20, 2008 8:59 AM
The movie based on LAT columnist Steve Lopez's stories and book about homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers was already being promoted in trailers. But Paramount bumped it from the November schedule,...
Posted October 18, 2008 8:59 AM
Courthouse News reports: A longtime copy editor for the Los Angeles Times sued Tribune Co. for age discrimination, claiming it fired him and 111 other people older than 40 in...
Posted October 17, 2008 8:15 PM
For the first time since backing Richard Nixon in 1972, the Los Angeles Times editorial board has publicly endorsed a candidate for president. It's also the first time ever that...
Posted October 17, 2008 6:00 PM
OK, so first the story is reported — back in the 1980s — that a big, fat Sunday Los Angeles Times landed on and crushed a dog belonging to actress...
Posted October 15, 2008 10:47 PM
Though Herald Examiner fans love the tale of a Sunday Los Angeles Times crushing Barbara Bain's dog in the 80s, a former Times staffer who I know sends along an...
Posted October 14, 2008 5:05 PM
Nick Goldberg, who has run Op-Ed, officially gets the title of deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages with added responsibilities. Sue Horton, who was editor of Sunday...
Posted October 14, 2008 4:46 PM
In Los Angeles media circles the legend is told that in the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times was so fat with news, feature stories and ads that a paper thrown...
Posted October 14, 2008 12:18 AM
L.A. Times Editor Russ Stanton today named Alice Short, the former editor of the L.A. Times Magazine, as an assistant managing editor to oversee some of the feature sections that...
Posted October 13, 2008 11:19 PM
I'm told the Los Angeles Times mailroom opened a hand-scrawled letter today that read "death to Obama" and contained a white powder that triggered a call to the FBI and...
Posted October 10, 2008 10:54 PM
Associate Editor Leo Wolinsky checked out Friday, the first to go in the new wave of departures from the Los Angeles Times. He had been there 31 years, starting as...
Posted October 10, 2008 10:20 PM
I got a look at some of the latest Los Angeles Times redesign options being tested with selected readers. They're being asked their reaction to new designs for the front...
Posted October 8, 2008 11:44 PM
Roy Rivenburg's tongue-in-cheek Not the Los Angeles Times jumped right on the news that the real LAT publisher, Eddy Hartenstein, is warning employees that it's "treason" — treason I say!...
Posted October 8, 2008 5:44 PM
I've never felt the need to do this before, but it seems prudent to alert the Los Angeles Times staffers who help me stay informed about the inner workings of...
Posted October 8, 2008 1:12 AM
This time — just weeks after the last, historically deep round of newsroom and content cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times concluded — I'm hearing there's a fair bit of...
Posted October 7, 2008 11:09 PM
This is a breaking situation this afternoon. Editors met over the weekend to get the word and to refine their lists. Newsroom staffers are being told today individually and in...
Posted October 6, 2008 2:53 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
Native Intelligence contributor Adrienne Crew made a nice find for fans of L.A. media history: a web archive of covers from West, the Sunday magazine in the Los Angeles...
Posted October 5, 2008 11:55 PM
The top grossing release at LATimes.com for the month of September was Gloria Steinem's Op-Ed piece called Palin: wrong woman, wrong message. The latest monthly update from website executive editor...
Posted October 2, 2008 2:30 PM
Garrett Therolf gets a partner in the Times' big but lonely office tucked away in the Hall of Administration on Temple Street. Molly Hennessy-Fiske has worked in Washington, Baghdad and...
Posted September 30, 2008 11:16 AM
Ex-LAT reporter and editor William Lobdell took some meaning from a recent perusal of the most-viewed stories at the Times and Register websites, concluding that the opinion pieces, crime briefs...
Posted September 30, 2008 9:40 AM
Upon hearing of Paul Newman's death, Times sports writer Lisa Dillman had to go right out and rent "Slap Shot." Does "Slap Shot," and its player-coach leader, hold up or...
Posted September 28, 2008 9:10 AM
No felony charge for Kanye West in that scuffle with a photographer at LAX. Reuters New editor assignments on the L.A. Times city desk — involving Nita Lelyveld and...
Posted September 26, 2008 10:40 PM
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
1) An LA Observed reader spots this politically balanced — if illogical — disagreement between facts on a news story up on the Los Angeles Times website this morning: [The...
Posted September 25, 2008 1:22 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
Last night's contrasting of New York Times and Los Angeles Times web editing choices elicited a bit of snark from up north. The SF Weekly suggests at least a different...
Posted September 23, 2008 5:38 PM
Major economic news from Wall Street and the nation's capital, or cute furry kitties speaking baby talk? You decide. These screen grabs of the New York Times and Los Angeles...
Posted September 23, 2008 12:25 AM
I guess Jim Newton really didn't want to leave the Los Angeles Times to write his book about Dwight Eisenhower — and that Publisher David Hiller was the main reason...
Posted September 19, 2008 12:12 PM
Sam Zell responded to yesterday's class-action lawsuit by Los Angeles Times employees — which was first reported here — in a Dear Partners note to the company. He calls the...
Posted September 17, 2008 2:55 PM
A few minutes ago I added the names of the Los Angeles Times columnist and former reporters who sued Sam Zell in federal court today, alleging he messed with the...
Posted September 16, 2008 12:44 PM
The film in which Robert Downey Jr. portrays LAT columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx plays downtown street musician Nathaniel Ayers, must be getting close. The trailer runs 2:31 on...
Posted September 16, 2008 11:10 AM
I'm told that lawyers representing current and former Los Angeles Times newsroom staffers are filing a class-action federal lawsuit against Sam Zell and Tribune this morning in Los Angeles, alleging...
Posted September 16, 2008 10:12 AM
New York-based publishing writer Josh Getlin signed out over the weekend with an email to his colleagues. His job was eliminated in the July cutbacks. From: Getlin, Josh Sent: Sunday,...
Posted September 15, 2008 11:16 AM
Every big newspaper used to have a bar nearby where reporters stayed too late, editors brought new hires to get acquainted over drinks, and Pulitzers were celebrated. For the L.A....
Posted September 11, 2008 12:59 AM
Even the original item sounds skeptical, but the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street page speculates today that Sam Zell may share the newspaper empire-building gene of his predecessors...
Posted September 10, 2008 10:55 PM
The NYT's T Magazine also noticed the resemblance between its cover and the Los Angeles Times Magazine cover. (My post from yesterday.) The LAT mag's creative director, Rip Georges, calls...
Posted September 10, 2008 10:35 PM
I finally listened to the whole interview that Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton gave the Daily Sundial at Cal State Northridge, linked in Monday's Morning Buzz. He drops a...
Posted September 10, 2008 12:03 AM
In the foreground, the New York Times' successful fashion magazine. In the background, the L.A. Times Magazine that made its first appearance Sunday, hoping to be accepted as a fashion...
Posted September 9, 2008 11:04 PM
I enjoyed reading the story of Tom Dreesen and Tim Reid, who met at a Jaycees meeting outside Chicago in 1968 and struggled to break through as a black-and-white comedy...
Posted September 9, 2008 10:41 PM
According to an editor's email sent to Calendar staffers on Friday, Los Angeles Times Magazine publisher Valarie Anderson left the company even before the first issue came out on Sunday....
Posted September 8, 2008 10:05 PM
Sunday brought the first edition of the new Los Angeles Times Magazine that isn't part of the Los Angeles Times, but that comes in the Times. It's 144 pages and...
Posted September 8, 2008 12:58 AM
House ads the past couple of weeks have revealed that the new magazine will indeed carry the old Los Angeles Times Magazine label, despite complaints from the paper's top editors...
Posted September 5, 2008 10:47 AM
A lot like the old L.A. Times rules, with small adjustments for the more casual lexicon of the web. The Readers Representative blog discusses a memo from Deputy Managing Editor...
Posted September 4, 2008 9:17 AM
The previous publisher of the Times, David Hiller, used to break out in song around the office (he favored pieces from musicals) and even belted out a respectable national anthem...
Posted September 3, 2008 5:32 PM
Top of the Ticket has reached #85 on the Technorati hit parade, LATimes.com executive editor Meredith Artley says in her wrap-up for August. More highlights: Total traffic to the Times...
Posted September 3, 2008 4:54 PM
Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton welcomed the staff back from Labor Day with encouragement to do good work — and plans to reorganize where people sit. His email this...
Posted September 2, 2008 10:39 AM
Today's New York Times story says right up high in the fourth graf that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced her daughter Bristol's pregnancy "after a swirl of rumors by liberal...
Posted September 1, 2008 11:30 PM
Houston bureau chief Miguel Bustillo jumps to the Wall Street Journal. He is a product of the LAT's once-lauded minority intern program. His exit email to the staff wonders why...
Posted August 29, 2008 5:12 PM
Scott Martelle has been busily covering the presidential election for the Los Angeles Times, including many posts to the Top of the Ticket blog. But he was tapped on the...
Posted August 29, 2008 7:56 AM
The L.A. Times says it omitted race from the descriptions of three Melrose-area serial robbers by mistake. From the Reader's Representative blog: At least a dozen readers sent a question...
Posted August 28, 2008 9:30 AM
Those fears within the Tribune about Sam Zell's radio-izing of the company look even more justified now. A day after the Los Angeles Times hired a top executive with roots...
Posted August 27, 2008 11:58 AM
Investigative reporter T. Christian Miller is joining the Los Angeles Times exodus to ProPublica, the non-profit that hired Pulitzer winners Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber. Miller's exit e-mail, sent recently:...
Posted August 26, 2008 10:10 AM
Publisher Eddy Hartenstein had made his first move, adding a new senior executive and "chief revenue officer" at the Los Angeles Times — and grabbing him from the parent company...
Posted August 26, 2008 9:58 AM
Sometime this fall the Los Angeles Times will unveil wholesale changes that SoCal readers may or may not want. The reinvention of the Times as we know it was ordered...
Posted August 25, 2008 1:21 AM
Gawker has posted a whole bunch of excerpts from the Washington, D.C. case that led to a restraining order against former L.A. Times rising star Andrés Martinez. OK, he's a...
Posted August 22, 2008 5:33 PM
Kelly Mullens' attorney Blair Burk says in a statement that the lawsuit filed today by ex-L.A. Times editor Andres Martinez is without merit — and grows out of a restraining...
Posted August 21, 2008 6:26 PM
Whoa, this needs some background. Martinez is the former editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times who resigned last year over the brouhaha that resulted from his offer to...
Posted August 21, 2008 4:38 PM
Dave Strickler, a former USC research librarian, has painstakingly compiled an online database listing the run years and some details of every comic strip to appear in the Los Angeles...
Posted August 21, 2008 3:46 PM
The Los Angeles Times got beaten on Tuesday by the San Francisco Chronicle's disclosure of an FBI probe into City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. A memo to the staff last night...
Posted August 21, 2008 9:58 AM
Scott Kraft will move aside after the election to the new position of senior editor and roving correspondent — the special deals didn't end with Sam Zell, it seems —...
Posted August 20, 2008 3:54 PM
Bruce Wallace, currently a correspondent in Tokyo, gets the Foreign Editor job that Marjorie Miller said awhile back that she would be vacating. Here's the memo from Editor Russ Stanton:...
Posted August 20, 2008 3:46 PM
A story in the L.A. Times last week on reactions from local Russians to the events in Georgia was based on interviews conducted in Russian by Metro reporter Ann Simmons....
Posted August 19, 2008 5:57 PM
Corie Brown won a big-within-journalism award for a story on climate change and wine. Too bad she doesn't cover wine, or anything else, for the Los Angeles Times anymore. From:...
Posted August 19, 2008 5:22 PM
New Los Angeles Times Publisher Eddy Hartenstein met some of the staff this afternoon and didn't make any headlines. That's a switch from previous debuts by Times and Tribune executives....
Posted August 18, 2008 5:20 PM
Eddy Hartenstein's email to the staff is brief. He will address all hands at 3 pm. Good day, As an avid reader of The Times for more than 45 years,...
Posted August 18, 2008 11:55 AM
One of the challenges facing new L.A. Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein will be stopping the brain drain of top journalists who see no future in a Sam Zell-run media venture....
Posted August 16, 2008 12:50 AM
The reports — starting, I believe, with Cynthia Littleton in Variety back in July — have all been accurate. Up next in the rotating chair of Los Angeles Times publisher...
Posted August 16, 2008 12:37 AM
Even though Tribune's innovation guru keeps advising Sam Zell's newspapers to make stars of their staffs and be funnier, in last month's cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times the editors...
Posted August 15, 2008 10:58 AM
You may think the Los Angeles Times is shrinking in print, but don't let your eyes deceive you. This Sunday's LAT was 368 pages fatter than a week before, if...
Posted August 13, 2008 5:03 PM
Allan Sloan of Fortune Magazine, a persistent skeptic of Tribune dealings, breaks down Sam Zell's latest creative financing scheme for Marketplace: "The company is in, as you know, big trouble....What...
Posted August 11, 2008 10:45 PM
It was less than a year ago that L.A. Times Sports Editor Randy Harvey praised his hire of young Metro reporter Jonathan Abrams to cover the Clippers. Now it's the...
Posted August 5, 2008 2:51 PM
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
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
Michalene Busico, who left the Los Angeles Times last week, was one of the high-profile New York Times talents who jumped to the LAT during the John Carroll-Dean Baquet era....
Posted August 3, 2008 11:14 PM
Executive editor John Arthur to the L.A. Times newsroom early this morning, about the paper's scoop on the suicide of anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins: From: Arthur, John Sent: Friday, August...
Posted August 1, 2008 10:28 AM
Just before noon, the editors at LATimes.com decided to give one of the top spots at the Los Angeles Times home page to a story — and tag cloud —...
Posted July 31, 2008 1:10 PM
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
Joe Scott blogs that Sam Zell should sell the Los Angeles Times. What amazes is the current lack of outrage about the decline and fall of LA’s most important asset....I...
Posted July 30, 2008 12:15 AM
Here's the audio link for today's show on the Los Angeles Times. And a link to last night's Which Way, L.A.?, also on the Times. Tomorrow about 4:40 pm, I'm...
Posted July 29, 2008 4:33 PM
Nikki Finke blogs that she has heard from reliable sources that Eddy Hartenstein, the ex-chief of DirecTV, "is under serious consideration to be the new Los Angeles Times publisher, replacing...
Posted July 29, 2008 10:54 AM
The New York Observer visits with interns spending the summer at Sam Zell newspapers and finds they aren't exactly having a great time. The story leads, not surprisingly, with the...
Posted July 29, 2008 10:30 AM
This morning's newspaper feels like the smallest and lightest Los Angeles Times I've ever seen, with only six pages each in the Business and Sports sections (and not a single...
Posted July 29, 2008 8:56 AM
Scott Martelle, who has been covering the presidential campaign for the National politics desk, sent an email this afternoon to L.A. and literary contacts informing them that he got tapped...
Posted July 28, 2008 5:52 PM
The "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" drills down on the closure of newspaper book sections, pegged to the L.A. Times situation. Here's the email blast at Romenesko: This past Sunday, the...
Posted July 28, 2008 3:00 PM
Alan Mittelstaedt, formerly an editor and L.A. Sniper columnist at CityBeat and LA Weekly (and blogging at the Weekly and at Witness LA), is joining the editing staff at the...
Posted July 28, 2008 1:59 PM
Times book editor David Ulin tells Publishers Weekly that, in the post-Book Review era, the upside is that “editorially and aesthetically, we are going to be producing the same kind...
Posted July 28, 2008 7:58 AM
Former Times feature writer Roy Rivenburg calls his send-up Not the Los Angeles Times and includes spoof blogs by Sam Zell and Tribune innovation guru Lee Abrams, some digs at...
Posted July 28, 2008 12:07 AM
The end of several sections was formally announced in today's Los Angeles Times, starting with a wrap-around sheet on the paper itself that included a message from Editor Russ Stanton:...
Posted July 27, 2008 11:01 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
A large banner proclaiming Zell Hell was draped this morning off the corporate parking garage at the Los Angeles Times building in Downtown. It carries a link to TellZell.com, the...
Posted July 25, 2008 9:20 AM
Bob Carey is one of the Los Angeles Times photo staffers who were let go this week. Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, which is inviting parting journos to have...
Posted July 24, 2008 11:15 AM
TellZell.com got hold of the Powerpoint presentation for the new magazine that will replace the old Los Angeles Times Magazine, and it looks like pap. The mission statement: Loving L.A....
Posted July 23, 2008 4:44 PM
I'm hearing that at last night's L. A. Times farewell soiree, the elephant in the room, so to speak, was Eli Broad. The billionaire art patron was a very active...
Posted July 23, 2008 3:21 PM
If the new downZelled L.A. Times is going to convince people it knows about Los Angeles, it needs to stop describing places in Los Angeles as in "the Burbank area."...
Posted July 23, 2008 9:55 AM
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and ex-mayor Richard Riordan attended tonight's reception in the L.A. Times building for departing editor of the editorial pages Jim Newton. He quit June 3,...
Posted July 22, 2008 11:51 PM
When Jaime Cárdenas was hired as a Los Angeles Times sports writer last year, Sports editor Randy Harvey gave him special billing. Cárdenas was an intern with a personal story...
Posted July 22, 2008 3:02 PM
The hits just keep on coming, but not in the radio sense that the Zellots think about. Judy Pasternak, who won a prestigious enviro reporting award this year for her...
Posted July 22, 2008 11:45 AM
Yesterday it was the Book Review's former editors pleading to keep a distinct books presence in the Los Angeles Times. Today, Los Angeles author Daniel A. Olivas (Latinos in Lotusland,...
Posted July 22, 2008 10:55 AM
Truthdig's columnist writes: The decline of newspapers is not about the replacement of the antiquated technology of news print with the lightning speed of the Internet. It does not signal...
Posted July 22, 2008 9:24 AM
Los Angeles editor Kit Rachlis was an editor at the Los Angeles Times for six-plus years, mostly helping craft the kinds of narrative stories that fed the paper's reputation for...
Posted July 22, 2008 6:38 AM
The editor of Variety blogs: As another wave of Los Angeles Times staffers got their “farewell” notices last week, everyone seems willing to accept the notion that big city newspapers...
Posted July 22, 2008 5:52 AM
I make typos because I'm rushed and here alone, without another set of eyes until readers check in with their catches. The main page of LATimes.com makes typos because...the paper...
Posted July 21, 2008 2:40 PM
Now that the L.A. Times has folded its real Sunday magazine and laid off more than a hundred editorial staffers, the new upscale magazine being launched outside the newsroom's influence...
Posted July 21, 2008 9:35 AM
Four past book editors of the Los Angeles Times — Sonja Bolle, Digby Diehl, Jack Miles and Steve Wasserman — released a letter protesting the planned termination of the Sunday...
Posted July 21, 2008 9:20 AM
I'm woefully behind on emails and hope to catch up while traveling this weekend. Meanwhile, here's the link to Friday's LA Observed segment on KCRW. The script is posted below,...
Posted July 19, 2008 12:35 AM
Layoffs and voluntary departures continue at the Los Angeles Times, which has yet to reach the magic 150 figure for the newsrooms (250 paperwide.) Also, it seems that many staffers...
Posted July 17, 2008 11:08 PM
One of the big concerns I hear voiced repeatedly in Los Angeles about the new webbier, less journalistic L.A. Times is the fear that it will become LAT Lite: less...
Posted July 17, 2008 4:35 PM
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
Today's Los Angeles Times sports section, once a cash cow for the paper, carries a grand total of three tiny ads. That's 11 column inches of advertising across eight pages,...
Posted July 17, 2008 3:22 PM
Robert Abele at the LA Weekly wonders if the new character introduced in "The Closer" this season would be Sam Zell's idea of a model reporter. What’s with the inane,...
Posted July 17, 2008 9:05 AM
Departing Los Angeles Times reporters Marla Cone and William Lobdell will be on KPCC's "Airtalk" in the 10 o'clock hour, along with Book Editor David Ulin longtime sports writer and...
Posted July 17, 2008 8:58 AM
Confirmed departures not yet reported here, among the 150 editorial jobs (plus 100 outside the newsrooms) being lost by layoffs both voluntary and not: Steve Harvey learned he will no...
Posted July 16, 2008 11:57 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 L.A. Times local columnist writes today, "Like a lot of my colleagues, I've wondered if I should finally give it up, or might be forced to. But most of...
Posted July 16, 2008 8:44 AM
More confirmed departures: David Haldane was a reporter at the Times for 23 years, the last 16 in Orange County. "Yesterday (Monday) was my last day; I’m gone, gone, gone…...
Posted July 16, 2008 12:35 AM
This is a note that someone in the Los Angeles Times building taped to the wall where past Pulitzer winners are recognized. A bouquet of flowers was left on the...
Posted July 15, 2008 5:15 PM
OCWeekly's Gustavo Arellano exchanged email with William Lobdell, one of the Los Angeles Times staffers who is ankling the shrinking Orange County office. They appear together regularly on the Orange...
Posted July 15, 2008 4:10 PM
It's hard to know which would make Sam Zell happier — seeing so many prominent Times journalists heading out the door, or this headline that the editors have put in...
Posted July 15, 2008 2:24 PM
The Washington Post announced in the newsroom that Los Angeles correspondent William Booth is going back on the foreign beat. His wife, ex-foreign correspondent Anne-Marie O'Connor, will be leaving the...
Posted July 15, 2008 12:57 PM
Chuck Philips is the investigative reporter and Pulitzer winner whose March story linking rapper Sean Combs to an attack on Tupac Shakur was fully retracted by the Los Angeles Times...
Posted July 15, 2008 12:28 PM
Times publisher David Hiller invited staffers by email to drop in and say goodbye. He praises his executive assistant, Caroline Thorpe, who has worked with LAT publishers since Otis Chandler....
Posted July 15, 2008 10:21 AM
Turns out that the 150 or so newsroom staffers leaving the Los Angeles Times are a mix of buyout volunteers (who have to agree not to take another job until...
Posted July 15, 2008 1:10 AM
The company line, and what the Los Angeles Times reported as confirmed news on its website, is that David Hiller resigned as publisher. Now here's what he says: From: Hiller,...
Posted July 14, 2008 3:54 PM
Randy Michaels note to Tribunistas: I want to let you know that David Hiller has decided to step down as publisher of The Los Angeles Times, effective immediately. David took...
Posted July 14, 2008 12:33 PM
Editor Russ Stanton's memo to the staff says "Today, editors will begin notifying most of the 150 people who will be leaving us, and we hope to complete that process...
Posted July 14, 2008 12:10 PM
On the Los Angeles Times website: L.A.'s Latino mayor praises Obama at La Raza conference The locals just call him Villaraigosa. Shorter by two letters....
Posted July 14, 2008 12:11 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
Three newsworthy deaths today: Dr. Michael DeBakey, Tony Snow and Bobby Murcer. The Los Angeles Times website lede says of DeBakey, "preeminent cardiac surgeon saved millions with his breakthroughs." The...
Posted July 12, 2008 4:45 PM
Today's email from California Editor David Lauter about the preparations for layoffs at the Los Angeles Times. (The number hasn't risen above 150, he says.) It looks like next week...
Posted July 11, 2008 10:43 AM
That's how one staffer describes the mood around the Los Angeles Times offices, where editors were believed to be working last night on their final lists of staffers — 150...
Posted July 11, 2008 12:50 AM
The reason Sam Zell and company get so much attention (and let's face it, derision) here is not that they want to force change on institutions like the Times and...
Posted July 10, 2008 2:15 PM
With Sam Zell and Randy Michaels in town and making everybody antsy, and speculation raging in the newsroom about the future of Publisher David Hiller, the cutting out of printed...
Posted July 9, 2008 5:10 PM
In today's LAT, reviewer Leslie Brenner absolutely savages Gladstone's Malibu, the Pacific Coast Highway goldmine where former mayor Richard Riordan is the largest shareholder. The food is "abominable" and the...
Posted July 9, 2008 3:49 PM
Word swept through the Los Angeles Times newsroom today that managers were directed to prepare lists ranking staffers by level of talent then turn in the lists by tonight, a...
Posted July 8, 2008 5:50 PM
Sam Zell's in-house innovator Lee Abrams has memoed again, long and rambling and ungrammatical as usual. Now that the cost-cutting Los Angeles Times is apparently moving towards folding the stand-alone...
Posted July 8, 2008 9:15 AM
Investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for reporting on the deaths at King-Drew Medical Center, are leaving the Los Angeles Times for...
Posted July 7, 2008 12:11 PM
Surprise, a bit of good news about the Los Angeles Times. It appears that, just ahead of the layoff reaper, one of the paper's most graceful and reportedly highly paid...
Posted July 7, 2008 12:55 AM
It's not clear who was putting out the Los Angeles Times this afternoon, since the top editors attended the service for retired reporter Ken Reich. No hard feelings about his...
Posted July 3, 2008 11:54 PM
I'll be on with Larry Mantle about 10:06 am talking about the Times. Editor Russ Stanton goes on first. Update: Stanton sounded quite subdued and was frank about the Times...
Posted July 3, 2008 10:04 AM
There has been a range of reaction to the coming shrinkage of the Los Angeles Times, from horror and sadness to something close to glee from conservative haters of the...
Posted July 3, 2008 12:53 AM
"These moves will be difficult and painful," Times editor Russ Stanton says in a memo this afternoon that is short on details. He says the firings required will take place...
Posted July 2, 2008 3:46 PM
Six events at least, including a bunch involving contributors with business (or potentially so) pending at City Hall. David Zahniser touches on them at the Times' local blog, but for...
Posted June 30, 2008 4:14 PM
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
That's what retired Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Reich calls his series of blog posts telling a little bit about 75 former Times staffers who left during the later part...
Posted June 29, 2008 11:53 PM
Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller sent the staff a little pre-layoff salvo to prepare them for the cuts and repositioning that will be announced soon. Light on details, but...
Posted June 26, 2008 6:48 PM
Mark Lacter isn't alone in predicting that Sam Zell would be lucky to get any value for the Los Angeles Times property in the Civic Center. Downtown guru Tom Gilmore...
Posted June 25, 2008 3:38 PM
I'd much rather not be posting all the time about a Chicago billionaire, but Sam Zell is L.A.'s biggest news media mogul right now. Yesterday at a taping for Dave...
Posted June 25, 2008 10:28 AM
Tribune's Lee Abrams, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, sought to clarify some of his image as...a not very informed observer of newspapers, even though he's the...
Posted June 24, 2008 9:55 PM
Radio talker Hugh Hewitt offers some new advice to Sam Zell and Randy Michaels on the problem child of their big debt-laden, default-threatened investment in the Tribune company. (Here was...
Posted June 24, 2008 9:34 PM
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
Earlier this month, it was Truthdig's Robert Scheer reappearing on the L.A. Times Op-Ed page — notable because his firing as an Op-Ed columnist after thirteen years created quite a...
Posted June 21, 2008 11:22 AM
Sam Zell's Orland Sentinel has unveiled its new more colorful and "get to the point" redesign. The editor of the Chicago Tribune today told her staff that the paper will...
Posted June 20, 2008 9:17 AM
The anonymous L.A. Times staffer (plural?) behind Tell Zell has posted a list of the LAT journalists who have left the newsroom in the past two years and a link...
Posted June 16, 2008 11:54 AM
I've been kicking myself for a week for under-playing the selection of Russ Parsons, one of my favorite food writers, to the dining industry's hall of fame. He's the first...
Posted June 16, 2008 9:05 AM
Anita Busch, the journalist who was famously threatened by associates of jailed Hollywood snoop Anthony Pellicano while reporting for the L.A. Times, has a letter in Saturday's LAT co-signed by...
Posted June 14, 2008 1:25 AM
Never a dull moment.... Chicago Tribune publisher Scott Smith says he'll retire, calling it time for Zell and Randy Michaels to bring in their own morning deejay "new leadership." Romenesko...
Posted June 12, 2008 2:05 PM
Times editor Russ Stanton emailed the newsroom today with his take on the conversion of the LAT's Sunday magazine into a non-editorial venture. He suggests that today's New York Times...
Posted June 10, 2008 1:10 PM
The New York Times has posted the story it almost ran last week revealing a sloppy end to the Los Angeles Times Magazine as a newsroom product. This being the...
Posted June 9, 2008 9:10 PM
Joel Sappell, who vented recently in the American Journalism Review about Sam Zell and other changes that led him to flee the Los Angeles Times, started today as Deputy for...
Posted June 9, 2008 6:46 PM
Harriet Ryan has been a senior correspondent for Court TV and "is comfortable on camera," the L.A. Times memo says. In Times fashion, the memo wraps her hiring to monitor...
Posted June 9, 2008 12:59 PM
Tony Pierce of the LA. Times website captured and posted video of the boss, publisher David Hiller, belting out the national anthem at Thursday's Cubs-Dodgers game. Hiller hit all the...
Posted June 8, 2008 10:37 AM
While Sam Zell's pronouncement of yesterday continues to ripple across the media, the New York Times has budgeted a daily for Saturday saying that the Los Angeles Times Magazine has...
Posted June 6, 2008 3:30 PM
Marjorie Miller says it's her call to return to reporting and that the new management team at the L.A. Times should get to name its own foreign editor. Memos here...
Posted June 5, 2008 3:38 PM
* Update: The Times' unofficial pressroom blog, which posted the Sam Zell memo formerly quoted below, now says it was a repeat from February. (!) So no, Zell hasn't talked...
Posted June 5, 2008 9:32 AM
In an interview with Mediabistro's David S. Hirschman, L.A. Times Editor Russ Stanton puts the good spin on the cuts that his newsroom expects to land soon. "I get that...
Posted June 4, 2008 11:35 AM
Staff writer Thomas S. Mulligan, based in the New York bureau, writes "Newton's message carried praise for his colleagues and the paper, plus a hint of unspecified conflict between him...
Posted June 3, 2008 5:06 PM
Updated Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller announces that Jim Newton, his editor of the editorial pages, will leave in July to write a book. Newton lasted 14 months. Newton...
Posted June 3, 2008 10:44 AM
Joel Sappell had been at the L.A. Times for 26 years, most recently as an investigative projects editor. He never considered any previous buyout, thinking of the LAT as his...
Posted June 2, 2008 2:20 PM
After three somewhat stormy years living and blogging in Paris, four months in China and a stint in a rented apartment near Santa Monica beach, Los Angeles Times travel writer...
Posted June 2, 2008 12:49 AM
I'm happy for Times Publisher David Hiller that on June 5 he'll live his dream and sing the national anthem before the Cubs game at Dodger Stadium. (Back in February...
Posted May 30, 2008 1:19 PM
Sallie Hofmeister is the new business editor at the Los Angeles Times, reporting to the managing editor. LA Biz Observed Scary forecast about the financial future of newspapers, also...
Posted May 29, 2008 5:47 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
Jon Thurber, the LAT's obits editor, gets some ink on Claire Hoffman's religion blog for Newsweek and the Washington Post. To me, one of the most desirable jobs in newspapers...
Posted May 28, 2008 12:25 PM
Nikki Finke points a chiding finger at Defamer, Variety columnist Anne Thompson, LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein and Slate's Kim Masters for posting an erroneous item that she says began...
Posted May 27, 2008 10:31 PM
In an interview with Patterico blogger Patrick Frey, the victim of the dead-fish incident that helped spur the Anthony Pellicano prosecution voices concerns about ties between the convicted private eye...
Posted May 16, 2008 8:35 AM
Tidbits from the print world... The Daily News continues to lose journalists to other pursuits. But Councilman Jose Huizar gains a press deputy. Today's newsroom missives from Managing Editor Melissa...
Posted May 15, 2008 5:15 PM
Every year the L.A. Times throws a party for the newsroom staff and hands out some cash prizes. In past years, these were overflow banquets held at the Beverly Hills...
Posted May 14, 2008 4:57 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
"In fact, we made no errors," John T. O'Loughlin, President/Targeted Media and SVP/Marketing for Los Angeles Times Media Group, writes to the head of the Southern California Broadcasters Assn. Here's...
Posted May 9, 2008 3:28 PM
The president of the Southern California Broadcasters Association has a bone to pick with a recent L.A. Times house ad claiming the paper has more reach to offer advertisers than...
Posted May 9, 2008 9:07 AM
I never know what to really make of this data, but Scarborough Research has released its 2008 Newspaper Audience Ratings Report. It aims to estimate, based on telephone surveys, how...
Posted May 9, 2008 1:31 AM
Perhaps Sam Zell realized his troubled new company needs a full-time boss, or maybe he just tired of his newspaper toys after a few months in charge. Whatever, executive VP...
Posted May 7, 2008 11:28 PM
Tribune innovation czar Lee Abrams blogs that before coming to Los Angeles, "For years I have heard the Industry dirt on the Los Angeles Times. Got a lot of 'good...
Posted May 5, 2008 4:55 PM
The Times is moving California political writer Phil Willon onto the Los Angeles City Hall beat. The memo from California Editor David Lauter waxes on a bit about the importance...
Posted May 4, 2008 11:54 PM
He actually sounds pretty forgiving about that whole Tupac Shakur business, while talking to Associated Press about getting his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and house-hunting in Los Angeles:...
Posted May 2, 2008 12:20 PM
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
Sure, the Tribune Co. has owned the L.A. Times since 2000. But the Chandler family's trust kept the land at 1st and Spring streets in Downtown, so the Times had...
Posted April 29, 2008 5:55 PM
As LAO noted yesterday, the L.A. Times suffered a greater circulation drop the past six months than any of the top U.S. newspapers — and by far the most precipitous...
Posted April 29, 2008 5:10 PM
The Times' website today is pushing a travel feature on the West San Fernando Valley, writing that "in what we hope will be an ongoing series, we present you a...
Posted April 29, 2008 2:16 PM
In the early 1990s, my beat at the Times was to rove California's small towns and far-flung regions and cover stories that needed telling. Just about every time I would...
Posted April 29, 2008 9:12 AM
With another 5.13% loss in average weekday circulation comparing this March 31 to last year, the L.A. Times posts the biggest percentage drop of the top 10 U.S. papers. The...
Posted April 28, 2008 8:09 AM
L.A. Times Sports Editor Randy Harvey felt he had to bang his writers and editors over the head yesterday about the paper's rules regarding unnamed sources, threatening written reprimands and...
Posted April 25, 2008 3:30 PM
L.A. Times editor Russ Stanton takes great pains in his memo to make it sound like current managing editor John Arthur will still have a crucial post, but the real...
Posted April 23, 2008 11:55 AM
If you want to know if anyone is reading your stories, "make sure you insert a mistake about George Washington," writes Mary McNamara, the Calendar TV critic who mistakenly said...
Posted April 21, 2008 11:10 PM
Erstwhile and future minor candidate for mayor Walter Moore proves a lightweight in an email exchange with L.A. Times editorial page editor Jim Newton, blogged by Ron Kaye. According to...
Posted April 21, 2008 1:00 PM
In a Q&A with Forbes' Louis Hau, L.A. Times Publisher David Hiller answers one of the lingering questions about the future paper: The Los Angeles Times is one of the...
Posted April 16, 2008 4:16 PM
RJ Smith at Los Angeles magazine conducted interviews with all six living ex-editors of the Los Angeles Times, a group whose time in charge spans from 1971 to this year....
Posted April 15, 2008 7:40 AM
Hours after Howard Kurtz dinged Russ Stanton for not talking about the first big scandal under his watch as Los Angeles Times editor, Stanton told Editor & Publisher that reporter...
Posted April 14, 2008 3:29 PM
Bringing home a Pulitzer Prize to Los Angeles isn't the only praise Investor's Business Daily cartoonist Michael Ramirez gets to bask in this month. He also just picked up a...
Posted April 14, 2008 1:34 PM
The L.A. Times put its online entertainment listings today under The Guide banner. Memo from associate editor Leo Wolinsky and website executive editor Meredith Artley follows: From: Wolinsky, Leo Sent:...
Posted April 14, 2008 11:59 AM
At the end of his Washington Post media column today, Howard Kurtz seems put out that L.A. Times editors haven't given interviews about the big Tupac Shakur-Sean Combs screw-up. He...
Posted April 14, 2008 8:30 AM
Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton took 25 editors to the South Bay this week for a beachfront "off-site" to figure out how to stop the bleeding and regroup as...
Posted April 11, 2008 12:20 PM
Sunday's L.A. Times real estate section will include a nice piece from real estate editor Lauren Beale praising the 24-year run of Hot Property columns by Ruth Ryon, who originated...
Posted April 11, 2008 9:50 AM
Just passing along what I was told this morning from a possibly good source — no confirmation, no independent reporting, no warranty implied. But my contact travels in the right...
Posted April 11, 2008 9:06 AM
No, not at the Daily Journal — yet. In yesterday's print edition of the L.A. Times, the headline on the third editorial — about religion and the 1st Amendment —...
Posted April 9, 2008 6:15 PM
In one of his occasional long messages to the staff, Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller says "we are smack in the middle of a recession on top of the...
Posted April 9, 2008 12:56 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
It's hard not to notice that the periodic recaps of web performance at LATimes.com don't dwell on writing or reporting quality, impact of the journalism or connecting with Los Angeles....
Posted April 8, 2008 1:22 AM
Russ Stanton is taking key editors at the Los Angeles Times on a retreat this week to prepare them for the future. "If we don't chart a new course, others...
Posted April 7, 2008 9:56 PM
My prediction of this morning was correct, if general. The Washington Post cleaned up with six Pulitzer prizes, for coverage of Walter Reed, Virginia Tech, Dick Cheney and Blackwater among...
Posted April 7, 2008 12:25 PM
Forget Saturday's Guantanamo correction — this is your correction o' the week, if not o' the year. It has to be especially painful for LAT staffers, coming out on the...
Posted April 7, 2008 12:20 AM
Cecilia Rasmussen's regular Sunday column in the Times on L.A. historical figures went out with a bang. She and the paper commissioned DNA tests that appear to show that L.C...
Posted April 6, 2008 10:50 PM
The day was yesterday, the perpetrator was the Los Angeles Times, and the question left by the correction is geez, what did they get right? Guantanamo Bay: An article March...
Posted April 6, 2008 7:44 PM
Ann Brenoff succeeds Ruth Ryon as maven of the L.A. Times column on real estate that happens to be owned or leased by celebrities. Memo after the jump:...
Posted April 4, 2008 5:33 PM
LAT Beatbox, being incubated on Blogspot, has a post criticizing Sean Combs for threatening reporter Chuck Philips' job: "You might be a smooth criminal, but when you pick on the...
Posted April 3, 2008 9:18 AM
Bunk Magazine pokes fun at the L.A. Times past and present with an April Fool's Day website The Los Wikiless Timespedia, billed as a last-ditch effort to save the newspaper...
Posted April 1, 2008 4:12 PM
I'm told that Times publisher David Hiller did make some news-driven exceptions to last Friday's buyout departure date. L.A. Times Poll director Susan Pinkus and deputy Jill Darling will be...
Posted April 1, 2008 2:25 PM
This updates the preliminary list I posted on March 4. It's based on my best information, but I'm sure there will be additions or deletions as better info comes in....
Posted March 31, 2008 1:13 AM
Stephanie Simon, a national reporter based in Denver for the Los Angeles Times, will roam the heartland for the Wall Street Journal starting April 14. At the L.A. Times she...
Posted March 30, 2008 2:18 PM
Calendar section writer Robert Welkos, co-author with Joel Sappell of the Los Angeles Times' seminal investigation of Scientology awhile back, took a lighter touch than most of this season's buyout...
Posted March 30, 2008 1:10 AM
Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein's voice carries a lot of weight in the newsroom and his departure may be the one affecting staff morale the most. (Here's his Friday...
Posted March 30, 2008 12:56 AM
Many of the journalists who departed the L.A. Times on Friday sent farewells to the newsroom. Some directed messages at Tribune owner Sam Zell. Here's the email from special projects...
Posted March 30, 2008 12:43 AM
Friday was clean out their desk day for the editors, writers and other staffers who left the Los Angeles Times in the lastest wave of buyouts. (I'll update my list...
Posted March 29, 2008 11:37 AM
I've got a bunch of things to do away from the computer, and today really is a holiday for some, including UCLA staff: Cesar Chavez Day. Here's a roundup of...
Posted March 28, 2008 8:47 AM
The headline is NYU journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen's response to Warren Olney's question about how big a black eye the L.A. Times has suffered in the Sean Combs-Tupac...
Posted March 27, 2008 7:30 PM
Reporter Myron Levin, one of the veteran reporters to take the Los Angeles Times buyout, checked out today with a farewell email to the entire editorial staff. He seems to...
Posted March 27, 2008 5:12 PM
Romenesko adds up the stream of comments on the errant Tupac Shakur story: 25 pages (now 30 and counting, because they limit each to ten entries.) First seven provide a...
Posted March 27, 2008 1:25 PM
The L.A. Times will resume calling its staff critics what they are. Memo today: From: Wolinsky, Leo Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 11:58 AM Subject: Critic Bylines After a 7-year...
Posted March 27, 2008 1:15 PM
CityBeat's L.A. Sniper columnist Alan Mittelstaedt captures Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's persuasive argument that the Times' cutback of local coverage through the years contributes to the city's bad traffic by letting...
Posted March 27, 2008 9:14 AM
Veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips and his editor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology for the story that linked Sean Combs to the murder of...
Posted March 26, 2008 11:57 PM
The report in the Smoking Gun that the Times got duped on its recent Sean Combs- Tupac Shakur story has been top of the page for hours now at LATImes.com,...
Posted March 26, 2008 12:17 PM
The Smoking Gun claims that the L.A. Times relied on FBI documents fabricated by con man James Sabatino for the paper's report last week that the 1994 shooting of Tupac...
Posted March 26, 2008 9:12 AM
Greg Krikorian, a Los Angeles Times veteran who is the lead reporter on the Anthony Pellicano trial, applied for and received the recent buyout. He's joining the office of the...
Posted March 24, 2008 4:48 PM
Eric is off this week doing his duty as the parent of a pre-college teen, so everybody can take some time to play with their pages for Right of Way....
Posted March 24, 2008 12:40 AM
MaryKaye Schilling is leaving to return to New York, according to an abrupt memo from the newly assigned editor helping with management issues on the L.A. Times features side. From:...
Posted March 21, 2008 12:21 PM
Foreign Editor Marjorie Miller marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war with a "well done" message to the Iraqi nationals who help staff the Los Angeles Times bureau in...
Posted March 20, 2008 4:36 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
Alan Miller was a charter member of the investigative team in the Times Washington bureau and won his Pulitzer in 2003 for stories on problems with the military aircraft so...
Posted March 20, 2008 11:45 AM
David Willman of the L.A. Times Washington bureau is no longer on the buyout list, he confirms. (I previously termed it that he "withdrew," but that's saying more than I...
Posted March 17, 2008 9:08 AM
The Downtown News' Jon Regardie saw some news in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa repeating to Charlie Rose the company line that will he run next year for a second term. In...
Posted March 17, 2008 12:38 AM
An LA Observed reader emailed to alert me to the big news out of the Federal Reserve and to wonder why his hometown paper wasn't on it: Lead story...
Posted March 16, 2008 9:12 PM
The Los Angeles Times has lost more subscribers in the past four years than any U.S. newspaper and it isn't even close. Editor & Publisher compared 2007 circulation to 2003...
Posted March 11, 2008 7:15 PM
The latest entry on the Los Angeles Times politics blog comes from a new — but no longer unexpected — source. It's credited not to one of the Times' bloggers...
Posted March 10, 2008 6:08 PM
Ed Padgett at the Los Angeles Times Pressmens blog posted the news on Friday: 31 employees out, most in Orange County, some at the downtown L.A. printing plant. Just a...
Posted March 10, 2008 3:56 PM
The best political contest of the year in Los Angeles, by far, is the showdown between Councilman Bernard Parks and State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas to be anointed the next Los...
Posted March 10, 2008 11:28 AM
Couple of bad links fixed Sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge, science writer Elise Kleeman and former LAT editor Wes Hughes are among the staffers out of jobs in this week's round...
Posted March 8, 2008 4:48 PM
Certain eyes popped wide open when the Times reported last week that Nancy Daly Riordan, the ex-mayor's ex-wife, had sold her Malibu home for a whopping $68 million. Even for...
Posted March 7, 2008 4:38 PM
Associate Editor Leo Wolinsky had handled page one duties through several of the recent editorships at the Los Angeles Times. For the first time in his 30-year career at the...
Posted March 7, 2008 9:38 AM
Long Beach resident and LA Observed reader Ron Schweitzer sent a letter to the Press-Telegram explaining why the latest cuts there pushed him into becoming an L.A. Times buyer. His...
Posted March 6, 2008 12:27 PM
One reporter each at the Pasadena Star-News and San Gabriel Valley Tribune so far, says former LANGland editor and reporter Gary Scott. More expected at the Inland Empire properties, he...
Posted March 6, 2008 12:10 PM
Veteran Times reporter Henry Weinstein will be on KCRW's Which Way, L.A.? tonight at 7 pm talking with host Warren Olney about the effects of buyouts at the LAT. Weinstein...
Posted March 5, 2008 2:16 PM
Mark Lacter and I were just on "Airtalk" talking with Larry Mantle about the buyouts at the Times and other local papers. You can hear it in the archives at...
Posted March 5, 2008 12:35 PM
This is the unofficial list going around the Los Angeles Times newsroom of staffers who applied for the buyout, whether nudged or not. Some applications may be declined, in theory,...
Posted March 4, 2008 4:25 PM
Dance critic Lewis Segal got the tap on the shoulder. His position is being eliminated, Sasha Anawalt writes: In a city where dance riddles the inner sanctums of churches, temples,...
Posted March 4, 2008 11:58 AM
Three Pulitzer winners from the John Carroll-Dean Baquet era turned in papers by yesterday's deadline, I'm told. Many other veteran reporters and editors have decided to call it quits. I'll...
Posted March 4, 2008 1:11 AM
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
How often can the people who actually have to run the L.A. Times cover for Sam Zell's...Zelliousnness? This time, Publisher David Hiller sent the Washington bureau a valentine assuring the...
Posted February 28, 2008 3:46 PM
Michael Tackett, who runs the Chicago Tribune's side of the big bureau in Washington that the LAT dominates, tells Editor & Publisher that his people are ready to work with...
Posted February 27, 2008 11:47 AM
Chicago Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal covers yesterday's Sam Zell attack on the LAT Washington bureau, and it goes beyond the psychic bloodbath I picked up. Zell wants the Times...
Posted February 27, 2008 8:59 AM
I'm told Sam Zell just informed the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau that there's way too many people there and they should start acting like a wire service for the...
Posted February 26, 2008 11:21 AM
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
The L.A. Police Protective League took umbrage at Times columnist Tim Rutten's chiding of Mayor Villaraigosa for injecting a bit of politics into his TV time at the funeral of...
Posted February 23, 2008 9:53 AM
I listened to Sam Zell answer questions Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, then afterward shook his hand and chatted a bit about the Times and newspapers. First time I'd...
Posted February 21, 2008 10:06 PM
The new L.A. Times news blog looks and acts freakishly like LA Observed, often posting on the same news nuggets after we do. (And sometimes it works the other way.)...
Posted February 20, 2008 8:34 PM
Editor Russ Stanton, in offering the package clearly aimed at getting older staffers to leave, suggests that Sam Zell's message is "take it or else." Sam's people have indicated that...
Posted February 19, 2008 5:42 PM
A mini-profile of L.A. Times publisher David Hiller in tomorrow's New York Times leads with the idea that he's star-struck by the glamour of his adopted hometown. It's pegged to...
Posted February 18, 2008 7:41 PM
L.A. Times publisher David Hiller and editor Russ Stanton both guest on tonight's Which Way, L.A.? with Warren Olney, at 7 pm on KCRW. Presumably Hiller will talk about why...
Posted February 18, 2008 2:55 PM
The rumors were true that new editor Russ Stanton made getting rid of John Montorio his first big move. Montorio, the managing editor for features, told his editors this morning...
Posted February 18, 2008 12:35 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
The shrinking L.A. Times needs to get better in some areas and to "walk away from" some subjects it has traditionally covered, new editor Russ Stanton says. He wants the...
Posted February 15, 2008 9:10 AM
Russ Stanton gets the job of Los Angeles Times editor, as expected for the past few weeks. The announcement had been delayed by the presidential debate in Hollywood, and apparently...
Posted February 14, 2008 11:34 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
The first print edition of the free culture weekly Metromix — "reverse-engineered" from the Times-run website of the same name, Ad Age says — hit the streets yesterday. It will...
Posted February 14, 2008 12:36 AM
While I was on the road, Mark Lacter picked up the news that Sam Zell ordered staff cuts at the Times and across Tribune, citing the need to reduce costs...
Posted February 13, 2008 11:18 PM
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico was in Chicago and the Bay Area yesterday. Today he'll address the Legislature in Sacramento and visit the Napa Valley, then be greeted at LAX...
Posted February 13, 2008 12:36 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
Bad timing. As soon as I finished and posted the previous item on some LAT concerns about the reaction to Sam Zell's style, I received an email that went out...
Posted February 11, 2008 6:38 PM
So you get the choice assignment: illustrate a story on the science of orgasm. Problem: How do you depict something you can't see? Caveat: It's for a big family newspaper,...
Posted February 11, 2008 6:18 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
Sam Zell apparently got enough feedback about his boorish (at best) remarks at the Times and Orlando Sentinel last week that he sent out a mea culpa this morning posing...
Posted February 11, 2008 11:41 AM
Times pressman Ed Padgett blogs that Sam Zell was a big hit at the paper's downtown printing plant this morning. The new boss also brought some news, according to Padgett....
Posted February 7, 2008 6:22 PM
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
New owner Sam Zell apparently lit into ex-editor Jim O'Shea during this morning's talk to L.A. Times employees. If I get better reports, or the transcript — or video? —...
Posted February 7, 2008 11:21 AM
That dramatic reading of the collected works of David Hiller and Jim O'Shea didn't air as billed on the Jan. 26 edition of "Deadline L.A." KPFK's transmitter was knocked off...
Posted February 7, 2008 9:37 AM
Last year's managing editor of the Los Angeles Times (actually he stayed nearly two years) will be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show Thursday. Frantz and his wife, Catherine Collins, will...
Posted February 6, 2008 9:42 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
Sam Zell is turning out to be prickly about having his wisdom about journalism challenged, even slightly. He got all huffy about a question in one of his visits to...
Posted February 4, 2008 11:58 AM
The blogger at Spanglish Gringo lives in Boyle Heights and recently was told by the Los Angeles Times that he can no longer receive the paper at home. Baffled, he...
Posted February 4, 2008 8:59 AM
Joe Mathews, who's covering the presidential campaign, will leave the Los Angeles Times sometime after Super Tuesday to join the New America Foundation as a California Fellow. Other ex-Timesmen already...
Posted February 2, 2008 9:03 PM
First presidential endorsements by the LAT since Richard Nixon in 1972. On Barack Obama: "Either of the Democratic candidates would make a strong nominee. But just because the ballot features...
Posted February 1, 2008 1:45 PM
Robert Downey Jr. and Catherine Keener (said to be looking somewhat Maureen Dowd-ish) are in the Times newsroom today filming the Nathaniel story. Along with a bunch of extras portraying...
Posted February 1, 2008 11:29 AM
Janet Clayton stepped down last year as the L.A. Times editor in charge of Metro and California coverage, which followed a long stint as editor of the editorial pages. Today...
Posted January 30, 2008 2:31 PM
You might remember last summer when Times editors spiked a Patrick Goldstein column that recommended the LAT give away music to boost interest in the paper. (The Calendar section ran...
Posted January 29, 2008 5:56 PM
Outgoing L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea won't be on "News Conference" here Sunday morning, as we noted, but he is scheduled to turn up on CNN's "Reliable Sources" with Howard...
Posted January 26, 2008 11:53 PM
While the battered denizens at the L.A. Times wait to hear whether their next editor will be a patsy for the publisher or an actual respected newsroom leader with independence...
Posted January 25, 2008 3:20 PM
Filming of the movie "The Soloist," based on Steve Lopez's series of LAT columns and book on Downtown homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers, will move into the Times city room on...
Posted January 25, 2008 2:58 PM
Author Samantha Dunn writes in today's Calendar section, "We should thank our lucky stars Mary McNamara's debut novel, 'Oscar Season,' arrives when it does, because if the writers strike goes...
Posted January 24, 2008 9:16 AM
You may remember awhile back (June 2006, actually) that the L.A. Times editorial page said it would resume making presidential candidate endorsements. Those plans survive the change in editors, publishers...
Posted January 22, 2008 1:15 PM
Tribune chairman Sam Zell decrees that his properties will no longer filter the Internet content that employees can view. Via email to staffers: From: Talk to Sam Sent: Tuesday, January...
Posted January 22, 2008 11:42 AM
Now we know how Jim O'Shea could find time to write a 1,700-word farewell speech. He got the message at lunch at Traxx in Union Station that the gulf between...
Posted January 21, 2008 10:46 PM
That seems to be a popular theme, pegged to the coincidence that yesterday's news about yet another high-level exit from the Times broke on the same day that HBO's popular...
Posted January 21, 2008 3:34 PM
New Tribune chairman Sam Zell emailed the Times staff: From: Talk to Sam Sent: Monday, January 21, 2008 10:04 AM Subject: Jim O'Shea's departure Everyone, With all of the media...
Posted January 21, 2008 11:29 AM
Departing L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea addressed the newsroom this morning and reiterated that he was pushed out and did not quit. He also criticized Tribune's priorities, and said that...
Posted January 21, 2008 11:15 AM
The budget squeeze that apparently prompted the departure of L.A. Times editor Jim O'Shea wouldn't result in newsroom layoffs or seriously impair coverage, according to Managing Editor John Arthur, the...
Posted January 21, 2008 12:47 AM
Times publisher David Hiller tells his newspaper's reporter that he did not fire his editor — "Jim and I decided we no longer saw things the same way about how...
Posted January 20, 2008 9:30 PM
* Freshened and slightly edited post It's amazing to me that the journalists left at the L.A. Times can put out a paper and a website every day, with all...
Posted January 20, 2008 3:12 PM
Although the Los Angeles Times is listed as one of the sponsors (along with CNN and Politico) of the presidential campaign debates behind held here Jan. 30 and 31, the...
Posted January 18, 2008 12:21 PM
New health care and regional air transportation reporters, and a new beat assigning a veteran reporter with a video camera to report on local government. Memo from California editor David...
Posted January 17, 2008 5:05 PM
Back when there were newspaper wars between the L.A. Times and the Daily News (over the Valley), the Times and Register (over Orange County), and other suburban papers, this never...
Posted January 17, 2008 11:22 AM
A new employee handbook from the Zell regime went out to all 20,000 Tribune "owners" today. It tries to distance the new Zellian Tribune from the old group, and begins...
Posted January 16, 2008 11:51 PM
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
I have to think the Sports staff at the L.A. Times is still rattled by the gaffe and front page skimback on the Roger Clemens investigation. They should be. Now...
Posted January 15, 2008 3:26 PM
The most-viewed story on the Los Angeles Times website in 2007 was nothing the paper's reporters covered or exposed or explained. It was sports columnist Mike Penner's last byline —...
Posted January 9, 2008 5:53 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
Three L.A. Times editors go online to defend the paper's use of three reporters to cover Ms. Spears' latest public meltdown. "If we had wanted simply to report the facts...
Posted January 9, 2008 9:07 AM
The L.A. Times' decision to go ahead and distribute Parade magazine's Benazir Bhutto issue as if she were still alive — with an unfortunate cover line — has drawn more...
Posted January 7, 2008 11:17 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
Times publisher David Hiller has let staffers know that he was back home for the holidays but has returned here refreshed and ready to carry out the Sam Zell agenda....
Posted January 3, 2008 10:56 AM
Ken Ellingwood moves from Jerusalem to Mexico City, and Ashraf Khalil leaves Metro for the Middle East. Memo from Foreign Editor Marjorie Miller after the jump....
Posted January 2, 2008 5:12 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
It's amazing, really, to look back at all the distraction, disruption and toe-shooting the new Los Angeles Times can pack into a single year. In 2007 alone: The #2 editor...
Posted January 1, 2008 11:38 PM
Irv Letofsky, former editor of the L.A. Times Sunday Calendar section and a critic for the Hollywood Reporter, died Sunday of liver cancer at age 76. From the Reporter obituary:...
Posted December 24, 2007 10:25 AM
The Tribune Company takeover by Sam Zell prompted Times media columnist Tim Rutten to pronounce the seven years of Tribune ownership at the LAT "a disastrous journalistic experiment...there's no need...
Posted December 23, 2007 12:55 PM
That was quite a front-page correction the L.A. Times ran on Thursday, below the fold under the headline 'Steroid affidavit unsealed.' The Times acknowledged that its own 2006 story implicating...
Posted December 23, 2007 12:30 PM
Tribune Company chairman Dennis J. FitzSimons won't be missed much at the L.A. Times. Here's his farewell missive sent this morning (the typos or misspellings are his, not mine.) From:...
Posted December 19, 2007 9:18 AM
It's been six months since Joe Hutchinson left the L.A. Times for Rolling Stone. Today his replacement was named. It's apparently a somewhat controversial decision within the newsroom, judging by...
Posted December 18, 2007 11:18 PM
Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein got off some good observations about the waning quality, originality and relevance of Oscar race analyzing and gossip. The award announcements make a nice one-day...
Posted December 18, 2007 10:54 PM
With the Zellionaire's takeover of Tribune expected to close this week, the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune are reporting that chairman and chief executive Dennis J. FitzSimons could resign...
Posted December 18, 2007 10:31 PM
Leslie Brenner, the Food Editor at the L.A. Times, will move over to become interim editor of the monthly Sunday magazine. There's at least nominally a search on for a...
Posted December 17, 2007 5:58 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
The L.A. Times is going back to reporter "bureaus" placed around the Los Angeles area, in hopes of flushing out more local news. The paper has had them before, then...
Posted December 11, 2007 3:54 PM
OK technically it was an editor's note. And the day was Sunday. But it was just pointed out to me. The subject is architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's piece in Sunday's...
Posted December 10, 2007 10:53 PM
I'm working through my email from last week and will be posting the most worthy stuff. To start, here's the latest memo at the Times from Meredith Artley, executive editor...
Posted December 9, 2007 1:41 PM
Sometimes the hiring memos at the L.A. Times yield some insight into the interests an editor brings to the table. In this case, we learn that new California Editor David...
Posted November 27, 2007 2:12 PM
Matt Welch makes official what has been unfolding behind the scenes for a bit: he has left the Los Angeles Times editorial page to return to Reason, with the current...
Posted November 24, 2007 12:48 PM
Brian Grazer was "deeply upset by the episode" in which the L.A. Times asked him to guest-edit the opinion section on Sunday, then refused to publish it — and he...
Posted November 19, 2007 8:55 AM
Phil Willon, who runs the L.A. Times bureau in the Inland Empire, is becoming the paper's newest statewide political writer. He'll continue to be based in Riverside. Higher education reporter...
Posted November 15, 2007 3:56 PM
Times Publisher David Hiller uses his in-house blog to refute Joe Scott's blind item that reported the LAT building is for sale. I guess most Times editors don't keep up...
Posted November 15, 2007 1:12 PM
Political blogger Joe Scott, citing buzz among major real estate brokers, says the Tribune Co. intends to sell the square block of Downtown where the Los Angeles Times sits for...
Posted November 14, 2007 7:45 PM
Times media columnist Tim Rutten is moving to the opinion pages, where he began his L.A. Times career [* nope, I'm told he began in the old View feature section.]...
Posted November 13, 2007 12:07 PM
It seems the masthead where the L.A. Times lists its top editors is either expanding — or shrinking — depending on the leadership culture in vogue. Right now the trend...
Posted November 12, 2007 5:20 PM
It's hiring memo day at the L.A. Times. First, before he became the Wall Street Journal Hollywood columnist and a Sitrick and Company troubleshooter, John Lippman covered the television biz...
Posted November 12, 2007 3:53 PM
CityBeat columnist Alan Mittelstaedt FOI'd the chancellor of UC Irvine trying to find out who pressured him to un-hire Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of the new law school, before eventually...
Posted November 7, 2007 11:25 PM
Andrés Martinez, the former LAT editorial page editor, has teamed up with the Washington Post website on a twice-weekly online political advice column. (His former deputy in Los Angeles, Michael...
Posted November 5, 2007 9:57 PM
The New Yorker's Connie Bruck examines the personality that is Sam Zell and his deal to acquire Tribune, and comes up with some earthy quotes and notable observations. Zell on...
Posted November 5, 2007 9:15 AM
Martin J. Smith and Barbara Thornburg were, I think, the last senior editors at the Los Angeles Times Magazine to pre-date and survive the West experiment. Anyway, Smith is finally...
Posted October 31, 2007 9:11 PM
Pajamas Media's Ron Rosenbaum has got some chatter going with an item that hand-wrings about media gossip that the L.A. Times is sitting on an explosive story about sex and...
Posted October 31, 2007 12:20 PM
Sure, Allan Mayer is a veteran Hollywood crisis flack with many successes on his resume — but he's not the only one. So what explains this slobbery treatment in Elizabeth...
Posted October 31, 2007 11:54 AM
An LA Observed reader who didn't receive his L.A. Times on Sunday went to the paper's website and was amused to see these competing notices on the same page. Emphasis...
Posted October 28, 2007 10:44 PM
Remember this photograph from the L.A. Times that I posted on Monday, at the start of this week from hell? It's still the strongest fire image I've seen, because you...
Posted October 26, 2007 10:55 PM
Today's LAT devotes a story — and three bylines — to casting doubt on the claims of a million fire evacuations that the paper reported earlier. For one thing, many...
Posted October 25, 2007 7:28 AM
I've nothing to add on the wildfires that are burning homes by the hundreds across Southern California, but you've got to see — and appreciate — this photo on the...
Posted October 22, 2007 10:06 PM
Shav Glick covered auto racing for the L.A. Times for 37 years, until he was 85 years old, and earned legend status in the sport. He died Saturday of complications...
Posted October 21, 2007 11:21 PM
I haven't checked this out, but the source who tipped me has never steered me wrong. The report is that the L.A. Times held a little internal silent auction yesterday...
Posted October 19, 2007 12:13 AM
Jay Clendenin, a freelancer in Washington, DC, and Liz O. Baylen, a freelancer in New York, are joining the L.A. Times photo staff. Photo editor Colin Crawford's memo also posts...
Posted October 18, 2007 11:45 PM
From today's Los Angeles Times: The obituary of Doolittle Raider Nolan A. Herndon in Monday's California section gave his nickname as Sue. In fact, he was known only as Nolan...
Posted October 18, 2007 9:03 AM
Times reporter Peter Hong sat through the whole first act of The People vs. Phil Spector, but he found a way to leave at intermission. He's transferring to the LAT's...
Posted October 16, 2007 1:39 PM
Announcing today's return of the Los Angeles Times Magazine name, the front page note in the Times reads: The magazine will offer a richer and more substantial report on the...
Posted October 14, 2007 10:55 AM
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
Remember that episode back in March when Andrés Martinez resigned as editor of the Times editorial pages after the publisher, David Hiller, didn't back him in the Brian Grazer...
Posted October 10, 2007 8:02 AM
Ever wonder how those bright, not very insightful little blurbs about restaurants, shops and nightlife get onto all the city search websites you mostly don't read? They come from people...
Posted October 8, 2007 11:00 PM
Lennie LaGuire may have taken the sweet buyout to leave the L.A. Times staff, but her fingerprints remain on the weekly-turned-monthly Sunday magazine. As consulting editor she's looking to hire...
Posted October 8, 2007 9:16 PM
Meredith Artley, executive editor of LATimes.com, has sent the staff another periodic update on the site. Traffic is creeping back up, and there are plans this month for more blogs...
Posted October 2, 2007 1:53 PM
Jim O'Shea, coming up on one year since he inherited the top job at the L.A. Times, is shaking things up a bit. In a memo posted in full below,...
Posted October 1, 2007 12:22 PM
In his talk today at Town Hall Los Angeles, Times publisher David Hiller said he may launch a free tabloid patterned after the Tribune's Redeye in Chicago. The Reuters story...
Posted September 27, 2007 9:31 PM
Timothy M. Phelps, the Washington bureau chief at Newsday, moves down the hall to the Times bureau as the Washington investigative editor. Memo from LAT bureau chief Doyle McManus:...
Posted September 27, 2007 9:17 PM
The Tribune Company has come up with a new tactic to cut costs and annoy the hell out of its employees — again. It seems that everyone on the staff...
Posted September 25, 2007 10:31 PM
The only thing lamer than the new LATimes.com feature where reporter William Lobdell writes about pretending to do stuff that other people do for real is that former Breeze columnist...
Posted September 20, 2007 7:15 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
A Craigslist job posting advertises for an experienced director of audience development for an unnamed downtown Los Angeles website. The employer is described only as "one of the biggest brands...
Posted September 18, 2007 11:16 PM
Another big exit from the Los Angeles Times, and another hit to the paper's national profile. Washington columnist Brownstein is joining Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic and National Journal,...
Posted September 17, 2007 7:19 AM
Marc Duvoisin, the LAT's assistant managing editor for writing and projects, gets a boost to deputy managing editor for all projects at the paper. Memo from Managing Editor John Arthur...
Posted September 14, 2007 5:26 PM
Stewart has covered the sports side of TV and radio in Los Angeles since 1973, first for the Herald Examiner and lately in the Times. After today he's moving full-time...
Posted September 14, 2007 9:48 AM
David Lauter, a veteran of Metro and the foreign desk, gets the job as editor over all news coverage within the state of California. Different title than his predecessor: Janet...
Posted September 13, 2007 7:26 AM
If you didn't get enough of corporate exec-turned-dumpster diver Madeline Nelson in the lede of yesterday's L.A. Times front page story, you can always see more quotes from her in...
Posted September 12, 2007 5:51 AM
Remember when former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan was so perturbed at the L.A. Times that he dallied with starting his own rival paper? He even produced a prototype of...
Posted September 10, 2007 1:03 AM
Recent chatter in the L.A. Times newsroom had co-managing editor Leo Wolinsky in trouble with the forces of Tribune over his overtures to suitors Eli Broad and David Geffen and...
Posted September 10, 2007 12:56 AM
Since the U.S. government appears to be sharing his email with journalists, the Times' Chuck Philips figures it's only fitting to get out the rest of the story. It begins...
Posted August 20, 2007 12:08 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
In Friday's story about actor Steven Seagal feeling burned by the Pellicano scandal, Chuck Philips of the Times reported that U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek "declined to comment" on questions...
Posted August 19, 2007 7:58 PM
When Dean Hill began as a reporter for United Press International he watched the construction of the downtown state building's parking structure outside the bureau window. More recently, he watched...
Posted August 19, 2007 7:36 PM
Geoff Mohan takes over the Times environment desk for Frank Clifford, who left via buyout to work on another book. Clifford had national status in the LAT's hierarchy of desks,...
Posted August 19, 2007 7:21 PM
He did not pay anyone to threaten reporter Anita Busch and pretty much loathes PI Anthony Pellicano, says the actor whose name was prominently mentioned when the feds first began...
Posted August 16, 2007 11:51 PM
Sam Zell doesn't yet have control of the Tribune Company — and tried to reassure a skeptical stock market today that he will — but he's billed as the special...
Posted August 14, 2007 3:24 PM
Jaime Cardenas has been covering soccer as a Times sports intern. He apparently impressed enough to stay — and inspired Sports Editor Randy Harvey to put some writing into his...
Posted August 14, 2007 1:52 PM
Down to $24.87 in mid-day trading today, almost ten dollars below what Sam Zell is supposedly going to pay for the struggling company. It's the lowest value for Tribune stock...
Posted August 14, 2007 9:33 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
Jim Bates, the deputy editor on the entertainment-tech desk in the Times' Business section, is jumping into the crisis PR game at Sitrick and Company. He has the second-longest tenure...
Posted August 9, 2007 4:58 PM
Jessica Guynn will cover Google, Yahoo and other Silicon Valley media companies from the Times' San Francisco bureau. She comes from the SF Chronicle and lives in Berkeley with Art...
Posted August 8, 2007 4:08 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
New shorts will be tacked on to the end... Updated: A 19-year-old handyman at Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery told police he killed Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey over stories...
Posted August 4, 2007 12:06 PM
Los Angeles Times Editor Jim O'Shea didn't like reading a New York Times editorial suggest that the LAT has suffered "sharp reductions” in its national and foreign coverage. O'Shea sent...
Posted August 3, 2007 3:14 PM
Tim Swanson will leave Portfolio to take over as film editor in the Times' Calendar section. He's formerly of Premiere and Variety. Memo below:...
Posted August 2, 2007 3:59 PM
Geoff Boucher was in San Diego to cover Comic-Con when he encountered some toughs on the sidewalk in the Gaslamp Quarter. In the 15 years I have been writing for...
Posted July 30, 2007 7:43 AM
In a piece at Artnet called "L.A. Confidential," writer Emma Gray surveys local galleries and also gives credit to journalist Jori Finkel, a sometime contributor to the New York Times,...
Posted July 25, 2007 11:12 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
The losing candidates are apparently being told that John Arthur is getting the Times managing editor nod after all. A few weeks ago his name circulated, but after that he...
Posted July 24, 2007 5:23 PM
The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today's Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment. Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday...
Posted July 24, 2007 12:06 PM
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
The L.A. Times PR staff has taken to sending pitch emails to journalists bragging about stories the paper wants credit for breaking in the Sunday paper. Pickings must have been...
Posted July 23, 2007 8:23 AM
Bob Sipchen left the L.A. Times last month after working as an education columnist, editorial writer (where he won a Pulitzer Prize) and founding editor of both the Current and...
Posted July 21, 2007 11:18 AM
David Lazarus is joining the L.A. Times in August to write a Business section column. Let's hope the San Francisco Chronicle, his current employer, knew before the house ad popped...
Posted July 19, 2007 3:55 PM
Glenn Bunting took the buyout from the L.A. Times last month and signed on at Sitrick and Company. Guess he makes his old colleagues nervous. Check out this email that...
Posted July 19, 2007 1:57 PM
Strong words from financial analyst Jim Cramer at The Street.com about the pending Tribune Company sale. Make that red flags and warning sirens: You have to feel terrible about what's...
Posted July 17, 2007 7:59 PM
Newly reunited at Los Angeles Magazine with his former editor Kit Rachlis, Moehringer explains at the end of a long profile of an obscure musician he admires how it was...
Posted July 17, 2007 10:46 AM
Publisher David Hiller just dropped a "mid-year business update" on L.A. Times staffers that has fresh bad news: "Revenue was down 10% in the second quarter, and cash flow down...
Posted July 13, 2007 1:38 PM
Director Susan Pinkus, who's staying, issues a statement after the jump. In addition to the senior staffers she names, something like 90-odd interviewers who work as needed when there is...
Posted July 13, 2007 12:19 PM
While researching his forthcoming biography of the late California political leader Jess Unruh, Bill Boyarsky delved into the story of how reporter Paul Weeks covered the civil rights era at...
Posted July 12, 2007 3:31 PM
Abigail Goldman has covered the retail beat for the Times' Business section even though she loathes shopping. They are moving her to a newly created beat "focused on the crossroads...
Posted July 12, 2007 11:29 AM
Ross Johnson of Sitrick and Company did such a good job promoting Tuesday night's premiere party for Captivity that he had bloggers falling over themselves to pre-hype the event, got...
Posted July 12, 2007 12:44 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
Editor Jim O'Shea informed the staff today that eliminating the Times Poll operation came up during the recent round of staff cuts, but that he decided instead to keep a...
Posted July 11, 2007 7:14 PM
The Times editorial page calls Rocky Delgadillo "unfit" to be City Attorney and urges he do the right thing and resign. Under the headline "The honorable thing," the paper says:...
Posted July 3, 2007 8:36 AM
For the past few days, the Times has been promoting the re-appearance of columnist Al Martinez in the California section and, sort of, admitting that the paper feels it screwed...
Posted July 2, 2007 12:46 AM
Both FishbowlDC and The Huffington Post are reporting this morning that Page One editor John Arthur has been promoted to managing editor of the L.A. Times, citing sources. Arthur is...
Posted June 29, 2007 7:55 AM
Well now we know where (soon to be ex) L.A. Times managing editor Doug Frantz is going. He is returning to Istanbul as Middle East bureau chief for the Wall...
Posted June 28, 2007 4:20 PM
Doug Frantz told senior editors this morning that he has resigned as number two editor at the Los Angeles Times. He didn't say if he was headed to a new...
Posted June 28, 2007 11:17 AM
Purging of top names at the San Francisco Chronicle continues. With a bunch of painful newsroom cuts still to come, Deputy Editor Narda Zacchino has decided the time is right....
Posted June 25, 2007 12:05 AM
Al Martinez has been told that his Monday column will start in the Times' California section on July 2. It's the compromise solution reached by Times editors who got caught...
Posted June 22, 2007 10:24 AM
Now this should get interesting. LA Weekly political reporter David Zahniser, the hottest property on the City Hall beat, is jumping to the L.A. Times to cover Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa....
Posted June 21, 2007 11:29 PM
Writers Dan Neil and Charles Perry of the L.A. Times (and former LAT film critic Manohla Dargis) are on MSNBC's list of 144 journalists who donated to political campaigns between...
Posted June 21, 2007 9:12 AM
Today's Times relegates the obituary of Mexican music legend and big-time Los Angeles crowd pleaser Antonio Aguilar — "the Roy Rogers of Mexico" — to the obits page. In the...
Posted June 21, 2007 8:54 AM
For Richard A. Aust of Lake Forest, the LAT's decision to scale back West magazine to a monthly was the last straw. If they are only going to serve him...
Posted June 20, 2007 11:49 PM
The last of the West magazine senior writers to remain with the L.A. Times, Lynell George is moving back to her roots in Calendar. Here's today's memo from Lennie LaGuire,...
Posted June 19, 2007 11:36 PM
Columnist Joel Stein has pulled out of teaching that oral sex class at Babeland on Melrose, at the L.A. Times' insistence. The store blames "censorship" by the Times and says...
Posted June 18, 2007 8:09 AM
The Times editorial page launched a Rocky Watch box this morning that counts the days until City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo "comes clean" about who was driving his city-owned GMC Yukon...
Posted June 18, 2007 1:03 AM
Longtime L.A. Times staff writer Mark Arax and the paper reached an undisclosed settlement of their public dispute about a story he wrote about the Armenian genocide that was spiked,...
Posted June 17, 2007 11:25 PM
On the Times Op-Ed page, Patt Morrison doesn't want to know any more about the Villaraigosa marital troubles. But Steve Lopez writes in the Times that it's time for Mayor...
Posted June 14, 2007 9:10 AM
Jim Newton, new editor of the Times editorial pages, explains to Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell why the paper on Monday called for a ceasefire and peace talks. "I see...
Posted June 14, 2007 9:05 AM
According to Babeland, the sex toy store on Melrose, Joel Stein will co-teach an oral sex workshop later this month. “I feel it's time to give back after taking so...
Posted June 13, 2007 5:46 PM
The L.A. Times readers' representative is telling people who email about the treatment of veteran columnist Al Martinez that his column will resume — only on Mondays and somewhere in...
Posted June 13, 2007 1:52 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
Kurt Streeter, a Metro reporter at the Times whose lengthy narrative pieces have sometimes focused on athletes, is moving to the sports staff as a columnist and feature writer. He's...
Posted June 11, 2007 12:33 PM
The brief West magazine experiment at the L.A. Times ends with the June 17 restaurant issue — and with it apparently goes the tradition of a serious Sunday magazine at...
Posted June 8, 2007 1:40 PM
The former editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages will be joining the New America Foundation as an Irvine Senior Fellow. Martinez, you'll remember, resigned in a huff after...
Posted June 7, 2007 7:44 PM
The latest internal missive from Executive Editor Meredith Artley says there were 77.9 million page views at LATimes.com in May, which they think is a record for the Times website....
Posted June 6, 2007 3:29 PM
Now that the last of the Chandler family representatives have left the Tribune Company board, Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal writes, "it's like passing a stone. One only hopes the...
Posted June 5, 2007 8:46 AM
The L.A. Times website is finally going 24-7 (ish) with the addition of a couple of overnight editors. They will scan the wires and, in theory, keep the home page...
Posted June 5, 2007 12:17 AM
Budget pressures are the stated reason for ending Rick Wartzman's weekly California & Co. column in the Business section. But as usual with the L.A. Times these days, there's a...
Posted June 4, 2007 6:54 PM
I had a feeling the decision makers at the Times were clueless that an outcry — from the paper's most loyal but ever more perturbed reader niche, no less —...
Posted June 3, 2007 2:27 PM
This is the day for farewell messages down at the Times. A selection of emails to colleagues from the bought out and the otherwise leaving follows after the jump (with...
Posted June 1, 2007 1:20 PM
We reported before that L.A. Times Schwarzenegger reporter Peter Nicholas was leaving Sacramento for the Washington bureau. Now here's the memo from bureau chief Doyle McManus and national editor Scott...
Posted June 1, 2007 12:57 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
Times publisher David Hiller says the revenue picture is dire. Sounds like he's looking to restore the suburban zoning that his Tribune predecessors did away with, plus he announces a...
Posted May 31, 2007 10:46 AM
J.A. Adande, the only Times sports columnist who went to Crossroads, writes that he took the buyout and is exploring other options. He sends a shout-out to a roundup of...
Posted May 31, 2007 9:13 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
The Metro staff at the Times will lose fifteen reporters and editors on Friday, spurring a couple of internal moves and plans to hire some replacements. Three staffers — Jenifer...
Posted May 30, 2007 8:39 AM
Readers sent along these form emails they are getting from the Times in response to complaints about Al Martinez being pushed out. Editor Jim O'Shea, perhaps hearing a public backlash...
Posted May 29, 2007 11:15 PM
Or did the LAT pass? Mickey Kaus of Slate compared Times coverage of the Lindsay Lohan crash and arrest with the same-day coverage in the New York Post. Guess which...
Posted May 29, 2007 8:25 AM
"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
Does it seem like reader email over the Al Martinez shove is getting more mean? Check out the new stuff. Martinez himself is scheduled to guest on KPCC's "Patt Morrison"...
Posted May 29, 2007 1:06 AM
Patrick McGreevy, a fixture at City Hall for the L.A. Times, is transferring to the buyout-impacted Sacramento bureau. Memo after the jump....
Posted May 25, 2007 2:11 PM
Times editor Jim O'Shea emails the staff to report that 57 editorial staffers will be leaving, some voluntarily and some given the Al Martinez treatment. The Los Angeles Times Poll...
Posted May 24, 2007 5:58 PM
Al Martinez just sent a second email to his L.A. Times colleagues, informing them that the newspaper will de-activate his email address tonight. He included a personal email address, but...
Posted May 24, 2007 2:01 PM
OK, if I ran Times Sports I might try to hide my connection with T.J. Simers too. But since his mug is all over newsboxes and even inside the Times...
Posted May 24, 2007 10:52 AM
The news is hidden after the jump for aesthetic reasons. Click to go on in....
Posted May 24, 2007 8:51 AM
Columnist Al Martinez has been with the Los Angeles Times more than 30 years and, despite being exiled to the back of the features section several years ago, is one...
Posted May 23, 2007 7:52 PM
Staffers at the Los Angeles Times were more than a bit shocked when they got to work Tuesday. Posted on the elevator walls were large photos of selected sports columnists...
Posted May 23, 2007 12:52 AM
Nothing punctuates buyouts under the threat of layoffs like some new hires. While the top suits contemplate how many of last week's rush to the exits to accept, two additions...
Posted May 21, 2007 4:06 PM
Fans of "The Sopranos" spent all day Monday comparing notes on what an exultant Tony Soprano screamed at the end of Sunday night's intense episode. The LAT's television writer Paul...
Posted May 16, 2007 10:54 AM
* Updated with later information; names will be underlined as I get confirmations, but all of these are on lists circulating in the Times newsroom. Senior Calendar Editor Lennie LaGuire,...
Posted May 15, 2007 12:54 PM
Video of the columnist addressing journalism graduates at today's USC Annenberg commencement, at LAist....
Posted May 14, 2007 2:28 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
Kevin Sack was one of the New York Times veterans who came west to LAT territory in the Dean Baquet wagon train, and it was a no-brainer that he would...
Posted May 13, 2007 10:39 PM
Daniel Weintraub reports on the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert website that Robert Salladay, who writes the LAT's Political Muscle blog from Sacramento, plans to take the buyout. Here's the item,...
Posted May 11, 2007 9:05 AM
Times reporter Mark Arax lives with his family in Fresno and has deep roots there — his 1996 book In My Father's Name investigated the failure of the Fresno police...
Posted May 8, 2007 5:22 PM
OK, the Times claims to be getting religion about local coverage, but this isn't what the focus groups had in mind. Sunday's fashion story in the Image section on downtown's...
Posted May 7, 2007 11:56 PM
The Times sports writer formerly known as Mike Penner is scheduled to be interviewed live tonight at 11:30 on Sports Byline USA. She will chat with local journos John Woolard...
Posted May 4, 2007 8:44 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
Retired L.A. Times Metropolitan Editor Dave Rosenzweig died last night after battling cancer. A longtime investigative reporter and editor, Rosenzweig most recently had covered the federal courts downtown. I believe...
Posted May 3, 2007 12:28 PM
The Armenian National Committee of America in Glendale is orchestrating a campaign to besiege the L.A. Times with emails demanding that Managing Editor Doug Frantz resign over his handling of...
Posted May 2, 2007 8:44 AM
Just to finish the thought from yesterday, Daily News circulation dropped 7.3% from a year ago to 146,000. That's not good news in the already threadbare L.A. Newspaper Group empire....
Posted May 1, 2007 8:51 AM
Not only did L.A. Times circulation take another hit today — down more than four percent — but Editor & Publisher named N. Christian Anderson III of the Orange County...
Posted April 30, 2007 12:48 PM
Times staff writer Mark Arax just escalated — in a big way — his dispute with the paper's managing editor over a recent story about the Armenian genocide. He emailed...
Posted April 30, 2007 11:47 AM
Couple of additions to the lineup of LA Observed contributors at this weekend's L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. Veronique de Turenne has been added as moderator of the...
Posted April 28, 2007 12:44 AM
The Times has shown laudable sensitivity to the story of transsexual sports writer Mike Penner making the transformation to Christine Daniels, but not so much the publisher of the Times-owned...
Posted April 27, 2007 3:32 PM
Mike Penner's column announcing his transition to Christine Daniels is already one of the most viewed LATimes.com stories of the past year, the paper says today in an interview with...
Posted April 27, 2007 8:51 AM
Well, just in the monologue "The Tonight Show" emails out: Here's an interesting local story, a L.A. Times sportswriter, Mike Penner...a very good sports writer, has announced he's undergoing a...
Posted April 26, 2007 8:09 PM
Editor Jim O'Shea has emailed the L.A. Times staff a response to all the hubbub about Mark Arax and whether or not a story was killed because of concerns that...
Posted April 26, 2007 5:35 PM
A few years ago Baseball Prospectus managing editor Christina Kahrl went through what Mike Penner wrote about this morning. She has been counseling the Times sports writer, who will be...
Posted April 26, 2007 2:28 PM
Nah, but the LA Weekly's Daniel Hernandez adds good new details in the dispute we reported Tuesday between Times managing editor Doug Frantz and West magazine staff writer Mark Arax....
Posted April 26, 2007 9:10 AM
Veteran L.A. Times sports writer Mike Penner writes in today's paper that he will return from vacation in a few weeks as Christine Daniels. He lays out his personal journey...
Posted April 26, 2007 7:39 AM
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today will report slight bumps up in circulation next week, but the Orange County Register will be down more than 5%, Editor & Publisher...
Posted April 25, 2007 10:40 AM
There's no point in asking Times newsroom staffers people to clean up their desks, Channel 2 style — clutter there is so far gone that fire inspectors have come through...
Posted April 25, 2007 9:05 AM
Books editor David Ulin is scheduled to discuss the changes in the Times Sunday Book Review, the situation at the paper and this weekend's LAT Festival of Books with host...
Posted April 25, 2007 8:50 AM
The L.A. Times Sacramento bureau is looking to bring in a new body to help cover Gov. Schwarzenegger. Here's how the offer went out to the newsroom: From: Janet Clayton,...
Posted April 24, 2007 10:59 PM
A dispute that has been quietly bubbling in the Times newsroom went public today when the publisher of the California Courier demanded that LAT managing editor Doug Frantz be fired...
Posted April 24, 2007 11:44 AM
I'm talking about today's Times news with guest host Jon Beaupre on KPCC's "Patt Morrison," after the NPR news at 2 pm. Update: Times Publisher David Hiller and USC Annenberg...
Posted April 23, 2007 2:00 PM
Times editor Jim O'Shea follows up the publisher's memo with a missive of his own, asking the newsroom to have faith and saying he understands anger over Tribune execs receiving...
Posted April 23, 2007 11:41 AM
As reported last week, the Times offers a buyout to most employees and will take 150. Long-term employees can receive up to a year's pay. An unstated number of positions,...
Posted April 23, 2007 11:26 AM
A buyout offer to be announced Monday will try to cut 70 newsroom jobs, taking the editorial staff from 920 to around 850. Before Tribune took over the news staff...
Posted April 20, 2007 6:45 PM
LA Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold won a Pulitzer Prize today in Criticism. It's the first Pulitzer ever for a food critic, according to the Weekly, and the paper's first....
Posted April 16, 2007 12:16 PM
Jim Newton, chief of the Times' City-County bureau, gets the post of editor of the editorial pages, reporting to Publisher David Hiller. He replaces the prematurely departed Andrés Martinez. Newton...
Posted April 13, 2007 3:16 PM
The LAT's Image section returns this weekend for its second stroll down the runway of public opinion. I'm told that Sunday's edition has a piece setting up the rivalry...
Posted April 13, 2007 9:58 AM
Times reporter Anna Gorman goes first-person in today's Column One to detail her family's fight with cancer and her own surgery to remove her ovaries, uterus and fallopian tubes. Gorman...
Posted April 13, 2007 8:21 AM
Remember last year when the plastic devices placed in Times newsboxes to promote Mission: Impossible III kept prompting frightened calls to bomb squads? Well, the U.S. Attorney's office here has...
Posted April 12, 2007 2:19 PM
Metromix, the younger and, ahem, edgier sibling re-make of Calendar Live coming in June from the Times and Tribune, has staffed up. Deborah Vankin, formerly of Variety and LA Weekly,...
Posted April 12, 2007 2:10 PM
The Times has rolled out a new web section devoted to the Lana Clarkson death and Phil Spector trial — stories that ran in the paper, photos, miscellany. The occasion...
Posted April 12, 2007 12:54 PM
The latest innovations from LAT Innovation Editor Russ Stanton are out -- a bunch of job openings following on his memo of earlier this week. Here's our favorite new reporter...
Posted April 11, 2007 10:37 AM
Borzou Daragahi, the Times' former bureau chief in Baghdad, has left the war zone for a new posting in Beirut. He writes in his farewell piece about some of the...
Posted April 10, 2007 8:55 AM
Couple of minor organizational twists were introduced today at LATimes.com. On the foreign page, a gathering of notes and observations from correspondents mostly in Latin America is being called La...
Posted April 9, 2007 7:37 PM
Times columnist Steve Lopez, looking for an angle, went out to Malibu to check out the hard-to-reach public beach near Tribune buyer Sam Zell's estate. After Lopez knocked on the...
Posted April 6, 2007 9:26 AM
David Geffen told the Washington Post yesterday that "I continue to want to buy the Los Angeles Times," and a source close to the mogul says that "Geffen has spoken...
Posted April 5, 2007 12:18 PM
Aside from what the Sam Zell deal does for the value of his Tribune stock, and his general Chicago loyalties, Times Publisher David Hiller talks up Zell as an owner....
Posted April 4, 2007 11:44 PM
The hometown Chicago Tribune got a long interview with the buyer of the L.A. Times, KTLA and everything else in the Tribune Company's portfolio (except the Cubs.) Mark Lacter gives...
Posted April 4, 2007 8:22 AM
Tribune buyer Sam Zell is known as "the grave dancer," so OC Register travel editor-blogger Gary Warner thought he would mark yesterday's news by stopping in at the graves of...
Posted April 3, 2007 8:26 AM
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York is upset with the L.A. Times for coverage of the priest abuse cases here. At issue is a story...
Posted April 2, 2007 5:12 PM
I'm not sure how persuasive this will be in the skittish Times newsroom, but Editor Jim O'Shea just emailed the staff his take on the transfer of Tribune to investor...
Posted April 2, 2007 3:47 PM
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics ran the numbers on victorious Tribune suitor Sam Zell and calls him a political contributor who gives generously to both Democrats and Republicans. "Double-giving...
Posted April 2, 2007 10:06 AM
The Chicago Tribune calls it an "epic corporate drama" that ends with the paper's parent company — owner of the Los Angeles Times and KTLA — being taken private by...
Posted April 2, 2007 7:09 AM
In a live story posted at 12:29 1:26 am Midwest time, the Chicago Tribune's website says the board of the parent Tribune company was busily negotiating a $13 billion deal...
Posted April 1, 2007 11:21 PM
Good piece in the Sunday LAT that began as a post on Jill Leovy's Homicide Report blog: LAPD officers frequently assign the wrong name to Latino crime victims and arrestees....
Posted April 1, 2007 3:09 PM
Washington Post columnist and Slate contributor Richard Cohen makes a stab at some Grazergate humor. Didn't work for me, but your mileage might vary. Excerpt of "One Man's Desperate Attempt...
Posted March 30, 2007 9:55 AM
Yeah, the Times really got its money's worth out of that innovation. "We have concluded we will not be moving forward with the program," the paper's official statement says. Gee,...
Posted March 26, 2007 11:50 PM
An L.A. Times press release announces several reductions in the value of what the paper give its dwindling readership — oops, I mean "editorial changes designed to meet the evolving...
Posted March 26, 2007 9:20 AM
The Times has quietly eliminated some of the typographic cacophony that erupted on the front page in October. Gone are the skinny, sans-serif headlines, the stacked decks of secondary headlines...
Posted March 26, 2007 8:16 AM
I received a whole bunch of thoughtful email last week on the Grazergate episode. Submissions are over at We Get Email from, among others, a former editorial writer at the...
Posted March 26, 2007 12:27 AM
In Andrés Martinez's email to LA Observed after he quit Thursday as Times editorial page honcho, he implied that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the list of...
Posted March 25, 2007 2:57 PM
Allison Silver, now a producer on "The Charlie Rose Show," edited the Sunday Opinion section in the L.A. Times for ten years before moving over in 2000 to be an...
Posted March 25, 2007 9:27 AM
Tim Cavanaugh, the web editor who joined the Times Opinion staff recently from Reason magazine, reacted to the resignation of his boss, Andrés Martinez, by posting a personal message on...
Posted March 25, 2007 7:50 AM
Times media columnist Tim Rutten was fingered by Andrés Martinez (in Thursday's email to LA Observed) as one of the LAT staffers supposedly blocking innovation at the paper and purposely...
Posted March 24, 2007 11:22 AM
Times Editor Jim O'Shea sent a missive around the newsroom this evening replying to Andrés Martinez's attacks emailed to LA Observed and posted earlier today. In his retort, O'Shea...
Posted March 23, 2007 10:38 PM
(* Update after jump: New email from Martinez reacting to Times editor Jim O'Shea.) After my post last night on his exit blog from the Times, Andrés Martinez asked me...
Posted March 23, 2007 1:14 AM
Lost in the earlier flurry of posts about the resignation of Andrés Martinez were his verbal attack on the Times newsroom and veiled bitterness at Publisher David Hiller's plans to...
Posted March 22, 2007 10:16 PM
Brian Grazer's thoughts on the big issues won't be in Sunday's Los Angeles Times Current section, if there even is a Current stuffed deep into papers this weekend. But here...
Posted March 22, 2007 4:49 PM
I was locked in a meeting when the morning's dramas went down, but here's the bottom line. Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller, under heavy pressure from the news staff,...
Posted March 22, 2007 1:22 PM
Bill Boyarsky played a prominent role in cleaning up the L.A. Times' ethical mess after the Staples Center scandal in 1999, serving as the conduit for ex-publisher Otis Chandler to...
Posted March 22, 2007 9:12 AM
Times publisher David Hiller says in the morning paper that he might kill this Sunday's Current section rather than run an editor's note about how Hollywood producer Brian Grazer was...
Posted March 22, 2007 1:34 AM
Sunday's Current section in the Los Angeles Times will carry an editor's note disclosing some details of a romantic relationship between Andrés Martinez, the paper's Editor of the Editorial Pages,...
Posted March 21, 2007 5:24 PM
Michael Newman is the deputy editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times who starred in a minor media dustup this month over his observation, from the vantage point of...
Posted March 19, 2007 3:51 PM
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
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
There's continued talk at the L.A. Times of looming cost-cutting and a senior newsroom shift in the works, but I guess there is no hiring freeze. The LAT has snapped...
Posted March 16, 2007 3:10 PM
Last year's L.A. Times publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, has a taken an executive post where he will oversee media interests for Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. Burkle, through Yucaipa, joined with Eli...
Posted March 16, 2007 8:22 AM
The L.A. Times has announced that Current, the paper's Sunday (for now) commentary and ideas section, will have a guest editor every quarter to bring a little outside intellectual...
Posted March 15, 2007 12:35 PM
More La Cucaracha-related troubles at the L.A. Times feature section: 'La Cucaracha': In some copies of today's Comics Plus, the "Blondie" comic strip was printed twice, mistakenly replacing "La Cucaracha,"...
Posted March 15, 2007 8:37 AM
Yes, newspapers still care about Pulitzer prizes. Prompted by yesterday's news that the Times has two Pulitzer finalists in criticism who nominated themselves, a whisper campaign has begun in the...
Posted March 14, 2007 1:59 PM
Science writer Robert Lee Hotz is leaving the Times for the Wall Street Journal to write the Science Journal column. An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement...
Posted March 14, 2007 7:56 AM
All three finalists in the cricitism category of the Pulitzer prizes are from Los Angeles, Joe Strupp reports at Editor & Publisher. The trio includes two Times critics who nominated...
Posted March 13, 2007 10:47 AM
Joseph Russin joins KTLA News as executive editor of planning. "Russin's responsibilities will include overseeing news coverage on-air and on the web, planning feature stories and supervising the work of...
Posted March 13, 2007 9:08 AM
From the L.A. Times: An article in Sunday's California section profiling members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said that decorations on the walls of Supervisor Mike Antonovich's...
Posted March 13, 2007 8:23 AM
The new fashion-centric Image section will appear monthly in the Times starting next Sunday then switch to weekly in September. The section will be headed by deputy features editor Michalene...
Posted March 12, 2007 10:51 AM
Geez, it's been nothing but memos today. One more: the LAT Business section shuffles editors and brings back Anne Reifenberg, who had been running West magazine since the exit of...
Posted March 9, 2007 4:09 PM
As we hinted earlier, the columnist rotation changes. Out are Erin Aubry Kaplan (as reported previously), Max Boot and Jonathan Chait. Meghan Daum escapes the Saturday ghetto for Mondays. Also,...
Posted March 9, 2007 3:04 PM
Look whose arms are being twisted to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times: employees. Head of circulations Jack Klunder, who returned to the LAT after a stint at the MediaNews...
Posted March 9, 2007 11:38 AM
Every year Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher reports the supposedly secret list of finalists submitted by Pulitzer Prize judges. One year I beat Joe into print and felt pretty...
Posted March 8, 2007 9:18 PM
Lalo Alcaraz feels pretty good about having "La Cucaracha" restored to the L.A. Times. He's sending around this riff on Dewey Beats Truman....
Posted March 7, 2007 5:34 PM
I'm going to guess that the pressure to fold the Times' Sunday Book Review into a cheaper, thinner Saturday tabloid comes from the Chicagoans in temporary residence on Spring Street....
Posted March 7, 2007 8:25 AM
Are we entering an era of cross-newspaper snark? Yesterday it was Daily News blogger Mariel Garza making fun of an L.A. Times editor who finds Los Angeles ugly and who...
Posted March 6, 2007 10:51 PM
Back in November we noted that the Times' then-new publisher David Hiller replied to a disappointed reader's email with a personal note. That's still his style, apparently. Hiller today answered...
Posted March 6, 2007 8:34 PM
That was fast: the Lalo Alcaraz comic strip that was killed yesterday will be back tomorrow by popular demand. Flip side: the dog cat gets it. A blurb on the...
Posted March 6, 2007 2:54 PM
If Jeffrey Trachtenberg's Wall Street Journal report is accurate, that would mean the Times decided to face the critical music and launch the scaled-back Book Review before the big LAT...
Posted March 6, 2007 7:59 AM
Michael Newman, the Times' deputy opinion editor from out of town, thinks so after running yesterday's marathon. He particularly seems to not much like Boyle Heights, Koreatown or the sections...
Posted March 5, 2007 4:18 PM
The San Francisco Chronicle has a unique understanding of how readers here might react to the LAT folding its Book Review in with Current. The Chronicle merged its Sunday review...
Posted March 5, 2007 8:09 AM
Essayist William Kittredge will pick up the Robert Kirsch Award on April 27 when the winners in the following Los Angeles Times Book Prize categories will be announced. Finalists were...
Posted March 2, 2007 2:47 PM
For the newsroom at the L.A. Times, the most upsetting parts of last night's "Frontline" episode on the paper's future were remarks by the vice chairman of Ariel Capital Management,...
Posted February 28, 2007 3:46 PM
Today's Times Op-Ed column by Erin Aubry Kaplan will be one of her last. She has been told that her services will no longer be required come April, along with...
Posted February 28, 2007 12:34 PM
The latest installment of "News Wars: What's Happening to the News" airs tonight on PBS — and Times publisher David Hiller sounds concerned about how his paper will be treated....
Posted February 27, 2007 5:19 PM
Bunch of new correspondent assignments were just posted for L.A. Times foreign bureaus, with Baghdad the most affected. There's also a new chiefs of bureau for Moscow and Cairo and...
Posted February 27, 2007 4:45 PM
Times political reporter-columnist Ron Brownstein is taking his act to the opinion side, writing a weekly Op-Ed page column and longer pieces for Current. He'll also have a presence online....
Posted February 27, 2007 7:51 AM
LA-ClergyCases.com was started in 2005 by by the law firm (Hennigan, Bennett & Dorman) that represents the Archdiocese over sexual abuse allegations against priests and defends Cardinal Mahony against accusations...
Posted February 26, 2007 7:56 AM
Chicago real estate developer Sam Zell has proposed to take over Tribune Company and Trib is listening, the New York Times reports on its website. Zell's late-hour play has put...
Posted February 25, 2007 5:12 PM
With the Times launching a new travel website to go with Sunday's redesigned Travel section, newsroom staffers were encouraged Friday to contribute their own experiences so the cupboard doesn't look...
Posted February 24, 2007 10:55 AM
The L.A. Times will send all of its staff bloggers, current and aspiring, to blogging "boot camp" on March 12. The idea, according to a memo from Innovation Editor Russ...
Posted February 24, 2007 9:51 AM
In emails flitting around Hollywood today, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez take offense at a passage in yesterday's Times by Susan King. It ran in The Envelope and read: "Demander...
Posted February 22, 2007 3:40 PM
In the new issue of Los Angeles magazine, media columnist RJ Smith offers several suggestions to help the Times survive — "for rescuing a newspaper that deserves to be." He...
Posted February 22, 2007 11:41 AM
Joel Sappell, who gave up the title of Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive at the LAT in last month's shakeup, gets a new gig as Special Projects Editor. The memo...
Posted February 22, 2007 11:14 AM
Newsroom sources at the Times expect the Sunday Book Review will be folded into a new hybrid opinion section and delivered in Saturday papers. The new section that some staffers...
Posted February 22, 2007 2:24 AM
Amid resurgent newsroom talk of personnel cuts by the end of the quarter — that's March 31 for you civilians — the Times this afternoon undermined staff morale a bit...
Posted February 21, 2007 5:44 PM
Meredith Artley, named earlier this month to be executive editor of the Times website, tells the Online Journalism Review that her focus will be on strengthening the local impact of...
Posted February 20, 2007 10:26 PM
Portfolio is calling Claire Hoffman a contributing editor, starting immediately. Hoffman's jump from the L.A. Times was reported last month, shortly after she danced briefly with the New York Times....
Posted February 16, 2007 9:54 AM
Dean Baquet, erstwhile editor of the Los Angeles Times, talks about his future at the NYT Washington bureau and the state of newspapering in a Q-and-A at the Poynter Online...
Posted February 15, 2007 12:08 PM
I'm a week late in noticing Hugh Hewitt's blog essay, but the talk show host and author offers a bunch of tips under the provocative rubric of "the Los Angeles...
Posted February 15, 2007 7:25 AM
Throttle Jockey columnist Susan Carpenter walks, talks and rides on her video reviews on the Times website. Today's installment covers three-wheeled bikes and scooters and shows Carpenter whizzing around downtown,...
Posted February 14, 2007 11:59 AM
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
Vernon Loeb, wooed off the CIA beat at the Washington Post in 2004 to run the Times' investigative team in Metro, is returning to the Philadelphia Inquirer as Metro Editor....
Posted February 13, 2007 10:36 AM
On the same day that the editor was given a better parking spot in the Times garage, Hoy was forced to run a "to our readers" editorial sheepishly doing the...
Posted February 12, 2007 11:57 PM
On the same day that Tribune announced it is selling the New York edition of Hoy to La Opinión's parent, the Los Angeles version of the Spanish-language newspaper gets a...
Posted February 12, 2007 11:11 AM
The Times plans to launch its long-discussed Image section on March 18, the first day of Los Angeles Fashion Week, WWD.com says. Rose Apodaca, the former West Coast bureau chief...
Posted February 9, 2007 11:49 AM
Davan Maharaj was being recruited hard by the New York Times, according to reliable newsroom gossip. Instead, he will stay at the L.A. Times as the top editor in the...
Posted February 8, 2007 12:47 PM
While debating the war at National Review Online two years ago, Times op-ed columnist from the right Jonah Goldberg offered the following wager: Let's make a bet. I predict that...
Posted February 7, 2007 9:41 AM
From the LAT: L.A. Fashion Week: An article and headline in Saturday's Calendar section about making L.A. Fashion Week a more exclusive event incorrectly quoted Fern Mallis, vice president of...
Posted February 6, 2007 12:12 PM
Meredith Artley, digital development director of the International Herald Tribune, is moving from Paris to be executive editor of latimes.com. She began at the New York Times website. Memo after...
Posted February 6, 2007 10:47 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
TMZ has the 911 tape from Ryan O'Neal's home the night police came and arrested him for firing a shot during a ruckus with his son. O'Neal says his son...
Posted February 5, 2007 3:21 PM
Guess they mean it. Training classes begin Feb. 12 for Los Angeles Times editors to learn how to post to the website — and in some cases to just learn...
Posted February 2, 2007 11:57 AM
Aaron Curtiss, the tech editor in the Business section, gets the title of Deputy Innovation Editor at the Times. He was on the Spring Street Project, has experience on the...
Posted February 1, 2007 4:11 PM
Using low-experience freelancers paid by the item. Job posting: Tribune Interactive is looking for a limited number of experienced freelance writers in Los Angeles to generate listings for a new...
Posted February 1, 2007 9:50 AM
Jim O'Shea, the Times' reluctant editor, has moved to a Manhattan Beach condo and taken to commuting downtown via Lexus. He has done an LAPD ride-along in South Los Angeles...
Posted January 31, 2007 9:28 PM
The three white female victims of the Halloween beating in Long Beach testified tearfully in court today and asked that the black defendants, in jail since then, get the...
Posted January 31, 2007 4:41 PM
The Chandler Trusts, which own a 20% stake in Tribune, are continuing talks with the special committee reviewing offers for Tribune, a source tells Chicago Business. The deadline had been...
Posted January 31, 2007 2:32 PM
“It became clearer and clearer to me that The New York Times was the place where I belonged now,” ex-LAT editor Dean Baquet told the New York Observer. He said...
Posted January 31, 2007 10:17 AM
Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, bucks up the troops with a go-get-em memo. Posted at Romenesko: From: McManus, Doyle Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 11:29...
Posted January 30, 2007 10:53 AM
Former LAT editor on high Dean Baquet is returning to the New York Times as Washington bureau chief. He'll also be an assistant managing editor and instantly a potential contender...
Posted January 30, 2007 10:28 AM
They run it by collective, call it make/shift — subtitle "feminism in motion" — and plan to launch in March. One of the Los Angeles-based regulars caught my eye: Times...
Posted January 29, 2007 1:50 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
Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, was asked by Market Watch's Jon Friedman if ex-LAT editor Dean Baquet would be returning to the NYT. Friedman writes: "Lately,...
Posted January 29, 2007 11:07 AM
The lumber has arrived, demolition has begun, and Veronique de Turenne is off on the home remodeling ride of her life. She tries at Here in Malibu to take it...
Posted January 26, 2007 11:35 AM
More than 500 LA Observed readers put their media savvy credentials on the line and offered predictions on the top Los Angeles media stories of the coming year. The news...
Posted January 26, 2007 3:38 AM
An alert LA Observed reader noticed a discrepancy between the Times' online version of yesterday's web shake-up and today's print version. The James Rainey story that ran on the web...
Posted January 25, 2007 4:22 PM
L.A. Times editors are busily trying to come up with a new beat attractive enough to keep Business section rising star Claire Hoffman away from the New York Times. The...
Posted January 25, 2007 2:05 AM
Tom Plate has a singular L.A. media distinction. He was the editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times toward the end of the Chandler ownership era and, previously, at...
Posted January 24, 2007 4:28 PM
James Rainey's staff story on today's shakeup at the Times website reveals some behind-the-scenes details on the internal tension over how best to move the LAT toward a higher and...
Posted January 24, 2007 2:54 PM
This is the big reinvention that publisher David Hiller promised. Joel Sappell is out as Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive, and current Business Editor Russ Stanton will get the new...
Posted January 24, 2007 11:42 AM
Sheriff's deputies are "relatively sure" they have the guy who spilled mercury in the Pershing Square Metro station last month. Armando Bustamante Miranda, 27, was being held on an...
Posted January 23, 2007 4:43 PM
The PR industry anony-blog Strumpette is making fun today of Villaraigosa press deputy Matt Szabo. He came up in Steve Lopez's recent Los Angeles Times column on Hummer-driving transportation aide...
Posted January 23, 2007 1:46 PM
Correction to yesterday's item: it was a homeless woman who jumped to her death from the L.A. Times parking garage yesterday while staffers were arriving at work. Brief memo today...
Posted January 19, 2007 11:14 AM
Eric at Blogdowntown has posted a heat map showing where the homeless population is concentrated, based on LAPD counts. You can see distinct nodes of where people are sleeping on...
Posted January 18, 2007 12:33 PM
Mark Lacter applies his veteran business editor acumen to figuring out what the heck is going on at Times-Tribune. He was also on KPCC this morning as an analyst. LA...
Posted January 18, 2007 10:47 AM
In a revision to her first story for today's paper, Sarah Ellison of the Wall Street Journal says that three proposals were submitted to Tribune by yesterday's deadline: one of...
Posted January 18, 2007 1:19 AM
Twice Updated: Eli Broad and Ron Burkle and the Chandlers are readying competing bids for all or part of the Tribune, Jim Rainey reports in the LAT He essentially confirms...
Posted January 17, 2007 5:56 PM
Eli Broad has opened up a bigger lead on David Geffen as LA Observed readers' most likely (or preferred?) buyer of the L.A. Times. Ron Burkle runs a distant third;...
Posted January 17, 2007 11:55 AM
While L.A. Times publisher David Hiller struggles to make the paper more local, his business side has decided to out-source the in-house computer help desk — to India. This function...
Posted January 17, 2007 11:23 AM
You might remember that after losing Tim Brown to Yahoo last November, LAT sports editor Randy Harvey put out the call (second item) for a Spanish-speaking writer to work general...
Posted January 16, 2007 12:43 PM
Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine thinks the most likely outcome of the Tribune Company's dance with potential buyers is no outcome -- that no sale will take place, Editor...
Posted January 12, 2007 3:29 PM
Have you seen the Times spots where fisheyed faces peer into a newsbox and consider whether to drag out a copy of the paper? Advertising Age reviewer Bob Garfield has,...
Posted January 9, 2007 1:25 AM
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
There's one California newspaper in bigger turmoil than the Times: the San Jose Mercury-News. After being taken over by the Dean Singleton crowd last year, the Mercury has been downsizing...
Posted January 8, 2007 11:04 AM
Tim Rutten's Saturday LAT column about the online-vs-print future of newspapers exemplified by the redesigned Wall Street reached at least one influential reader. Times Publisher David Hiller, shaking off that...
Posted January 7, 2007 10:42 PM
Jacob Soboroff has video up now with Times employees celebrating their success at bringing a union into the paper's downtown and Orange County pressrooms....
Posted January 6, 2007 8:29 PM
General Otis (and Otis Chandler) must be rolling in their graves. For the first time in a long while, workers at the Los Angeles Times have voted to affiliate with...
Posted January 6, 2007 3:27 PM
Slate's Jack Shafer identifies the Los Angeles Times newsroom stars he says are vulnerable to poaching by other media outlets if the Tribune-induced fear and loathing doesn't settle down soon....
Posted January 6, 2007 10:02 AM
The difference between the news side of the L.A. Times and the newly and earnestly irreverent opinion side was on display in the handling of this photo from the Gerald...
Posted January 4, 2007 1:58 AM
The Times' Pressmens Club blog has photos up of all the anti-union banners and placards placed around the Olympic plant (and presumably in Costa Mesa too) in preparation for today's...
Posted January 4, 2007 12:53 AM
Ax falls at Channel 2/9: veteran reporter Paul Dandridge has been taken off the bio page, though his blog remains — last updated in August. Newsroom sources say that Inland...
Posted January 3, 2007 5:20 PM
Workers in the L.A Times press room on Olympic Boulevard downtown begin voting tomorrow whether to bring in a union. The paper, of course, has long been anti-union within its...
Posted January 3, 2007 1:36 PM
An unsigned editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review calls on Chicago's Tribune company not just to sell off the Los Angeles Times, but to quit the newspaper business entirely. After...
Posted January 2, 2007 2:46 PM
In his Times column today, Joel Stein drums up web traffic and blogosphere chatter by throwing down with his readers. Don't email him, Stein writes, because he doesn't care what...
Posted January 2, 2007 2:28 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
Did the Los Angeles Times have a tough year or what? Lots of unhappy departures, speculations about a dark future and criticism aimed at the paper. There also was much...
Posted December 31, 2006 11:55 AM
Kim Masters writes at Slate that David Geffen is the wrong man to run the L.A. Times, taking issue with the position voiced earlier this month by Times Hollywood writers...
Posted December 29, 2006 10:06 AM
Shades of Brown in the LA Weekly was Daniel Hernandez's take on the relationship between the Times (his former employer) and its Latino staffers as well as the city's largest...
Posted December 28, 2006 11:30 PM
Mary Kaye Schilling, the former executive editor of Entertainment Weekly, gets the helm of the LAT's Calendar Weekend section. She used to be the magazine's Los Angeles bureau chief. Looks...
Posted December 27, 2006 4:52 PM
Mark Lacter has the scoop over at LA Biz Observed: Rick Wartzman gave his notice at the L.A. Times to join the New America Foundation, the think tank where Gregory...
Posted December 22, 2006 8:18 PM
John Balzar, one of the last ties to the L.A. Times' run as an exemplar of the literary newspaper journalism form, has given his notice and will move to Washington...
Posted December 22, 2006 2:26 PM
Daniel Hernandez, a former Metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times, goes long on the paper's dearth of Latino journalists and disconnect from the community in today's LA Weekly (and...
Posted December 21, 2006 1:21 AM
Alissa Rubin, who just last September was given the Paris bureau chief slot for the L.A. Times, succumbed to the lure of the New York Times. She's going back to...
Posted December 20, 2006 2:10 PM
Dean Baquet's defense of news values against the bean counters — and his November ouster from the LAT — has won him the New York Observer's fourth annual Media Mensch...
Posted December 20, 2006 9:30 AM
Saturday's Daily Breeze ran this photo of Dean Singleton addressing the staff, along with a main story about the day's big news in the South Bay. Including the Breeze within...
Posted December 17, 2006 12:40 AM
Jill Leovy covers homicide and the police for the L.A. Times, often in South Los Angeles. She writes today at Salon.com that the recent uptick in murder stats and spreading...
Posted December 14, 2006 11:31 AM
Readers of The Envelope in yesterday's Times might have thought that Calendar staffer in New York Paul Lieberman's interview with Martin Scorsese was timely. It was all framed around the...
Posted December 14, 2006 10:55 AM
Tribune has neither accepted nor rejected David Geffen's all-cash offer last month to buy the Los Angeles Times, a source tells the paper's James Rainey. Also: Rainey reports that ousted...
Posted December 14, 2006 7:45 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
Dean Baquet told his younger brother Terry (right) that he was being ousted as editor of the Los Angeles Times on Oct. 31, seven days before the Wall Street Journal...
Posted December 13, 2006 12:20 PM
A quartet of Hollywood old hands — Patrick Goldstein and John Horn of the LAT and Sharon Waxman and Laura Holson of the NYT — agreed last night at Zócalo's...
Posted December 13, 2006 12:35 AM
The Teamsters union is trying again to organize in the L.A. Times pressroom, and new publisher David Hiller has taken to the web to urge employees to vote no. I...
Posted December 12, 2006 2:18 AM
Remember this spring when the Los Angeles Times announced with some fanfare that it was devoting three staffers, two front-section pages and some design energy to giving readers a brighter...
Posted December 11, 2006 5:31 PM
Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart uses today's column to say he doesn't think much of The Envelope, the L.A. Times' effort to take Oscar campaign ads away from the trades. He...
Posted December 9, 2006 1:45 PM
Nelson is a professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC and a former national correspondent at the Los Angeles Times. In an op-ed in next week's Los Angeles...
Posted December 8, 2006 4:44 PM
There will be a new lineup of Los Angeles Times editors managing coverage of the next presidential race. The desk will be bicoastal: one editor in Washington, one here in...
Posted December 8, 2006 3:51 PM
David Geffen tells the WSJ that Dreamgirls is his final Hollywood project: "I don't want to keep solving the same problems. I'm not interested in buying things simply to make...
Posted December 8, 2006 10:12 AM
Hollywood Reporter lays off five more, including executive editor Peter Pryor, Fishbowl LA and Nikki Finke say. Earlier in the week editorial director Howard Burns got the axe. (I'm...
Posted December 7, 2006 4:50 PM
New religion and higher education reporters, a philanthropy beat, a reporter for the South Bay and Long Beach and Jeff Rabin moves off the city ethics and developer influence beat....
Posted December 5, 2006 10:14 AM
LA Observed reader Marc Litchman emails with one of those shake-your-head stories about trying to get through to the more-depleted-than-ever business side at the Los Angeles Times. I know circulation...
Posted December 4, 2006 5:57 PM
The LAT is once again trying to find good reporters willing to relocate to, as Jon Stewart puts it, Mess-O'-Potamia. Memo from foreign editor Marjorie Miller follows. The Foreign staff...
Posted December 4, 2006 1:17 PM
I'm quoted in another out-of-town piece about the Los Angeles Times, this one a cover package by Rob Gurwitt in Governing magazine that takes on the larger issue of declining...
Posted December 1, 2006 12:25 PM
Eli Broad didn't talk specifics about his bid with Ron Burkle to buy the Los Angeles Times, but in a wide-ranging interview circulated today by the Associated Press he said...
Posted November 30, 2006 10:51 PM
Ellen Barry of the Los Angeles Times' New York bureau confirmed for The Media Mob that she is switching to the NYT. She'll start her New York Times career in...
Posted November 30, 2006 10:31 PM
To go with today's California section story on radiation testing at the Brentwood dog park and nearby sports field, the Times runs a staff photo of a technician using a...
Posted November 30, 2006 11:38 AM
Highway 1, the LAT's weekly two-page featurette on driving and vehicle buying, seems of split minds on motorcycle culture. On the one hand, they gave staff writer Susan Carpenter the...
Posted November 29, 2006 11:27 AM
Lennie LaGuire moves a couple of bodies in the Calendar section: From: LaGuire, Lennie Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 11:33 AM Subject: staff moves Just to keep things interesting around...
Posted November 28, 2006 12:06 PM
Have you noticed a definite uptick in journalistic ambition in the L.A. Times? Credit the annual rush to squeeze in big projects while papers are fat with holiday ads and...
Posted November 27, 2006 5:16 PM
Departures from the increasingly Tribunized L.A. Times are beginning. Tim Brown, the national baseball writer since leaving the NBA beat, is jumping to Yahoo! Sports, where the former #2 at...
Posted November 27, 2006 2:52 PM
Lennie LaGuire has clearly emerged as a favorite of Times features czar John Montorio. Fifteen months ago he put her in charge of Daily Calendar, with the awkward title of...
Posted November 21, 2006 3:53 PM
L.A. Times op-ed and Current editor Nick Goldberg e-mailed to elaborate on his terse response to historian Mike Davis in yesterday's post, and also to correct my notion that Davis...
Posted November 21, 2006 12:05 PM
After UC Irvine historian and controversial Los Angeles chronicler Mike Davis was called a "Marxist apocalypticist" by Gregory Rodriguez in the LAT's Current section on Sunday, he fired off an...
Posted November 20, 2006 4:28 PM
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad occupied the prime spot on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page from 1964 to 1993, and I know from signing books next to him that...
Posted November 20, 2006 1:45 AM
Item: The Los Angeles Times makes a 20% annual profit and wins Pulitzers, but is considered in decline as a business. Instead of investing in delivering more to readers, Tribune...
Posted November 20, 2006 1:13 AM
L.A. Times legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein, in New York to pick up his John Chancellor Award, dropped in on lefty Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" for a chat with hosts...
Posted November 16, 2006 11:53 PM
A bunch of Times readers have emailed to say how jarring they found this morning's front page. Not because the news stories above the fold were all local, but that...
Posted November 16, 2006 3:52 PM
This shouldn't happen at the Los Angeles Times. In the staff-written web story about the UCLA student who got the stun gun, the Times says the incident has prompted "outrage...
Posted November 16, 2006 12:19 AM
LATimes.com has posted ten minutes of video showing new editor Jim O'Shea's address to the newsroom yesterday. He says in it that he told his Tribune bosses that the Times...
Posted November 14, 2006 11:25 AM
It has come to this: James O'Shea's first address to the staff as editor of the Los Angeles Times was considered newsworthy enough to be reported on in today's paper....
Posted November 14, 2006 2:05 AM
I was wrong earlier today (Eastward ho) when I mentioned that the Times' associate editor, John Montorio, had stayed mum about his future with the post-Baquet paper. Actually, he had...
Posted November 13, 2006 11:49 PM
Programming note: I'm supposed to talk about the Times with Suzi Weissman on Beneath the Surface live on KPFK (90.7 FM) at 5:15 pm. I'm not sure what the folks...
Posted November 13, 2006 5:09 PM
Legendary Texas journalist Molly Ivins, in Editor & Publisher via Yahoo. What may ultimately happen, she believes, is that "we settle into some form of prestige papers, a bit like...
Posted November 13, 2006 4:18 PM
Safe to say the trend of New York Times staffers leaving the gray lady for brighter, more optimistic futures at the Los Angeles Times is over. As ex-editor Dean Baquet...
Posted November 13, 2006 12:57 PM
There's been a bunch of analyzing, fretting and free advice-giving by staffers at the Times the past couple of days (not to mention Metro reporter Sam Quinones' cheeky email to...
Posted November 13, 2006 12:11 PM
Remember Times publisher David Hiller's email plea on Friday for staffers to think about the newspaper's future? Metro reporter Sam Quinones emailed the entire newsroom his reply, which could be...
Posted November 12, 2006 7:11 PM
Harry B. Chandler actually worked at the Los Angeles Times, unlike most of his relatives who own shares in Tribune. He was an early proponent of an ambitious Internet strategy,...
Posted November 12, 2006 4:19 PM
David Hiller, the new L.A. Times publisher who pushed out editor Dean Baquet last week, gave $1,000 to the Republican National Committee as recently as 2003. Since 2000, while an...
Posted November 12, 2006 12:37 PM
New L.A. Times publisher David Hiller read the paper's story on itself this mornng and emailed a missive to the staff asking them to devote time thinking about the paper's...
Posted November 10, 2006 9:05 AM
The Journal's Sarah Ellison does a good job explaining how the culture clash between Tribune and the Times has escalated to the point that two Los Angeles publishers and two...
Posted November 10, 2006 8:51 AM
Steve Harvey, the Only in L.A. columnist for the Times, was in West Los Angeles when he heard a voice from the past. A panel truck stopped and the driver...
Posted November 10, 2006 1:39 AM
The Times is all over the running story of its future. Along with a piece breaking the news that Tribune is offering KTLA to potential buyers, James Rainey reports that...
Posted November 10, 2006 12:58 AM
Former L.A Times and New York Times reporter Anita Busch, in an amendment this week to a civil suit, names onetime Hollywood power Michael Ovitz as one of the figures...
Posted November 9, 2006 10:12 PM
Expect more video on LATimes.com and sharing of video between the paper and Channel 5, with KTLA producing local news segments for the website through the day. Here's this afternoon's...
Posted November 9, 2006 5:23 PM
Finally, some meaty if unattributed info out of the billionaires trying to buy the Los Angeles Times. LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke has been sounding confident for months about her...
Posted November 9, 2006 5:20 AM
At James O'Shea's going away party today in the Chicago Tribune newsroom, his ovation came with a gag gift of a plastic shield and body armor — a comment by...
Posted November 8, 2006 4:12 PM
A disgruntled Times reader sent new publisher David Hiller a heated email yesterday afternoon after the Baquet news broke. She got back a personal (perhaps defensive?) response pointing out that...
Posted November 8, 2006 11:19 AM
Eli Broad and Ron Burkle have together offered to buy the Tribune Company, the Times' James Rainey reports on the paper's website. Details about the offer and the price that...
Posted November 8, 2006 11:11 AM
Here are the some of the best observations and news culled from the next-day coverage about the ouster of Dean Baquet as editor of the L.A. Times. Managing editors Doug...
Posted November 8, 2006 2:19 AM
I will be on live talking with Warren Olney about LA Observed's coverage of Dean Baquet's ouster tonight between 7:20 and 7:30 pm. Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison, who...
Posted November 7, 2006 7:10 PM
Dean Baquet was forced out as editor in chief of the Los Angeles Times after just more than a year and replaced by the #2 editor at the Chicago Tribune....
Posted November 7, 2006 4:01 PM
Jamie Court, president of the Santa Monica-based Foundation For Taxpayer and Consumer Rights and a founder of ArnoldWatch.org, posts somewhat bizarrely that today's ouster of Dean Baquet "pulled a page...
Posted November 7, 2006 3:10 PM
Times publisher David Hiller just emailed the newsroom his version of this afternoon's events. Basically, he wanted his guy: From: Hiller, David Sent: Tuesday, November 07, 2006 2:40 PM Subject:...
Posted November 7, 2006 2:48 PM
Updated repeatedly with new information Times editor Dean Baquet "is stepping down under pressure from Tribune Company," the Wall Street Journal says in an online story citing "people familiar with...
Posted November 7, 2006 1:35 PM
Even before seeing these dozen graphs at NewsDesigner.com, you knew that the odds of the L.A. Times' front page redesign helping stem the circulation slide were long. As someone asks...
Posted November 7, 2006 11:18 AM
I should have noted this yesterday, but when rookie Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller announced a new emphasis on "serving our Hispanic audience" he defied his paper's 25-year preference...
Posted November 7, 2006 1:29 AM
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
New Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller just sent out a call for change across the paper to deal with plunging circulation and other threats to the future. He stresses...
Posted November 6, 2006 10:47 AM
Friday's Times carries the obit on the paper's long-time and respected classical music reviewer, Daniel Cariaga, who died on Wednesday at age 71. His life path was not typical of...
Posted November 3, 2006 12:39 AM
This is the Jackson Pollock painting that David Geffen has reportedly sold for $140 million — should I say that again? $140 million — to Mexican financier David Martinez. It's...
Posted November 2, 2006 12:18 PM
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
Daniel Cariaga was the longtime classical music reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Calendar section. A note sent to the staff this afternoon said that he had been hospitalized with...
Posted November 1, 2006 6:58 PM
The Wall Street Journal has moved a story (subscribers only) saying that since private-equity bids for the whole company came in so low, Tribune has given noticed that "it will...
Posted November 1, 2006 1:45 PM
Fox News shouter Bill O'Reilly is back on his Times kick, this time alleging that the real circulation is about half of what the ABC said it was this week....
Posted November 1, 2006 10:24 AM
A source outside the Los Angeles Newspaper Group who has been reliable before says the Daily News suffered a scarier circulation plunge than even the drop at the Times: down...
Posted October 31, 2006 9:15 AM
Among big-city newspapers, only the Miami Herald (8.8%) lost a bigger percentage of its daily readers than the Los Angeles Times (8%) in today's new numbers. The Times, of course,...
Posted October 30, 2006 11:14 AM
Writing over at Native Intelligence, New York Observer columnist (and LA Observed regular from Hancock Park) Bruce Feirstein says the Los Angeles Times is losing the war for the hearts...
Posted October 30, 2006 2:25 AM
First, let me say that I want West magazine to flourish. I think it should be, and on some Sundays is, an important home for California-oriented journalism. Just today the...
Posted October 29, 2006 11:52 PM
The number of college graduates who read the L.A. Times is closer to the 42% that Times columnist Tim Rutten claimed in his churlish snappish response, not the 19% that...
Posted October 26, 2006 2:53 PM
Times editor Dean Baquet spoke to the gathered Associated Press managing editors in his hometown of New Orleans today and urged newspaper editors not to passively accept whatever cuts the...
Posted October 26, 2006 1:59 PM
In most election years, the Los Angeles Times Poll would be out in the field this week with a final look at the governor's race and the other statewide offices...
Posted October 26, 2006 12:35 PM
A powdery substance found this evening sent everyone down to the lobby. A Los Angeles Police Department Hazardous Materials team is on the scene along with the health department. *...
Posted October 24, 2006 10:36 PM
Kurt Andersen is a New Yorker, but as the onetime editor-in-chief of a couple of decent magazines (Spy, New York), columnist at others (The New Yorker, Time) and co-founder of...
Posted October 23, 2006 3:31 PM
I'm not sure that ambushing your customers with an unfamiliar product and giving the perception of less content — four front page stories instead of the usual six or seven...
Posted October 23, 2006 2:30 AM
After an internal redesign process that has gone on for years, Sunday's Los Angeles Times will unveil a busy new look on the front page and announce a major shift...
Posted October 21, 2006 12:35 PM
Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade mag, likes L.A. Times Cairo bureau chief Megan Stack. A profile posted today says that Stack, then the Houston bureau chief, happened to be...
Posted October 18, 2006 3:45 PM
The L.A. Times is really embracing this whole solicit free advice idea. In addition to the Manhattan Project and asking readers to share tips at the Opinion blog, the paper...
Posted October 18, 2006 1:46 PM
Is the ex-New York Daily News gossip columnist about to pop up as the long-awaited in-house gossip for the L.A. Times? I don't know, but intriguing stars are aligned. Grove...
Posted October 16, 2006 10:16 PM
Before he was a city ethics commissioner, Bill Boyarsky was city editor of the Los Angeles Times, chief of the paper's city-county bureau and a political writer for the paper....
Posted October 13, 2006 12:30 PM
I've gotten some more details on the Los Angeles Times' sudden new quest to journalistically investigate how it can reengage with readers, an effort unfortunately dubbed the Manhattan Project (more...
Posted October 13, 2006 5:12 AM
Item #1: The Tribune Company has finally decided the time is right to sell off Chicago's corporate jet. No details were divulged on what the plane was worth or what...
Posted October 13, 2006 12:16 AM
Three investigative reporters and a half-dozen editors have been assigned to identify ideas that get readers excited about the newspaper again. Editor Dean Baquet is holding a meeting today to...
Posted October 12, 2006 10:42 AM
The L.A. Times' investigative reporters on the Getty story, Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino, didn't get the Pulitzer but they did get a book contract. Chasing Aphrodite was billed as...
Posted October 11, 2006 1:56 AM
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
Starting on Oct. 29, the two confusingly organized sections of Sunday Calendar in the Times will have more clearly delineated content. One will focus on movies, TV and web entertainment,...
Posted October 9, 2006 12:19 PM
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
The deposed LAT publisher tells Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal that he knew his job was on the line as soon as he went public telling the bosses at Tribune...
Posted October 8, 2006 2:58 PM
Forget local. Merge the best of the Tribune papers into an LAT-dominated national brand that competes on foreign and Washington news and owns coverage of entertainment and celebrity culture, Michael...
Posted October 8, 2006 2:22 PM
Going into the weekend here is some follow through on the Times and Daily News situations: LAT petition: In an email to the newsroom, Times investigations editor Vernon Loeb says...
Posted October 7, 2006 9:59 AM
Actually I don't know where you get them, but Los Angeles Times foreign correspondents have donned t-shirts with editor Dean Baquet's image in solidarity with the newsroom petition. (Nope, actually...
Posted October 6, 2006 6:07 PM
Nikki Finke and John Amato at Crooks and Liars have posted lengthy pieces on the past right-wing connections of new L.A. Times publisher David Hiller. He was an assistant to...
Posted October 6, 2006 5:58 PM
Times newsroom staffers are circulating another petition expressing support for editor Dean Baquet and their unhappiness at the ouster of publisher Jeff Johnson. The call for signatures is below: From:...
Posted October 6, 2006 11:19 AM
Newsroom sources at the Los Angeles Times are angry that today's axe fell on ex-publisher Jeff Johnson at a personally difficult time. According to the sources, a family member this...
Posted October 5, 2006 6:02 PM
LA Observed contributor Bob Baker is a former Los Angeles Times city desk editor, reporter and writing coach. He posts at Native Intelligence that today goes down in Times lore...
Posted October 5, 2006 4:08 PM
Times editor Dean Baquet told an editors meeting at 11:30 that he can work with new publisher David Hiller. Baquet had coffee with Hiller this morning and apparently was told...
Posted October 5, 2006 12:14 PM
Brendan Huffman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association, was one of the community leaders who signed last month's letter urging the Tribune company to reconsider cuts at the...
Posted October 5, 2006 12:05 PM
Updated at the bottom as new info comes in... * It's breaking this morning. Editor Dean Baquet is said to be in meetings with Tribune this morning. * The Times...
Posted October 5, 2006 11:11 AM
Two new editorial writers, an online editor and an articles editor for op-ed in on the second floor at the L.A. Times, and some other names headed out. Plus the...
Posted October 5, 2006 11:10 AM
A memo shooting around the Los Angeles Times today introduces Nancy Sullivan, most recently SVP of Music & Digital Entertainment at Rogers & Cowan. Her job will be to tell...
Posted October 4, 2006 2:27 PM
Thought I recognized some of the scenery in "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." The board room scenes and corporate offices of fictional network NBS in Aaron Sorkin's new NBC...
Posted September 30, 2006 3:10 PM
After the district attorney's spokeswoman blasted investigative reporter Christine Hanley, the editor of the LAT Orange County edition responded: Susan Kang Schroeder’s letter to her staff about our reporter Christine...
Posted September 28, 2006 5:49 PM
Today's New York Times carries a man-in-the-news on LAT publisher Jeffrey Johnson, who "seemed to many Los Angeles Times employees to transform himself as dramatically as Clark Kent does when...
Posted September 28, 2006 11:41 AM
Nikki Finke is out with an LA Weekly story saying that David Geffen is actively trying to buy the L.A. Times and feels confident he will succeed. She also reports...
Posted September 27, 2006 11:50 PM
The Orange County District Attorney's office is attacking the Times again, this time focusing on an investigative reporter working on a story about the office's chief spokeswoman, Susan Kang Schroeder,...
Posted September 27, 2006 8:29 AM
Marty Kaplan, associate dean of USC Annenberg, takes the Times to task at Eat the Press for Sunday's bizarre inside ad for Time Warner Cable. The ad covers page 37...
Posted September 25, 2006 10:45 AM
Mark Lacter blogs over at LA Biz Observed: Getting relatively little attention in today's stories about the Tribune announcement was a sentence buried in the press release. It relates to...
Posted September 22, 2006 2:18 PM
Sebastian Rotella yields the Paris bureau to become a roving international investigative reporter, plus a new correspondent in Baghdad. Memo after the jump:...
Posted September 22, 2006 12:02 PM
Conan Nolan just left LA Observed Tower and I may be on NBC 4 at 5 pm talking about the Times-Tribune situation. (I was, along with Prof. Bryce Nelson of...
Posted September 21, 2006 4:31 PM
By the way, the memo went out Monday that Sallie Hofmeister is the Times' new Business section poobah for entertainment and technology coverage. It follows after the jump:...
Posted September 21, 2006 11:34 AM
Today's Los Angeles Times sports section carries a story on NASCAR racing under the byline of Times Staff Writer Ed Hinton. One problem: readers (and probably most Times staffers) don't...
Posted September 21, 2006 11:27 AM
Nikki Finke says at Deadline Hollywood Daily that Dean Baquet's three top deputies have a "suicide pact" to resign on the spot if he is fired for refusing to carry...
Posted September 21, 2006 1:35 AM
Today's Editor and Publisher has the wording of the letter that hundreds of staffers at the L.A. Times have signed in support of editor Dean Baquet and publisher Jeff Johnson:...
Posted September 20, 2006 8:24 AM
NPR's David Folkenflik came up with a good piece this afternoon for "All Things Considered" that fleshed out some of the internal corporate struggle going on at the Los Angeles...
Posted September 19, 2006 11:57 PM
On the eve of a crucial board meeting, Tribune Company chairman Dennis J. FitzSimons sent a contentious four-page reply to Los Angeles civic leaders who had said publicly the company...
Posted September 19, 2006 12:55 AM
Times columnist Tim Rutten adds his voice to those advising the Tribune Company — essentially his bosses — to consider selling the LAT. His Saturday column contrasts the Tribune's latest...
Posted September 16, 2006 12:58 PM
After all the morale-sapping speculation about a new wave of Tribune-ordered cutbacks, LAT publisher Jeff Johnson felt moved to email words of reassurance to the staff. Are they reassuring? You...
Posted September 15, 2006 5:49 PM
In the aftermath of the letter from Warren Christopher and others urging the Tribune to shape up in Los Angeles or get out, today's report on August revenues finds the...
Posted September 14, 2006 12:33 PM
Celebrity gossip Marc Malkin is taking his act from The Insider to E! Online. He will write the daily Planet Gossip column to launch in October and co-host a weekly...
Posted September 14, 2006 12:24 PM
Under pressure to extract more budget savings by further cutting the staff, Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet admits in the paper today to a "difference of opinion" with his...
Posted September 14, 2006 1:18 AM
From the Los Angeles Times: Scandinavian fest: A listing in Sunday Calendar said hot dogs would not be allowed at the Scandinavian Autumn Fest and Marknad on Sept. 17 at...
Posted September 13, 2006 12:39 PM
Scriptland is billed as a weekly-on-Wednesday addition to Calendar by freelancer Jay A. Fernandez. For the first installment, he reads from James Vanderbilt's 200-page screenplay adaptation of Against All Enemies:...
Posted September 12, 2006 10:25 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
At age 82, classical music critic Alan Rich could be expected to look down over his bifocals at the newbies who come along on his beat. And at that age,...
Posted September 7, 2006 4:41 PM
Don't go looking for the new Los Angeles Times blog that was supposed to launch today as part of a new website, California Politics, per managing editor Doug Frantz's memo...
Posted September 7, 2006 3:36 PM
Amy Scattergood is going full-time on the staff of the Los Angeles Times Food section. She might a be a trifle overqualified, judging by today's memo from Michalene Busico, the...
Posted September 7, 2006 1:49 PM
After Steve Lopez's column today ragging on the New York Times for using La-La Land in a piece about Amy Wilentz — calling it a cliche favored by New Yorkers...
Posted September 6, 2006 6:59 PM
Nita Lelyveld gets the nod, replacing Washington-bound editor John Hoeffel. She became an editor in Metro last year. Yes, she is the offspring of retired New York Times executive editor...
Posted September 5, 2006 2:30 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
The Black Dahlia opened the Venice Film Festival yesterday, with James Ellroy and the stars in attendance. (Variety covers and reviews: "...literally ripping good yarn is undercut by some lackluster...
Posted August 31, 2006 10:54 AM
David Davis at SoCal Sports Observed makes the point that the Los Angeles Times has yet to mention that the father of USC basketball player Brynn Cameron says his daughter...
Posted August 30, 2006 2:32 PM
The young reporter (he's 25) who left the Los Angeles Times this year for the LA Weekly (and did a well-received profile of Gustavo Arellano and took heat for his...
Posted August 28, 2006 2:29 PM
Don Woutat doesn't stay long in any job at the Los Angeles Times. But he really didn't stay long as the Times' new correspondent in Las Vegas. He was announced...
Posted August 28, 2006 1:48 PM
Anna Richardson is the former British late-night TV personality who said that Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled her onto his knee, fondled her and asked if her breasts were real after a...
Posted August 25, 2006 1:01 PM
It's not unusual for someone to claim that a newspaper misinformed them. It is quite unusual, though, for the complaint to come from a Los Angeles Times contributor — about...
Posted August 19, 2006 12:52 AM
In my Politics piece this month for Los Angeles magazine, while talking about South L.A. black politics post-Yvonne Burke I observe that reporters typically resist assignments at the county Hall...
Posted August 16, 2006 1:23 PM
Claire Hoffman's talker on Girls Gone Wild creep Joe Francis in West two weeks ago might be the most-clicked-on L.A. Times non-news story ever. As this memo sent from LATimes.com...
Posted August 16, 2006 10:23 AM
The LAT announced in yesterday's TV Times that the weekly guide to what's on television will no longer come with Sunday papers. If you are a Times subscriber, and if...
Posted August 14, 2006 4:52 AM
The Times has posted the full list of its anointed 100 most powerful Southern California players. After the first ten, which I gave you here this morning, they are in...
Posted August 10, 2006 12:47 PM
West Magazine will run "The West 100" of power players in Southern California on Sunday, as chosen by Los Angeles Times staffers drafted by the magazine. It's not a conventional...
Posted August 10, 2006 9:25 AM
I don't think so, but Clay Risen at the website The Morning News does. His reasoning is a little tortured: he calls Claire Hoffman's piece in last Sunday's West magazine...
Posted August 9, 2006 11:17 AM
The topic of Gary Webb and his treatment within the journalism world remains divisive. People I respect fall on both sides: that he was a courageous investigative digger who got...
Posted August 8, 2006 1:46 PM
That profile of Joe Francis in West magazine I told you about last week was the talk of the town (to the degree that can happen in L.A.) all weekend....
Posted August 7, 2006 10:22 AM
Business section staff reporter Claire Hoffman opens her piece in the Sunday magazine West with a graphic scene. The screaming phone calls, accusations that she has a crush on her...
Posted August 4, 2006 2:58 PM
In a column tomorrow motivated by Mel Gibson's anti-Jewish recidivism, Times Calendar columnist Patrick Goldstein chides Hollywood executives for not distancing themselves from the actor-producer. Amy Pascal is my hero....
Posted August 1, 2006 5:59 PM
Desperation strikes. Publisher Jeff Johnson just announced that the Los Angeles Times will begin to accept advertising on the front pages of some news and feature sections — but not...
Posted July 31, 2006 5:01 PM
The annual gaming trade show that the geeks drool over is cutting way back and will move out of the downtown Convention Center — but wants to stay in Los...
Posted July 31, 2006 1:49 PM
Each of the local billionaire media moguls-in-waiting — Eli Broad, David Geffen and Ron Burkle — sent separate letters to the Tribune Company board this month expressing interest in buying...
Posted July 29, 2006 11:22 AM
After my Monday scooplet (yes I mean it ironically) about Los Angeles Times managing editor Doug Frantz giving Metro reporters pony rides at lunch hour as a staff bonding exercise,...
Posted July 25, 2006 2:49 PM
Staffers at the Los Angeles Times are giggling about a morale booster that managing editor Doug Frantz perpetrated in the midday heat downtown today: pony rides for the Metro staff....
Posted July 24, 2006 1:43 PM
The weekly Highway 1 section in the Los Angeles Times always skews toward the few who are buying a vehicle and usually has little if any information or fun stuff...
Posted July 20, 2006 11:23 AM
We told you on Monday that Helene Elliott would become a general columnist for the Los Angeles Times sports section. Today the memo came down: she joins Bill Dwyre, Bill...
Posted July 19, 2006 4:17 PM
She has been the editor in charge of entertainment coverage for the Los Angeles Times business section since last year, after returning from Los Angeles magazine in 2004. She will...
Posted July 17, 2006 3:18 PM
L.A. Times beat writers will no longer routinely cover road trips of the Kings and Ducks, Sports Editor Randy Harvey tells LA Observed. Hockey columnist Helene Elliott will become a...
Posted July 17, 2006 2:11 PM
Alexandra Zavis comes from the Johannesburg bureau of Associated Press. Memo to the staff from foreign editor Marjorie Miller follows:...
Posted July 11, 2006 5:12 PM
Sell the Los Angeles Times, Devin Leonard advises the Tribune Company. The Chandlers of L.A. will never be confused with the Sulzbergers of New York or the Grahams of Washington,...
Posted July 7, 2006 3:07 PM
Marilyn W. Thompson becomes the national investigative editor, based in Washington, on September 1. She is currently editor and vice president of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader and had been assistant...
Posted June 28, 2006 11:33 AM
I guess LATimes.com admired last week's Ghana hed on ESPN so much—as I did on Thursday—that they decided to borrow it for the top of the page today. A soccer...
Posted June 27, 2006 10:58 AM
Tribune CEO Dennis FitzSimon's so-called town meeting with Los Angeles Times employees this morning is being held in the Norman Chandler Auditorium. It's named for the late patriarch of the...
Posted June 27, 2006 9:57 AM
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller this morning distributed a statement on the paper's publication of details about the CIA-Treasury Department program of tracing financial transactions by suspected terrorists....
Posted June 26, 2006 10:07 PM
I haven't mentioned it much because it's frankly kind of lame, but for 111 days the Times has kept two goldfish in an aquarium supposedly living on water taken from...
Posted June 26, 2006 4:55 PM
Tribune CEO Dennis J. FitzSimons is dropping in on the L.A. Times tomorrow for a "town hall" meeting with employees. (With the cutbacks I think it's more of a neighborhood...
Posted June 26, 2006 11:57 AM
• It took a shot from a Taser to end a pursuit and traffic-snarling standoff on the westbound San Bernardino Freeway in Baldwin Park. • Michael Kinsley will join the...
Posted June 23, 2006 4:56 PM
Two items: Josiah Beeman, the former aide to San Francisco politicians and Ambassador to New Zealand and Western Samoa for President Clinton, died at age 70. He ran three Jerry...
Posted June 23, 2006 3:39 PM
Seen on the wall in the second-floor Calendar area at the Los Angeles Times: FOR SALE: Major metropolitan daily newspaper (slightly used). 312 222 4300 That's a number at the...
Posted June 23, 2006 3:09 PM
On KPCC right now, Patt Morrison has on Times Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus talking about their paper's decision to run this story disclosing secret U.S. government tracking of banking...
Posted June 23, 2006 2:13 PM
Headline at the top of LATimes.com: Gunmen Snuff Lawyer for Saddam * 1:55 pm update: Changed....
Posted June 21, 2006 1:29 PM
Staffers in the Los Angeles Times newsroom have discovered they cannot fully connect with the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga. You know, the renowned repertory group that is putting...
Posted June 21, 2006 12:08 PM
• Tribune chief Dennis J. FitzSimons vows to stand up to the big bad Chandlers. • A spill of cooking oil closed three lanes of the Long Beach Freeway this...
Posted June 20, 2006 5:28 PM
Well I lied; my desk is anything but clear. Here are some final news notes from the day though. Have a good weekend: • The Times replies to this morning's...
Posted June 16, 2006 3:53 PM
Peacefire.org, which keeps track of the political websites and other non-sexual sites that are blocked by content filters, sent a note to subscribers saying that its own website can't be...
Posted June 16, 2006 9:14 AM
A day after the Chandler family breakup demand hit the news, Tribune CEO Dennis FitzSimons sent a rebuttal from independent members of the Tribune board to staffers at his newspapers...
Posted June 15, 2006 4:50 PM
The Chandler family called for breaking up the Tribune Company into separate newspaper and television units, and possibly selling off the papers. A strongly worded letter filed with the SEC...
Posted June 14, 2006 11:59 AM
Carol J. Williams was put on a military flight out of Guantanamo Bay along with reporters for the Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer, on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's...
Posted June 14, 2006 11:26 AM
No one even says the paper is for sale, but Eli Broad, Ron Burkle and Peter Ueberroth "reaffirmed this week their interest in bidding for the country's fourth-largest daily newspaper"...
Posted June 14, 2006 1:53 AM
Newspaper editors and reporters are all doing it—taking note of which stories top the most-emailed list and get the most website hits—but everybody denies that it influences news judgment. "What...
Posted June 13, 2006 9:43 PM
Last week's Los Angeles Times investigative series on judges in Las Vegas was impressive as a piece of reporting, but a bad sign for the paper, writes Jeffrey Brody, professor...
Posted June 12, 2006 2:58 AM
Flurry of stories this morning on the repercussions of the Chandler family's strained relations with the Tribune Company. The most immediate effect is that the weak stock price is rising,...
Posted June 9, 2006 9:23 AM
Kate Aurthur has been writing for Calendar, Vanity Fair, Slate and the New York Times. Her father Robert Alan Aurthur was a producer and writer of All that Jazz and...
Posted June 8, 2006 1:18 PM
Times business reporter Kim Christensen has been detached from her his! Hollywood beat to work on the paper's Pellicano investigation team. So they are bringing Joseph Menn down from Silicon...
Posted June 8, 2006 11:32 AM
Susan Carpenter debuted today as the Los Angeles Times' first motorcycle columnist. Throttle Jockey will run bi-weekly in the Wednesday Highway 1 section. The flackage promises "comprehensive motorcycle reviews, ranging...
Posted June 7, 2006 4:24 PM
Today's WSJ story on the dissenting Chandler family board members was enough to prompt Tribune CEO Dennis FitzSimons to email some all-hands spin throughout Tribuneland. The missive received by the...
Posted June 7, 2006 12:12 PM
The Wall Street Journal fronts a story on opposition to the Tribune Company's stock buyback gambit from an unusual source—the three representatives of the Chandler family who sit on the...
Posted June 7, 2006 10:06 AM
There's been some grousing about the news summaries the Los Angeles Times began running on the second and third pages in April (or was it March?) Some complain that the...
Posted June 6, 2006 4:19 PM
Memo to the staff at the Los Angeles Times: From: Stern, Sherry Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 8:20 AM Subject: TV Times Changes (Managers and supervisors: Please share this information...
Posted June 2, 2006 4:21 PM
The Times columnist got off some good lines in his Tuesday op-ed offering about being invited to speak at career day at Beverly Hills High School—"I was pleased to find...
Posted June 1, 2006 5:07 PM
A post by Kirk Biglione at Medialoper is titled Why I Hate the Sunday Paper: It’s Sunday morning in Pasadena and my newspaper is sitting on the front lawn, untouched,...
Posted May 25, 2006 9:15 PM
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
In response to a question from golfing journalist Geoff Shackelford at the Times Festival of Books, LAT Editor Dean Baquet said (as he had when I interviewed him last fall)...
Posted May 12, 2006 2:41 AM
The dutiful minions at the Times' Opinion blog know one way to keep the boss, Andrés Martinez, happy: they posted his observations from China, where I assume he is on...
Posted May 11, 2006 11:52 PM
As a sidebar to Time magazine's 100 people who shape our world, LAT op-ed columnist Joel Stein was given a spot on the Time website to post the Joel 100:...
Posted May 11, 2006 1:51 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
In advance of the top editors going on retreat in the desert to noodle on the future of their newspaper, some juggling ensued in the mid-level lineup at the Los...
Posted May 8, 2006 6:32 PM
The Los Angeles Times lost another 5.4% of its print readers in the March-to-March comparison, falling to 851,832 daily copies sold. Other local papers are not included in today's media...
Posted May 8, 2006 10:43 AM
By now most people have probably heard of the Times' promotion-gone-wrong for Mission: Impossible III. Devices placed in newsracks to play theme music when the box is opened apparently look...
Posted May 3, 2006 8:53 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
Business Week's Inside Wall Street column says some investment pros are betting that Tribune Co. will be a takeover target. Like most other newspaper stocks, Tribune has been beaten to...
Posted May 2, 2006 1:13 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
Editors at the Los Angeles Times have stripped Michael Hiltzik of his Golden State column in the Business section and suspended him as punishment for posting anonymous arguments on his...
Posted April 28, 2006 3:34 PM
Unhappy U.S. prosecutors, very happy (and affluent) L.A. firefighters and the Hiltzik story goes national—plus items on Villaraigosa, Dov Charney, Reggie Bush, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and much more. Click on the...
Posted April 24, 2006 2:02 AM
♦ Michael Hiltzik's previous gaffe involving invasion of colleagues' email privacy when he was stationed in the Times' Moscow bureau is now making the rounds of conservative bloggers delighted by...
Posted April 21, 2006 4:12 PM
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
Deb Nelson, who has led the resurgence in investigative reporting by the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times, is leaving for a job in academia at the University of...
Posted April 18, 2006 3:04 PM
Die Hard director John McTiernan, the top Hollywood name to be charged in the Pellicano wiretapping case, appeared in court today on the charge of lying to the government and...
Posted April 17, 2006 3:49 PM
♦ Everyone following the Dodgers knows that reserve Cody Ross is primed to get the axe any hour now. So today he gets a start and slams a grand-slam homer—followed...
Posted April 13, 2006 4:59 PM
Light posting this weekend, but first... ♦ Michael Sonnenschein exits as co-editor of FishbowlLA. He bids farewell on the blog, and Claude Brodesser gives marching orders for the new regime....
Posted April 7, 2006 5:57 PM
The credit tag at the end of the LAT story on the Mammoth Mountain tragedy includes one Jeffrey M. Johnson. Who's that? Well he's the publisher of the paper. He...
Posted April 7, 2006 10:44 AM
It's official now that Kim Murphy is moving to the London bureau of the Los Angeles Times, replacing the newly departed John Daniszewski. Memo follows:...
Posted April 6, 2006 11:48 AM
Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Evan Maxwell left daily journalism two decades ago to fashion a successful career as a romance novelist with his wife Ann Maxwell. Now living...
Posted April 6, 2006 2:55 AM
The struggling Los Angeles Times has gone through another advertising chief. Publisher Jeff Johnson waited until after the stock market closed on Friday afteroon to disclose a new managament reorganization...
Posted March 31, 2006 3:56 PM
Times columnist Steve Lopez has sold Putnam a book to be called Imagining Beethoven, based on his personal connection to the columns he has been writing about the homeless, Juilliard-trained...
Posted March 30, 2006 5:58 PM
Tribune's experiment with a glossy lifestyle magazine aimed at high-income Southern Californians is over. Staffers at Distinction were told that next Friday is their last day. Today they are busy...
Posted March 30, 2006 10:50 AM
Managing Editor Doug Frantz thinks that stories in the Los Angeles Times are too flabby and he wants to tighten them up. Everyone at the paper has heard this before—it...
Posted March 29, 2006 9:59 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
In the past year or so the Los Angeles Times newsroom has seen the creation of the Image Team, the Demographics desk and the Sense of Place team. Yet another...
Posted March 23, 2006 2:55 AM
John Daniszewski is going to Associated Press as International Editor. Romenesko has the memos from AP and the Times....
Posted March 22, 2006 12:35 PM
From today's Los Angeles Times Food section: An article in last week's Food section said an invitation-only "Secret Restaurant" event in Los Angeles would be open to the public and...
Posted March 22, 2006 1:39 AM
In the wake of the recent Los Angeles Times series spotlighting questions about the union, the United Farm Workers has posted an ad on Monster.com looking for a new director...
Posted March 20, 2006 12:14 PM
Editors of the Los Angeles Times Calendar plan to revamp the staff lineup yet again, aiming to "build on the considerable strengths of the section and augment its talent pool...
Posted March 17, 2006 11:40 AM
This is how the Times website packaged this morning's Meghan Daum op-ed column jumping into the question of whether teenagers really do engage in lots of oral sex, and whether...
Posted March 11, 2006 1:11 PM
From today's Daily News: OXNARD - The United Farm Workers and Dole Food Co. have reached agreement on a three-year contract that gives berry pickers the best wage and health...
Posted March 10, 2006 12:44 PM
Reader Louis just emailed: It's 8:25pm, and the Kings made a major trade today....it was announced hours ago. So I go to the Times' sports on the web, and not...
Posted March 8, 2006 8:45 PM
Robert Niles at USC's Online Journalism Review blog picked up an exchange in which the Los Angeles Times readers' representative seems to say that headlines on LATimes.com are encouraged to...
Posted March 7, 2006 11:18 AM
From the Los Angeles Times: Abortion: A March 4 column about abortion and overpopulation said that "roughly 10 billion people" die of hunger annually. The correct figure is 10 million....
Posted March 7, 2006 10:38 AM
Ann Powers is the new chief pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times. The former pop critic for the New York Times and editor at the Village Voice lives...
Posted March 4, 2006 12:37 AM
The Times moved quickly to fill the job vacated recently by Alice Short. But now they need a new media editor: To: The Staff From: John Montorio, Associate Editor Lennie...
Posted March 2, 2006 5:14 PM
A lot of people in California and Los Angeles politics know John Balzar, the Times' former political writer, columnist and Sacramento correspondent. He has written most recently for the paper's...
Posted March 2, 2006 1:55 PM
Stephen Burgard was an editorial writer in the Los Angeles Times Orange County edition and now is director of the journalism program at Northeastern University. He emails: A few thoughts...
Posted March 2, 2006 10:16 AM
Patt Morrison writes in today's Los Angeles Times on her former publisher Otis Chandler: In his person, Otis stitched together two ideas as dissonant as Valvoline and Sparkletts: a believer...
Posted March 1, 2006 12:56 PM
Dennis McDougal, author of Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the LA Times Dynasty, gave a lecture on his subject and former publisher at the Los...
Posted February 28, 2006 8:50 PM
Alice Short, editor of the daily Calendar and Thursday Weekend Calendar sections at the Los Angeles Times, is moving off the features floor and upstairs to the third floor newsroom....
Posted February 28, 2006 1:57 PM
People care about this stuff and write in. Today several readers noticed that the Times got two names wrong in the Eddie Nalbandian obituary in this morning's paper. The early...
Posted February 28, 2006 10:17 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
Tomorrow's printed Los Angeles Times obituary on Otis Chandler will run over five to six pages and be one of the longest the paper has published. It is now online...
Posted February 27, 2006 12:24 PM
Eagle-eyed reader Doug Thomson spotted the paid obituary in Saturday's Los Angeles Times for Edward G. Nalbandian, better known as Eddie in TV commercials for his clothing store Zachary All....
Posted February 25, 2006 11:54 PM
The war of words between the United Farm Workers union and the Los Angeles Times continues. To catch you up, the Times in January ran an investigative series on the...
Posted February 25, 2006 1:54 PM
Orange County Register investigative editor Mark Katches emailed his staff yesterday about losing one of his prized reporters to the Los Angeles Times: "As staff departures go, this one is...
Posted February 23, 2006 9:11 AM
The Times website is rolling out some design tweaks today—press Ctrl-F5 on a PC to reload the new stylesheet if the pages look screwy at first. They have shrunk and...
Posted February 22, 2006 2:07 PM
Tribune stock has lost 27% in value since the start of 2005 and most of its newspapers went through layoffs and are losing readers and advertisers, but the company yesterday...
Posted February 22, 2006 1:53 PM
In case you didn't catch enough premature Oscar buzz the first time around, the LAT is publishing the best of The Envelope and other Times coverage as a special tab...
Posted February 22, 2006 11:13 AM
Josh Getlin, New York bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, is moving over to the Calendar staff to cover the publishing beat. He will remain bureau chief, while mixing...
Posted February 21, 2006 5:10 PM
Would you believe Jackie Goldberg for school superintendent? Rampant talk of that, plus good press for Alan Rothenberg, the mystery ooze of Olive Street takes a toll, a fresh crop...
Posted February 21, 2006 1:47 AM
Today's New York Times has a piece on the post-Katrina travails of LAT editor Dean Baquet's New Orleans family, some of which is still transplanted in Conyers, Georgia. Conyers is...
Posted February 20, 2006 6:26 PM
* Newest shorts at the bottom... ⇒ More subplots in the Anthony Pellicano affair, a thirteenth defendant and Leslie Abramson joins the case. Also, the Times says anonymous witness 'Johnny...
Posted February 18, 2006 11:24 PM
Martin Ludlow's possible political demise is what the clued-in class will be chattering about this morning, but there's also a Republican move to break up the school district ahead of...
Posted February 17, 2006 2:13 AM
Will Campbell at blogging.la (last night), Carolyn Kellogg at LAist and Brady Westwater (this morning) blogged about last evening's forum on homelessness at the Times building. Publisher Jeff Johnson stumbled...
Posted February 16, 2006 11:47 AM
Tough talk in Crain's Chicago Business about the L.A. Times being a serious drag on the Tribune Company—and charging way more for ads than the waning circulation numbers justify. Here...
Posted February 13, 2006 9:14 AM
Three lead items out of the largest local bureaucracy in the nation, none of them good news...plus Hiltzik lashes Keith Brackpool, no retraction for the UFW, the best and worst...
Posted February 13, 2006 2:20 AM
The LA Weekly editor has posted a defiant response to the United Farm Workers demand for a retraction of an earlier column he wrote lauding the Times series and chastising...
Posted February 8, 2006 2:15 PM
Mayor Villaraigosa voiced his support today for the commission's decision to no longer release names of LAPD officers involved in shootings. But he isn't too happy that the commission''s executive...
Posted February 7, 2006 5:59 PM
Doug Dowie scores some points but not a knockdown, the police commission mums up, "Today" takes the Chino shooting story, a new Nina Zero review and paying tribute to the...
Posted February 7, 2006 11:42 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
Former LAT book editor Steve Wasserman, now in New York as Managing Director at the compound-named agency Kneerim and Williams at Fish and Richardson, has gotten a preempt deal for...
Posted February 6, 2006 9:54 AM
Rick Wartzman's editor's note (labeled "From First and Spring") in Sunday's debut issue of West magazine fesses up to a strong belief in the Carey McWiliams school of California reportage...
Posted February 5, 2006 12:04 PM
LAT book editor David Ulin responds to the James Frey controversy in Sunday's Book Review with an essay that argues the line is fuzzy between literary truth and lie. Ten...
Posted February 5, 2006 11:50 AM
Here's the story lineup for the first issue of West, the Los Angeles Times Magazine replacement that debuts in the Sunday paper. Cover story: "The Valley's Not So Civil War"...
Posted February 3, 2006 1:58 PM
Rip Rense has some thoughts about the marketing campaign for the LAT's new West magazine, coming soon to a Sunday paper near you. Whatever the new West will be, or...
Posted February 1, 2006 11:26 AM
The first eight pages of this morning's Calendar section in the Times—including six full opens plus most of the cover—are devoted to coverage of the Oscar nominations. The State of...
Posted February 1, 2006 10:13 AM
Updated with new entries at the bottom ⇒ Copies of the first West magazine issue were seen at the Times' Travel Show over the weekend. The cover piece in the...
Posted February 1, 2006 2:35 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
Talk about awkward timing. Miriam Pawel, the reporter on this month's L.A. Times' series about the United Farm Workers union, applied for the employee buyout back in November and was...
Posted January 31, 2006 12:22 AM
The 81-year-old grandmother suspected of shooting and killing her granddaughter’s ex-husband confessed today to Times reporter Mai Tran at the Orange County jail—where she is the eldest inmate, the paper...
Posted January 30, 2006 5:45 PM
A libel lawyer retained by the United Farm Workers sent the Times a 62-page retraction demand to this month's investigative series on the union, Bill Bradley reports at New West...
Posted January 30, 2006 1:24 PM
⇒ The Daily News' Beth Barrett investigated complaints that the Tribune Company's philanthropic foundation counted about $3 million donated by Los Angeles charities as part of its own fundraising. ⇒...
Posted January 29, 2006 9:53 PM
Joel Stein will be on Oprah at 3 pm on Channel 7, but not to talk about his own controversy of the moment. The LAT op-ed columnist is one of...
Posted January 26, 2006 2:48 PM
This is the anniversary of the Metrolink disaster near Glassell Park. Unrelated, we think, fictionating non-fictionist James Frey will guest on Oprah to address the literary hubbub he has created....
Posted January 26, 2006 1:36 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
Yahoo's hiring of Dave Morgan, the #2 editor in the LAT Sports section, gets a thorough dissection in the forum at SportsJournalists.com....
Posted January 25, 2006 2:02 AM
I posted this morning that Joel Stein would get letters about his Warriors and Wusses column on the Times op-ed page. Reuters has moved a story quoting Stein saying he...
Posted January 24, 2006 4:47 PM
Late last year the L.A. Times hired Amy Moynihan, who used to direct corporate branding for McDonald's. When you bring in a new VP for Brand Marketing, corporate culture pretty...
Posted January 24, 2006 2:32 PM
I've already noted the LAT's addition of Rob Greene and Matt Welch (his j