Keyboardist for The Doors was 74
I left LA for Chicago why?
As the Center for Investigative Reporting, the newsroom in Berkeley will take a more national focus and cut back on the number of stories it undertakes. California Watch has been one of the most successful nonprofit journalism startups in the country.
Archive: Media
As the Center for Investigative Reporting, the newsroom in Berkeley will take a more national focus and cut back on the number of stories it undertakes. California Watch has been one of the most successful nonprofit journalism startups in the country.
Radio Titans is an Internet outlet for podcasts that was started by Carl Kozlowski (arts writer for the Pasadena Weekly), Jake Belcher and Brant Thoman. They do Grand Theft Audio ten hours a week and other shows that have guests including Richard Linklater and Burt Bacharach.
Before airing a documentary about the Park Avenue building where Koch and a lot of other rich people live, the president of WNET gave the mogul a call and offered to water things down. It didn't help: Koch still resigned from the station's board.
Former news anchor Giselle Fernandez kicks off "Big Shots" on the magazine's CityThink website with the Mexican mogul. The series will feature influential business people and leaders.
Anne Knudsen, one of the Herald photogs to come out of the Cal State Long Beach photojournalism program, quipped at the reunion we covered in March about being in chemotherapy — she was bald at the time. Now comes word that Knudsen died on Sunday, leaving a teenaged daughter.
Nothing has changed, Tribune Company CEO Peter Liguori says in an email to staffers today: "No decision to sell our publishing assets is imminent." All the speculation about this or that potential buyer of the Los Angeles Times and the other papers "has been and is premature."
CBS 2 sifts the data for the most notorious places for LAPD traffic cops to nab speeders, while Joel Grover and NBC 4 turn their hidden cameras back on Jiffy Lube. May is always a busy month for local TV's investigative teams.
The annual people issue of LA Weekly hits the stands this week and is already on the web. The selection of interesting Angelenos this time includes Janice Min of the Hollywood Reporter.
Gold will cover the money and politics beat for the WashPost. Before she started covering national politics and government, Gold covered the 2001 and 2005 races for mayor of Los Angeles between Antonio Villaraigosa and James Hahn and the City Hall beat.
With today's news about Angelina Jolie, Los Angeles Times reporter Anna Gorman revisits on the Times website her 2007 surgery.
The media mogul and possible buyer of the LA Times announced via Twitter that he has bought the Moraga estate on the Bel-Air ridge that faces across the 405 freeway at the Getty Center. Check out his tweet.
The New York Times weighs in today on the fear and loathing among some in Southern California over the possibility that the libertarian Koch brothers might buy the Tribune company's newspapers, gaining control of the Los Angeles Times. "No formal bids have been submitted," the story notes.
The weekly's editorial hopes that Garcetti "would grow in the job," and says it's "a pity" that Greuel is too close to unions. It's the LABJ's first endorsement for mayor.
Mario Machado was a familiar presence on Los Angeles TV and radio for a few decades starting in 1967, when he joined Channel 9 (then KHJ-TV) as the city's first Chinese-American TV news reporter. He was a soccer booster in LA before the sport was cool and a founder of AYSO. Girls play soccer today because of Mario Machado, a friend posted on Facebook.
Larry Altman, who covers crime for the South Bay Daily Breeze, contributes to a piece on CBS' "48 Hours: Over the Edge" airing on Saturday night. The story is about the case of Dawn Viens, who disappeared in 2009 from her Lomita home.
The National Magazine Award for Los Angeles last night came in the personal service category. The Naked Truth About the Future of Your Face and Body, a package on plastic surgery and the industry, was edited by Nancy Miller and ran in the October 2012 issue.
DWP salaries and the union's role for Greuel. Mike Woo endorses. Gov. Brown will go after handguns. LA Times latest to drop "illegal immigrant" from style guide. Register's lack of diversity. Slate vs. Joel Kotkin. Press Club to fete Carl Reiner. And Vin Scully to honor Roz Wyman at lunch today.
No one knows how seriously the Koch brothers might want to buy the Tribune newspapers — or how they might run them if they did become publishers — or even what kind of buyer the Tribune board is looking for. (If any.) But liberal groups have been campaigning on the prospect of a Koch-led LA Times, and now the candidates for mayor and controller have signed on.
Last Friday, Northwestern University journalism professor Douglas Foster accepted USC's offer to head up the journalism program here. On Sunday, he withdrew. Foster so far has had no public comment on the change of heart, or whatever it was.
The Boston Globe this weekend published the staff's reconstruction of the manhunt for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings. Haven't seen it all, but what I've read and watched looks pretty impressive.
He will contribute one of his human interest columns a week to all of the LA News Group papers. McCarthy retired in January 2012 after 30 years in the DN.
Randy Kraft was arrested almost 30 years ago with the body of his latest victim in the front seat of his car, and photos of many other victims under the Toyota's floormat. The computer programmer was convicted of 16 murders and linked to 65 others. He's still languishing at San Quentin, now 68 years old.
KTLA reporter Lu Parker is doing some time on skates with the Derby Dolls for a piece on Thursday night's 10 p.m. news on Channel 5. "I try to conquer the track," she tweets.
Stacey Farish, publisher of The Wrap since November of 2011, has jumped to Deadline's print magazine, Awardsline. She also becomes vice president of PMC Entertainment. Score one for Nikki Finke.
Dean Baquet, the former editor of the LA Times who is now #2 at the NYT, is at the center of a story about criticism of the leadership of executive editor Jill Abramson. "Just a year and a half into her tenure...Abramson is already on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom," says Politico.
Harold Meyerson, the former LA Weekly political columnist, argues in a Washington Post column that the choice of the next mayor is only the second-most important local question in Los Angeles these days.
Marcus was KCET’s chief content officer and executive producer of "SoCal Connected" until last week's layoffs. He hints that the award-winning 'Connected' team hopes to stay together somewhere else.
Wilson was a Los Angeles Times art critic from 1965 until he retired in 1998, and the chief critic for 20 of those years.
Barrett is the longtime Southern California radio hand and author who has chronicled the trends and comings and goings in local radio at LARadio.com for 16 years. The Orange County Register approached him to take over for Gary Lycan.
Noel Greenwood was the editor in charge of local and California coverage at the Los Angeles Times during the 1980s and some of the '90s, I believe. He hired scores if not hundreds of the journalists who passed through the Times and went on to populate newsrooms around the world. Greenwood died today at his home in Santa Barbara of prostate cancer complications.
Last month, Marcus was the main voice at KCET insisting that "SoCal Connected" was just between seasons and might be back. It looked remote then, given the station's financial mess, and looks even more remote now.
The Los Angeles Times editorial awards are a good window into which stories and efforts the editors liked last year. The awards can also reflect which journalists might be ascendant within the newsroom pecking order, and through the years have also been used to throw a few kudos to someone who is under-appreciated or nearing the end of a long career. Inside: This year's winners.
The merger last fall of Los Angeles public television station KCET with Link Media became more real on Friday. CEO Al Jerome, who took KCET out of PBS a few years ago, appears to remain.
Vernon Loeb, the former investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, has run marathons (61 of them) and covered the horrors of terrorism. But never on the same day until Monday.
Shearer, the actor and multi-platform talent (and ex-reporter for Newsweek) whose weekly "Le Show" started on KCRW in 1983, has posted his version of how he learned the show was dropped this week from the station's Sunday lineup.
KCRW announces a big revamp of the weekend schedule that drops 'Le Show' and 'Weekend All Things Considered,' adds the 'TED Radio Hour' and shifts some of the music shows. Harry Shearer, on KCRW since 1983, broke the news on Twitter this morning: "Any radio station in LA want to carry Le Show?" He will still be online.
California Watch and three LA Times staffers, including photographer Liz O. Baylen, were finalists for today's prizes. The national reporting Pulitzer went to InsideClimate News and there is a winner in fiction this year.
After producing shows for KCRW for 34 years, including 20 years with a show on Sundays, Tom Schnabel announced that Sunday was his final live program on the air. He is moving to an on-line platform that KCRW is calling Rhythm Planet. He explains inside.
The Orange County Register's longtime radio writer, Gary Lycan, died in his sleep on Tuesday, the paper reported this afternoon. Lycan had prostate cancer in recent years. His friend and collaborator Manny Pacheco posts a nice tribute: "the most difficult blog story I have ever written..."
After the Times refers to the Angels losing by a point, a reader on Twitter posts: "Dear large-market newspaper, please familiarize yourself with the language of baseball. Please." Deadspin joins in the mocking.
Kate Linthicum, one of the City Hall reporters for the Los Angeles Times, had written about Alex Renteria two years ago for a feature on the opening of the building's newly opened Homeboy Diner. In Monday's paper she writes about Renteria again, this time as someone she had come to know and who became the subject of a tragic news story.
Erica Phillips moves up to full-fledged general news and politics reporter after most of a year as officially temporary. And Hannah Karp moves over from GA to cover the music beat.
Gary Cohn, formerly of the LA Times, will write an investigative column. Plus: Variety falls for April Fools prank, LAT president promoted, Koch brothers and the LAT, Ellie nominations for Los Angeles and remembering the LA Examiner. Plus more.
For AP reporters from now on, and those many institutions that let Associated Press style be their guide, persons are no longer illegal but actions can be. It's the third time in about two years that Associated Press editors have revisited "illegal immigrant."
Executive editor Lisa Fung is the second former Los Angeles Times hand to leave the editing ranks of The Wrap in the past month. Also, Jeff Sneider of Variety re-joins The Wrap as a film reporter.
Took the weekend off and have a whole bunch of media items to catch up on. Remember, this is a slow posting travel week for me.
Between the Daily News and the LA Times, Martinez has written columns about Los Angeles for almost three decades. Last the year the Huntington mounted an exhibition of his collected work. Meanwhile, LANG is slapping the Daily News name on all of its papers.
Dan Turner was a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board who wrote on a wide range of topics. He died Saturday at home in Los Angeles of pancreatic cancer that was diagnosed about two years ago. He had continued to write editorials and blog items for the Times' opinion section until taking a leave of absence only about a week ago.
Barely a year after founder Otis Y. Chandler hailed Goodreads' "independence" from Amazon's technology by saying "we will celebrate January 30th for years to come!," Chandler has announced that his startup is "joining the Amazon family." Goodreads will continue but there will be more integration with the Kindle. Reaction around the book blogosphere is initially skeptical.
KCET says that while it doesn't look good for a sixth season of "SoCal Connected," it still might happen. "SoCal Connected depends on public funding and we don't know at this time what that funding will be."
KTLA 5 Morning News co-host Michaela Pereira is leaving the station at the end of May, after nine years, to join CNN in New York, the station announced. No replacement has been named.
It sounds as if Thursday night's episode of "SoCal Connected" on financially strapped KCET might be more than the final show of the fifth season. Co-host Madeleine Brand posted on Facebook that Wednesday's taping day was the show's last one. "A loss for good journalism in L.A.," she writes. We agree.
In between pieces on Pussy Riot and Anderson Cooper diving with Nile crocodiles, tonight's "60 Minutes" reported on the former Long Beach Poly High football player who served several years for a sexual assault he did not commit.
The jury is very much out on whether all this new investment at the Register is sustainable. But for now, the happy times continue. Owner Aaron Kushner will be on 'SoCal Connected' on Friday.
Vulture compiled every facet of sex, relationships and New York that Sarah Jessica Parker's lead character wondered aloud about during the six seasons of "Sex and the City."
PFK, the Pacifica radio station at 90.7 FM, says it will mark the anniversary of the "great Immigrant Rights March of 2006" with 24 hours of progressive Spanish-language programming.
The LAT is moving politics reporter Robin Abcarian over to be an online California columnist. Editor Davan Maharaj says, "Some of Robin’s columns will appear in print, but her primary mission is driving the digital conversation."
LA Times sports columnist T.J. Simers was in his hotel room at baseball spring training in Arizona last week when he started showing the signs of a transient ischemic attack. Dodgers head trainer Sue Falsone listened to the symptom then sent trainer Aaron Schumacher to get the cranky sportswriter to the emergency room.
Murder is way down, but the Times has decided to reactivate for the web the compendium of local murders that reporter Jill Leovy launched as a blog in 2007. The ideal candidate to write about murder "will bring keen storytelling skills and an ability to work with data to find themes and meaning. An interest in crime, detectives and the effects of violence on society is required."
The last daily issue of Variety hits mailboxes Tuesday — be sure and grab a copy to save if you are into that. For the next generation Variety, the news today is that Scott Foundas joins the trade as chief film critic. He will stay in New York.
Derek Thompson, the business editor at The Atlantic, gleaned this from today's Pew report on the State of the News Media. In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads. And it's getting worse not better.
Pakistani officials said today they have captured Qari Abdul Hayee, a terrorist leader who has been linked to the 2002 killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Hayee was taken into custody Sunday in Karachi by the Pakistani Rangers, a paramilitary unit, ABC News reports.
If you're NBC 4, you probably figure you have the TV footage of police chases, might as well cut the video together and put it on the web. The greatest hits reel from recent chases runs 2:44 and includes the man who huffed on balloons in the Valley and the woman who took off running while still on her cellphone.
Aaron Kushner, the hands-on owner of the Orange County Register, is still embroiled in conversation over his comment that the old quip about a newspaper's role — to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — is out of step with his vision of the paper. The latest exchange is with Marc Cooper, the longtime alt-weekly and The Nation rabble-rouser who has been a journalism prof for several years at USC Annenberg.
Ramona Schindelheim, a former producer for the 10 p.m. news on Channel 11 in Los Angeles, is returning to KTTV later this month. She will be the managing editor, after stints as executive producer for CNBC's "Business Day," senior producer for "The Jane Pauley Show" and business editor at ABC News.
Bryan Frank, the photographer for the CBS 2/KCAL 9 duopoly, has been posting some really nice behind-the-scenes images — as well as some food, coffee and street life shots that make me wish I was back in Rome.
Billionaire investor and philanthropist Eli Broad is joining in financier Austin Beutner's proposal to buy the Los Angeles Times and run the newspaper as a non-profit, the Hollywood Reporter says tonight based on sources.
"SoCal Connected" aired a story tonight that analyzes where Los Angeles Archdiocese priests accused of sexual abuse were assigned. Author Daniel A. Olivas' experiences with an abusive priest are featured. Warning: the video starts automatically.
Sheriff's detectives said today they are now investigating last May's disappearance of media executive Gavin Smith as a homicide case. Smith's 2000 black Mercedes Benz 420E was recovered last month in a storage facility in Simi Valley.
"Unverified rumors that should be taken with a grain of salt if not a whole dollop," says the LA Weekly. But still worth reporting. The Hollywood Reporter claims to have more.
Last night's Zócalo Public Square panel took up the question of what celebrity-driven news and websites like TMZ are doing to news reporting. And oddly enough there was a top producer from TMZ on the panel.
The Deadline.com team broke the news last night that parent company PMC is moving Variety out of its Miracle Mile office tower, and the Deadliners out of wherever they sit, and throwing them together in a building on Santa Monica Boulevard beside the 405 freeway. Nikki Finke and the Variety staffers she regularly insults together?
Los Angeles TV stations generally won't do Sacramento news (ABC 7 is the exception), but most sent their own people to Rome to cover the selection of the new pope — even though it is already one of the world's most adequately covered news events. Here's who is there.
Jimmy Orr, the managing editor for digital at the Los Angeles Times, praises the staff in a memo regaling the biggest month yet for the Times website — and biggest traffic day for the LA Now news blog. Coverage of the Christopher Dorner pursuit was the big draw -- Orr admits the paper milked traffic by posting and tweeting early and often. — he credits an "assertive digital strategy used to cover the event."
How's this for strange: Michael Kurcfeld was checking out an exhibition on imaginary languages in the Pompidou Museum in Paris recently when he came across a story he wrote in 1979 for the long-dead Los Angeles mag Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing.
When the writer Nora Ephron died last June of acute myeloid leukemia, a disease she had been fighting for years, many in the media and literary worlds were surprised. She had not made her illness a big part of her public life.
Fifteen months ago, the new deputy managing editor of The Wrap dismissed the site as "a small blog" filled with "opinion, agenda and fantasy" and "hardly a beacon of journalistic excellence." Editor Sharon Waxman was similarly dissed. All is forgiven, apparently.
KTLA News Director Jason Ball is new to Twitter and has been tweeting so much so that former Channel 5 reporter David Begnaud Twit-quipped to producers Tara Wallis and Marcus K. Smith: "Y'all take that twitter away from @jasonrball." Ball posted this photo the other day of the afternoon editorial meeting. It's nice to see inside the walls and have a mental picture of how they do things.
The staff at Pacifica-owned radio station KPFK in Cahunega Pass opened their emails on Wednesday morning to find a message from Bernard Duncan, the general manager. He informed everyone that a colleague at the station had been treated for scabies, a condition caused by tiny mites that burrow into the skin.
In Chihuahua, the state that borders Texas and New Mexico, gunmen on Sunday murdered Jaime Guadalupe González, the editor of Ojinaga Noticias, an online newspaper. The site posted a notice that it has suspended publication.
Another long-time Los Angeles broadcast presence is leaving the airwaves. I'm told Brooks will be retiring on March 15.
I only report this to finish the thought from earlier in the week. Paula Lopez, the news anchor at KEYT in Santa Barbara who was reported missing for several hours on Wednesday, was "experiencing a medical condition" that day, her family said in a statement.
Channel 7 political reporter John North talks with John Shallman, senior strategist for the Wendy Greuel campaign, at Greuel's Van Nuys headquarters on Thursday. North is scheduled to retire from ABC 7 on Friday after 34 years.
Two years ago, when Los Angeles magazine themed its February special issue the "Hidden LA" issue without credit, W. Lynn Garrett wasn't amused. When it happened again this year, the founder of the wildly popular Hidden Los Angeles Facebook community and website sued in federal court.
KCRW joined with Writers Bloc tonight to pack a couple of hundred people in the new Moss Theater on the Westside. The draw was New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright talking with Kim Masters, host of "The Business" on KCRW, about "Going Clear," his new book that authoritatively gives further exposure to the unusualness of the Church of Scientology.
Tina Fey cuts Seth MacFarlane some major slack for disappointing many viewers of Sunday's Oscars show, telling Anne Thompson of IndieWire that "It's the hardest job there is. It's a tough room. Seth did great."
The Online Journalism Review fell off my radar, and I suspect that of other news types, a few years ago. Now USC Annenberg has given it a new look and a new view of its role.
Nikki Finke's post this morning at Deadline on the changes at Variety almost dripped ice water, especially when she flat-out accused the boss she shares with Variety, Jay Penske, of lying to her. Never mind: sometime during the day, the phrase "Penske lied to me" disappeared.
Nice farewell note to the Los Angeles Times newsroom from Claudia Eller, the entertainment news editor and veteran of the Hollywood scoop wars who was announced today as one of three new co-editors who will run Variety. She opens with praise for her current editor, John Corrigan, and confirms the Times counter-offered.
Channel 7's long-time political reporter, John North, is retiring at the end of this week. The newsroom in Glendale got a memo announcing North's departure from news director Cheryl Fair.
The other shoe fell today in the evolution of Hollywood trade Variety under new owner Jay Penske. One of the new co-editors is Claudia Eller, a 20-year veteran of movie coverage at the LA Times. Nikki Finke says Penske lied to her.
It's transition time at some of the local TV stations, if the drumbeats I'm hearing are accurate. One transition that's for sure is that of Al Naipo, the Orange County bureau chief for Fox 11. His classy farewell note went out to the Bundy Drive newsroom tonight.
The bunch includes a new editor in San Francisco for the legal newspaper, which is based in downtown Los Angeles. There's a also a shift on the entertainment law beat, plus more. Memo from editor David Houston inside.
It's an internal hire: Geoff Mohan, who has recently been the editor for state bureaus and the immigration beat. He was previously the paper's environment editor, among other jobs. Memo to the newsroom inside.
Most (but by no means all) of the reviews for last night's Oscars show and host Seth MacFarlane have not been favorable. But the early ratings for the TV show are up about four percent over last year's show hosted Billy Crystal — and much younger. And that's entirely logical, says Richard Rushfield at BuzzFeed.
The venerable but dated brand of the International Herald Tribune will be dropped and the paper re-christened as the International New York Times. Plus assorted other changes.
Saylor started his own public relations firm in 2007 after leaving Sitrick & Co., and before that was entertainment editor for the LA Times Business section. He oversaw the Pulitzer-winning stories on the Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, radio payola and luxury detox by reporters Chuck Philips and Michael Hiltzik.
Former Los Angeles Herald Examiner photographers Paul Chinn, Anne Knudsen, Javier Mendoza, Mike Mullen, Jim Ober, and Jim Ruebsamen will chat March 9 at Central Library with Dean Musgrove, now photo editor of the Daily News.
He had 111 stories in the San Francisco Chronicle last year. Born before the discovery of penicillin or Pluto, he tells the LA Times: "I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do all my life, be a reporter."
Of "Fight Club," Kimmel writes for the Daily Beast that "I’m sure this is a great movie, but it seems like a lot of the people who really, really love it are dickheads." Same for the Terminator franchise.
A memorabilia dealer on Amazon is offering for sale a thank you note signed by LA Times editor William F. Thomas, who retired 23 years ago. Price: about $37. Tip: You can get it cheaper on eBay.
NBC's prime-time schedule looks as if it will finish the February sweeps period for the key age 18-49 demographic segment behind both Fox and Univision. It's the first time that NBC will finish in fifth place, according to Dominic Patten at Deadline.com.
The LA Times has been warning readers for more than a week that the daily primetime television schedule will disappear from the Calendar section next Tuesday. Now comes a memo explaining significant cuts in the space devoted to sports.
Los Angeles Times City Hall reporter Kate Linthicum has been deep into coverage of the race for mayor et al for months. She also finds time to pursue her after-hours gig as the vocalist and keyboard player for Basement Babies, a band that looks to be based around Echo Park, where she lives.
When he was the top guy at a media company, Sam Zell liked to hurl the f-word at his damnable journalists. The latest CEO of Tribune Company, Peter Liguori, appears to have more respect for his employees. His email today after a month on the job is full of praise for, you know, stories. Read the memo inside.
Photographer Gary Leonard took pictures this weekend of anyone who wanted to stand in front of angel wings painted by Colette Miller on the security shutters of the Regent Theatre downtown. John Rabe of KPCC went to observe — and pose — and reports back. Inside: Eric Garcetti gets wings.
Jerry Roberts was the editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press who stood up to the news outrages of owner Wendy McCaw. He's giving $150,000 to a Santa Barbara news startup, SPJ and EFF.
Because the State of the Union speech by President Obama was going to depress TV viewership numbers on the West Coast on Tuesday night, the local stations sold half-hour blocks for infomercials on the movies. But then, voila, lots of eyeballs were watching TV in Southern California. TV Guide's Michael Schneider explains.
Channel 4 will pre-empt "Law and Order, Special Victims Unit" to air a one-hour special, "Manifesto for Murder: The Hunt for Christopher Dorner." Airtime is Thursday at 10 p.m.
If I'm the publisher of the LA Times, I probably reject the big ads for "Southland" right now and don't let images of cops with guns take over my website for a small amount of revenue.
John Rabe, the host of "Off-Ramp" on KPCC, and his husband Julian Bermudez are one of the six featured couples in the current issue of LA Weekly. Also included are Michael Ritchie and Kate Burton, "the first couple of L.A. theatre."
LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called in CBS2 anchor Pat Harvey for an exclusive interview today in which Beck said he would take a look at some of the allegations of racism made by disgraced ex-cop Christopher Dorner. Beck told Harvey that his motive in re-opening the case that led to Dorner's firing was to keep the department's trust among African-Americans. "I'm not doing this to appease Dorner," Beck said.
Roger L. Simon was a novelist and screenwriter who went through a very public political conversion from left to right in the early 2000s. His blog hammering on the left turned into Pajamas Media and now into a conservative website and video outlet called PJ Media.
Michael Parrish was a longtime presence on the magazine journalism scene in Los Angeles as an editor and writer. He was founding editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, a contributor to Playboy, New West, California and other magazines, and a lecturer at USC Annenberg. He died today in the LA area, according to friends.
Two memos have nice words for Curtis, but there's no mention of him going on to anything else. KPCC had all the upheaval last year over the hiring of new morning host A Martinez and the subsequent departure of Madeleine Brand, whose morning show without Martinez was KPCC's most listened-to local program. Then last month the staff voted to unionize the newsroom with SAG/Aftra.
A pre-Grammys email from the CBS standards and practices department all but dares performers to show a little skin at the upcoming show. How many ways are there for a musician (or an audience member) to violate the CBS code? A whole lot.
Assistant city editor Kerry Cavanaugh is leaving the Daily News to be a producer on "Which Way, LA?" and "To the Point." Here's the note from City Editor Harrison Sheppard that is going around the Woodland Hills newsroom.
Just count the ways in which you could not imagine this story taking up high-profile space on the front page of the NYT or WSJ, or in earlier eras of the Los Angeles Times. Jimmy Orr, the LAT's managing editor for digital, writes a 1,500-word first-person story talking about an episode from his previous life as a press spokesman for the George W. Bush White House — when he came up with the idea for a webcam featuring the Bush dog Barney.
Channel 4 is expanding its weekend newscasts, beginning this Saturday. Robert Kovacik and Kathy Vara, who now co-anchor at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. on weekends, will also do a new "NBC4 News at 5PM" show.
KPCC's press release last week for its mayoral debate coming up on Wednesday night talked about the "four major candidates for mayor" who would be taking part. I guess some discussions ensued. Here's how the release reads now.
Yussuf J. Simmonds is recuperating from a stroke suffered in December while he was in Washington, D.C. "People who want to support Simmond’s convalescence can send contributions to the Los Angeles Sentinel," says the paper.
Sounds as if the Press-Telegram newsroom is in a bit of mourning this week. Tracy Manzer is leaving their midst after 18 years to move to Washington with her husband, the press secretary for new congressman Alan Lowenthal.
Los Angeles Magazine in a new piece up today calls Kevin James "the surprise of the mayor’s race." The story, though, is really about how candidate James has softened the kinds of things he used to say when he was an anger talk radio host.
The two top editors of the Los Angeles Times sent the staff a memo on Friday afternoon giving kudos to the team that scurried late Thursday to cover the late-breaking release of sexual abuse files by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Reporter Harriet Ryan is their star of story.
Local and national layoffs, shifts in the morning radio lineup and more.
KCRW plans to devote an hour-long broadcast of "Which Way, LA?" on February 6 to the rivalry (if any) between partisans of east and west in Los Angeles. They want your input on that and also want to hear from the people who are "neither Eastside nor Westside and don’t know what the fuss is all about."
Longtime Orange County Register editor Chris Smith tries to make sense of the Aaron Kushner phenomenon that is making over the OC newspaper and giving hope to unemployed journalists across the LA area. Smith writes in the new issue of Orange Coast magazine.
Eddie Lazarus has a been a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, as well as a some-time book reviewer and op-ed contributor to the Los Angeles Times. He also went to Yale with new Tribune CEO Peter Liguori, and perhaps most important he is deeply connected at the Federal Communications Commission.
The LA Times hires Daniel Miller from the Hollywood Reporter, per today's memo to the staff from the assistant managing editor for entertainment coverage.
Jack Klunder, the president of the Los Angeles News Group and publisher of most if not all of the chain's newspapers, is not a voter in the city of Los Angeles. But he has given $750 to mayoral candidate Kevin James, in three separate contributions since 2011, and also reportedly provided him with tickets to Lakers, Dodgers and Kings games.
Haas was a reporter and columnist at the Orange County Register for more than 20 years, a publicist for the Irvine Company, a book reviewer for Orange Coast magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist on aging and women's issues — and more.
Amy Wallace, an editor at Los Angeles magazine, is going to get ready for her birthday party by living a life that many fantasize about: working out every day just like it was a job. She wants to walk into the party "a taut, 140-pound warrior-goddess."
At the end of the Los Angeles Times story about two young street muggers being hanged in public in Tehran on Sunday, there's a surprise.
Channel 4 won two Golden Mike awards last night for best TV newscast, and AM radio stations KNX and KFI won for the best radio newscasts. KPCC-FM won the most awards overall, ten Golden Mikes in a variety of categories. Steve Edwards, the longtime host of "Good Day LA" on Fox 11, picked up the lifetime achievement award from the Radio and Television News Association of Southern California.
After months of campaigning, the KPCC newsroom staff voted 35 to 26 to join SAG-AFTRA. Hosts Larry Mantle and John Rabe were among the senior talent who argued against the union.
The Pantages has put up a Channel 5 story on reporter Lu Parker getting harnessed up to fly like Cathy Rigby does in the upcoming production of Peter Pan.
As expected, the new board of Tribune today named Peter Liguori as chief executive officer. The company's press release is warm towards the previous CEO, Eddy Hartenstein, who goes back to being just publisher of the Los Angeles Times and head of the paper's media group. Here are the company-wide (and newsroom) memos from Liguori and Hartenstein, and the press release.
Sports writers, of course, aren't the only journalists who claim to know that their favorite sources and heroes are honest and, above all, wouldn't lie to them. The big sports stories of this week serve as painful reminders that the media are all too willing to build up people they know know little about for the sake of the story — and it's only getting worse as more web "content producers" get rewarded for eyeballs and going viral but not for, you know, being right. Today it's Rick Reilly's turn to admit that when he was defending Lance Armstrong through the years, he didn't actually know bupkus.
This one is open to staffers and non-staffers. "Someone who is as comfortable and proficient writing for the front page of the paper as for the Sports section," says the sports editor. "Skill in all aspects of digital journalism and a strong background in social media are required."
The Los Angeles bureau of BuzzFeed continues to ramp up. Today Richard Rushfield et al are announcing the hire of Adam Vary as senior film reporter. He comes from the...
The Riverside County death certificate for Huell Howser says that the television host and producer died early on the morning of January 7 from metastatic prostate cancer. Howser was cremated and his remains scattered off the coast of Los Angeles County on Jan. 9.
This ran on this week's episode of "The Simpson's." Hat tip to KCET on Facebook. There is a sunset memorial to Howser scheduled this afternoon at Griffith Observatory.
It sounds as if one of the great lying acts in the history of sports will come to an end in Oprah Winfrey's televised interview with Lance Armstrong.
Gibbons, a public information officer for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office for 24 years, announced today she will be retiring on March 31. She was a former courthouse reporter.
Regrettable news from Donna Myrow, who founded L.A. Youth as a newspaper written by and for Los Angeles teenagers 25 years ago. It has been a struggle to keep the paper going in recent years. A desperate fundraising pitch last year bought some more time. But a note in the upcoming February issue will announce that L.A. Youth is closing down. Here is Myrow's note in the final issue.
When Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor was interviewed on Sunday night's "60 Minutes," a finely tuned eye could have spotted a cartoon by LA's Lalo Alcaraz hanging on her office wall. He gives some backstory.
The board of the local Society of Professional Journalists chapter announced after a special weekend meeting that "information had surfaced showing unauthorized withdrawals had been made from the chapter’s checking account." Sarah Baisley, the chapter’s treasurer for many years, was "removed from her position."
Big weekend for Angelenos in the New York Times, including an obituary of Huell Howser. Plus: Kobe and Vanessa back together.
Councilman Tom LaBonge, a friend of the public TV icon Huell Howser, said today he will join friends and fans for a public memorial at sunset on Tuesday, Jan. 15 at Griffith Observatory. Also: video of Huell in Tennessee as you may never have seen him.
Voice Media Group, parent of the LA Weekly, is giving up on San Francisco and has sold the SF Weekly to the company that publishes both the San Francisco Examiner and former arch-rival, the venerable Bay Guardian. A sale of the Seattle Weekly was also announced in the deal.
Reportero, which debuted Monday night on POV on PBS, follows a veteran reporter and his colleagues at Zeta, a Tijuana-based independent newsweekly, "as they stubbornly ply their trade in one of the deadliest places in the world for members of the media." Watch the trailer inside or stream the entire film.
KCET has posted some great tributes to Huell Howser, including video of the longtime production team and the station's three-minute obituary from Monday night's "SoCal Connected." Also: Kevin Roderick and John Rabe with Jacob Soboroff on HuffPost Live.
Superior Court Judge Emilie H. Elias reversed a private mediator and ordered the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to release 30,000 pages of internal files without blanking out the names of church officials and priests who were involved in the church's handling of sex abuse allegations or who were accused themselves. The judge acted on a request by the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press to include names when the files are released under a 2007 settlement with more than 500 victims.
Gustavo Arellano at the OC Weekly reported late this morning that California television icon Huell Howser has died. Arellano based his story on sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. A few minutes later, KPCC "Off-Ramp" host John Rabe tweeted that Howser's assistant confirmed that he died last night at home.
The fast-growing social web site BuzzFeed today launched an entertainment section. "Most exciting announcement of my career," LA bureau chief Richard Rushfield says on Facebook.
The fake stories and byline on the latest front page wrap around the Sunday LA Times are actually real, just old. 'Gangster Squad' grew out of a Times series, and the screenwriter is a former LAPD homicide detective.
Villaraigosa tells Conan Nolan on NBC 4's "News Conference" that he was in Cabo San Lucas on vacation, bumped into Charlie Sheen in the hotel, and that Sheen asked to take a photo. "I'm in the picture taking business. I've never said no to anyone that wants to take a picture."
Times columnist Bill Plaschke made a guest appearance yesterday on "Petros and Money," the talk show on Fox Sports Radio. His opening four-minute admiration of naked actresses, hotel room porn and especially the nudity of Helen Hunt in "The Sessions" has got the sports media chattering. Deadspin files the story under its "Gross" category and includes the audio.
Al Jazeera on Wednesday completed a deal to take over Al Gore's seven-year-old Current TV, which is based in San Francisco. A new channel, Al Jazeera America, will be based in New York, the NYT says. "Current will provide the pan-Arab news giant with something it has sought for years: a pathway into American living rooms."
A celebrity photographer said to be working "exclusively on Justin Bieber" had finished taking pictures of a CHP stop involving Bieber's car when he was struck Tuesday evening while crossing Sepulveda Boulevard near Getty Center Drive. The driver stopped to help and no arrest is foreseen. More inside.
These are stories, news or other items that I mentally noted and should have posted about during the last two weeks. Or I overlooked them completely until now. I was trying to spend a little less time tapping on keys.
I'm catching up on some locally prominent deaths I've missed during the holiday slowdown. Video inside: 17 minutes of "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida."
With a new board of mostly entertainment industry types, and a CEO on the way who has been at Fox and Discovery, it seems clearer that Tribune will look to sell the newspapers. Whether that's good or bad for the LA Times, it's too soon to tell.
This weekend's year-end edition of "This American Life" reprises a 1998 segment in which Jonathan Gold explains his year exploring the food offerings of West Pico Boulevard. Then everything changed. Listen inside.
The year-end memo from Michael Anastasi, vice president and executive editor of the Los Angeles News Group, announces the promotion of senior editor Kim Guimarin and suggests that photos and graphics will get more attention in the planning of projects. "Photo, in other words, will have a seat at the table," Anastasi says.
Former New West staffer Michael Kurcfeld found this clip from July 3, 1978, disclosing plans for a new alternative newspaper to fill the void left by closure of the Los Angeles Free Press. Working title: L.A.Weekly.
The Celtics lost Thursday to the NBA-best Clippers, but they did gain a new beat writer from LA.
The New York Times package reconstructing the stories around an avalanche in the Cascades has been called by some the best designed big web story ever. That encompasses a lot of great work, with much competition, but let's agree it's in the conversation and may be the best thing the NYT has ever done on the web.
Executive producer Wendy Harris, at Channel 4 for three decades, is retiring from the station. Here's the newsroom memo earlier this month from the VP for news.
The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists says it will honor five local journalists and an attorney at its 37th annual awards banquet next spring. This year's...
The former senior editor at the LA Weekly and co-founder of Slake has been named executive editor of the Santa Barbara Journalism Initiative, a nonprofit journalism startup supported by a Knight Foundation grant and local foundations.
KCET's story on Los Angeles County's dependency courts was one of 14 winners of Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards announced this morning at Columbia. This is big in the world of broadcast news, considered by some to be their Pulitzers.
A panel of three conservative appeals justices in Washington ruled that when McCaw fired her reporters for starting a union, she was the victim under the First Amendment.
In her editor's note introducing the January issue of Los Angeles magazine, Mary Melton doesn't sound too wowed by the candidates who are running for mayor. The next leader of...
NBC's chief foreign correspondent and his crew were held five days then freed Monday in a firefight at a checkpoint in Syria, NBC News announced this morning. Engel, producer Ghazi Balkiz and cameraman John Kooistra appeared live on "Today" from Turkey.
Joel Sappell writes in the January issue of Los Angeles magazine about the harassment he and co-author Robert Welkos endured, and he talks to a key church defector who used to run intelligence for L. Ron Hubbard and was the chief "auditor" for Tom Cruise.
The Los Angeles Times ran a Sunday editorial urging people to recognize that the election on March 5 is a big one that could shape the future of the city for years to come. They're right, you know.
With Rutten on the editorial page, and Al Martinez on the front page, the Daily News now offers its readers two columnists with something like 80 years between them at the Los Angeles Times.
Starting Monday, KCET will air SoCal Connected first at 5:30 p.m. then repeat at 10 p.m. "Rick Steves' Europe" is going into the old time slot on Monday, with various shows in the prime time hours the rest of the week.
Jesse McKinley went through a Santa Monica workshop that helps people rid themselves of the personal toxins of divorce. "I had been chosen for this assignment...for the simple reason that I was getting divorced. And, you know, that I probably needed it."
OC Register's new owner Aarson Kushner is profiled, and former LA Times writer Tim Rutten starts a Sunday column in the Daily News and its sister papers. Plus more
"We have implemented a number of protective measures to ensure each company has separate and distinct domains within the property."
Acosta is a former Los Angeles Times editor who now is the director of strategic initiatives at the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.
Ray Briem was the overnight talker on KABC-AM from 1967-1994 and kind of pioneered the form here in Los Angeles. That made him the welcomed late-night companion to thousands.
Who is that woman exchanging grins with President John Kennedy in 1962 on Santa Monica Beach? The LA Times photo blog tells us.
The Orange County Register has purchased Churm Media, the publisher of OC Metro and OC Family. Perplexing, says Gustavo Arellano at OC Weekly.
The Washington Post's Paul Farhi takes his stab at explaining why most Americans had never heard of Jenni Rivera until the Mexican-American performer died in a plane crash — and why very few media in Southern California had ever done stories on the local girl who made good. Make that very good.
After winning Oscars for "The Hurt Locker," director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal became "entertainment’s hottest couple who wouldn’t say they were a couple since Jay-Z and Beyoncé." Now it's complicated, says BuzzFeed.
I'm not sure this kind of corporate cheerleading helps the lousy newsroom morale at 1st and Spring streets, but praise and optimism is better than being threatened with cuts. No mention of the recent price hike at the newsstand or the proposed sale of the paper's one-time hope for the future in Orange County.
Michael Krikorian freelances now, far as I can tell, but he used to be a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Seventeen rounds from an AK-47 in his trunk got him a 30-day sentence in county jail.
"The Master" is the runner-up, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association also taps the 'Master' director and actors.
Mack Reed's Tumblr post about finding a duffel bag full of someone else's weed in his Silver Lake yard and calling the LAPD — we posted about it early yesterday — has made its way rapidly around the web.
Phillip Rodriguez will have access to unredacted autopsy and investigative documents, and coroner's photos, for his documentary on the 1970 death in East Los Angeles of journalist Ruben Salazar.
Arianna Huffington moves to president and editor in chief of the media group. Jimmy Maymann, previously AOL senior vice president of international, becomes CEO.
Silver Lake games developer Mack Reed, the former LA Times reporter and Voice of LA blogger, was faced recently with a quandary most of us will never encounter. On deadline, of course.
Anchor Sharon Tay, meteorologist Evelyn Taft in the middle and reporter Amber Lee in the KCAL studio. Tweeted by Taft.
Gustavo Arellano, editor of the OC Weekly and creator of the paper's popular "Ask A Mexican" column, will start doing regular weekly commentaries about Orange County for KCRW. He had been a regular on KPCC.
A crew from Vice posted photos this morning reported to be of on-the-run former tech pioneer John McAfee and his 20-year-old girlfriend from Belize, Sam, meeting with a lawyer in Guatemala City.
Brand tells Los Angeles magazine that she's in talks with KCRW for a 9 a.m. show that would compete with the friends she left at KPCC. But KCRW's Jennifer Ferro says in a statement that nothing is firm.
David Courtney, the arena announcer for the Los Angeles Kings and Clippers at Staples Center and the stadium announcer in Anaheim for the Angels, has died at age 56. No cause was given by the Kings, but Courtney had tweeted yesterday that he was at a hospital awaiting an angiogram.
"Off-Ramp" host John Rabe called and talked to me this afternoon for a piece he's doing on the end of Huell Howser's television career. Listen to some of the audio.
In the November issue of Los Angeles magazine, and online today, editor Amy Wallace and photographer Damon Casarez pay attention to the impromptu memorials you sometimes see placed where someone recently died.
Tamar Brott profiled Huell Howser for Los Angeles magazine and found him to be defensive about his enthusiasm and his affection for finding the positive, or denying the negative, in any situation.
On Wednesday's show, I'm told that KCET's "SoCal Connected" digs into the ties between Supervisor Don Knabe, his son Matt Knabe, and the clients of Matt's lobbying firm, Englander Knabe and Allen.
Howser is "retiring from making new shows but does not want to make any formal announcements about it," says an email. Amazing.
In a post rife with punnery, celebrity gossip site TMZ says that contrary to a report that originated in the San Francisco Chronicle, it has no interest in using airborne, unmanned drones to gather news.
The newest technology business reporter at the Times is Chris O'Brien, who comes from the San Jose Mercury. The memo to the newsroom from Business Editor Marla Dickerson.
The New York Times says it got questions to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in federal custody and, with his comments plus interviews with "church and law enforcement officials and more than a dozen people who worked on the movie," can conclude that "the making of the film is a bizarre tale of fake personas and wholesale deception."
Guy Adams, the Independent's man in Los Angeles for the last few years, is returning to London and starting after the new year as a feature writer for the Daily Mail. "Today I wrote my last ever article for the @independent. Fittingly, it was about the Elmo sex scandal," he tweets.
The producers call it a rare, "unflinching portrait." I suspect there's some flinching. Video: Geffen in love with Cher in 1973.
The Hollywood Reporter won six first-place awards at tonight's National Entertainment Journalism Awards put on at the Biltmore by the Los Angeles Press Club. Kim Masters of THR (and KCRW's "The Business") won entertainment journalist of the year, and THR also won for best entertainment publication and best website.
Born Sam Bensussen, he worked for 40 years at KLAC radio and Metromedia, was the editorial director for Channel 11, and in the 1950s and 60s was a commercial pitchman on local airwaves: "Se habla espanol at Lou’s Garage."
Villaraigosa was in a forgiving mood about that "Failure" cover back in 2009. He even joked about his "General Petraeus moment."
Federal regulators gave the go-ahead for Tribune Corp. to continue operating TV stations and newspapers in five markets where it holds both, removing a major obstacle to the Chicago company...
The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC announced this morning that Geneva Overholser, director of the School of Journalism since 2008, will step down in June. She said she will return to New York with her husband, Annenberg faculty member David Westphal. USC's release says it will launch a recruitment campaign for a successor to Overholser.
"The call I feared finally came late on a Friday...'I’m a nurse at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital,' she said. 'Don’t panic, but we have your son.'"
Deadline.com editor Mike Fleming returns to the site two weeks after his dad was injured at home during the storm in New York. Fleming says he's grateful for the support of his colleagues at the website.
Many journalists in Los Angeles, and many more in the LA Times diaspora, remember Baron as the business editor at the LAT during the section's glory days and a contender for higher-level jobs even since he left for the New York Times.
Message to freelancers: sue the Los Angeles Times at your own risk. An arbitrator has awarded the paper $266,000 to cover the costs of defending itself against a suit by the longtime Hollywood photographer.
BuzzFeed gets to the heart of the latest revelations in the David Petraeus scandal. Plus: an LA media angle to the Paula Broadwell story.
Self-serving questions from constituents for the 'Ask Paul" column on AOL Patch are actually written by the councilman's press deputy. But let's hope you knew that.
Before the LA Times rediscovered the corruption in Bell, and in some cases before DA Steve Cooley got to town with his corruption prosecutions, investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson was digging into the dirty dealings in the southeast cities for the LA Weekly. KCET interviewed Anderson about the challenges of reporting in places like Cudahy last decade.
This morning the former Fox 11 reporter showed up on NBC 4 covering the wood shop fire at James Monroe High School in the Valley. "Yes. I'm now at ch.4 news," she tweets.
Friends on Facebook and Twitter and staffers at the duopoly newsroom in Studio City are saying that Joel Connable, a reporter at CBS 2/KCAL 9 for three years until 2005, has died. Connable had just started a new anchor gig at KOMO-TV in Seattle last month, after being out of the local news business since 2009.
Madeleine Brand gives an interview to the LA Times about leaving KPCC and her initial reactions to being seen on television.
With a note from the editors.
He has the complex algorithm to back up saying that President Obama is the favorite to win on Tuesday. But all he needs, he says, is this: Obama is ahead in Ohio.
Saturday morning on one of Los Angeles' longest-running radio programs, the hosts will announce the death of John Retsek, who created "The Car Show" on KPFK in 1973. They will talk about John and possibly take calls from the legions of listeners who have listened to the show or been guests in its nearly four decades on the air — the odd duck among the politically charged news, talk and revolutionary rhetoric at the Pacifica-owned radio station.
The newspaper recently owned by the New York Times announced it was bought by a group that includes Darius Anderson, a Sonoma-based developer and top Sacramento lobbyist, and former Democratic congressman Doug Bosco.
Chris Little takes to his blog at AM talk station KFI to explain to listeners why he says "driver license" when referring to the card issued by the California DMV — and won't say "Democrat Party."
Just a mild heart attack, the Daily News columnist reports on Facebook.
How KPCC's quest for Latino listeners doomed the "Madeleine Brand Show," plus the first choice of a co-host — and the complications of A Martinez's advocacy for steroids in sports.
Have you seen this car? Veteran LA journalist Steve Devol was out early Sunday morning to shoot some dawn photos around Walt Disney Hall. So were a film crew and a guard who tried to stop Devol from taking pictures. Didn't work.
Could the Press Club's plan to honor Janice Min for revamping the Hollywood Reporter be a factor? Finke says the club "seems more interested in collecting entry fees and selling gala tables...than in rewarding high standards of journalism or conducting a competition with integrity."
Mona Shadia got some media coverage here and elsewhere last December when she was assigned to write a regular column about living as a Muslim in Orange County for the three local newspapers run by the LAT's Times Community News unit.
I went over to KCET's new studios in Burbank last week to catch the first day of run throughs for the made-over "So Cal Connected." Here's what to expect from the nightly show and some pictures of KCET's digs.
A cheerleading note went out to Los Angeles Times employees yesterday from the paper's president, Kathy Thomson, announcing a new branding campaign ("How California Thinks") and a web page called Trending Now to lure readers to spend more time on the website. Plus assorted other digital items.
Increasingly, and perhaps inevitably, his subjects are the vagaries and cruelties of becoming elderly. This might be the least recommended direction to go in these days when media editors count web hits above all else, but I think it's his best material. No one else in LA reports this personally on the aging thing.
A new Los Angeles bureau, meaning mostly Hollywood apparently, will be run by Richard Rushfield and include chief correspondent Kate Aurthur. Both are veterans of Hollywood coverage and of the LA Times, among other places.
Murdoch isn't alone: Austin Beutner, the Register's Aaron Kushner and San Diego partisan Doug Manchester all are expressing interest in the paper, which could be sold soon after bankruptcy ends.
Channel 4's Robert Kovacik was live on the air from West Los Angeles when a roach crawled across his shoulders. No problem! Watch the video.
"Please be advised that PMC employees, including but not limited to Nikki Finke, Mike Fleming, Pete Hammond and Nellie Andreeva, are under long term employment contracts," says the lawyer letter.
Young (OK, very young) versions of the former KNBC 4 stalwarts and a feature story on the Mojave Desert landmark.
You might remember the motorcycle column and videos that Sue Carpenter did for the Los Angeles Times. She's heading to the Register, according to a newsroom memo this morning.
I'm not sure I get the full impact of this, but KCET has announced what it's calling a merger with Link Media, the non-profit media company in San Francisco that produces LinkTV. Their new non-profit creation will be called KCETLink. No big changes on the air for now.
No, there are not 4.3 million immigrants in the city of four million, though the Los Angeles Times keeps saying there are.
Roxane Arnold is a senior projects editor who has been the lead editor on the Column One story that runs on the front page of the Los Angeles Times most days. Here's the newsroom email about her upcoming exit.
The longtime morning news anchor is the third high-profile woman let go by Channel 11 in recent months. "Wonder if this'll get my security desposit back?," she tweeted along with a picture of her cleaned-out desk.
When the Los Angeles Press Club gives its first Visionary Award to Jane Fonda in November, she will be introduced by Robert Redford. The pair starred together in "The Chase," "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Electric Horseman."
The three-year experiment in which the Los Angeles Kings paid reporter Rich Hammond to cover the team wasn't all smiles, according to Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth. He writes that the league demanded that a story Hammond recently posted about the current labor dispute with players be taken off the web, citing his employment status with the Kings.
Rich Hammond broke new ground when he left the Daily News three years ago to blog about the Los Angeles Kings for the Kings. He was the first journalist locally to be employed by a team to report independently on the team.
KCET will announce today that former KPCC host Madeleine Brand will become a special contributor to "SoCal Connected." The show is also going daily — it had aired on a weekly cycle. Val Zavala will remain the show's news anchor, with Brand doing mostly interviews, it sounds like.
More on sale of Variety, Sunday magazine next for Register, books from Roman Polanski's sex victim way back then and on LA's hardcore music scene, some media job notes and Dean Singleton speaks. Plus more.
In reporting that his employer has now acquired his former journalism home at Variety, Deadline film editor Michael Fleming took a moment for some personal words. Plus: The Wrap claims Finke 'having a major tantrum.'
"I try to advocate for a certain group. And not just for Latinos, but for immigrants," he tells Ana Garcia of NBC 4.
After 35 years at CBS, assignment editor Steve Crawford left the newsroom at Channels 2 and 9 on May 23 without revealing to anyone that he had stage 3 esophageal cancer. He insisted that no one know, his wife says in a note posted at the station today.
Whit Johnson, the new co-anchor at NBC 4, is married to new KCAL 9 reporter Andrea Fujii. He's a proud husband, per Twitter.
If you didn't grow up in the Los Angeles area during the baby boom, you can leave the room for a couple of minutes. Though if your parents fit the description, you might want to stick around.
The Guardian in the UK today published the first in a 7-part series on the Latino vote produced by USC Annenberg grad students over the summer as part of the News21 fellowship. "Across America an electoral giant is stirring."
One of the most talked-about of the positions the Orange County Register is filling is the paper's food critic. Now we know the job will go to Brad A. Johnson, the James Beard winner who had been writing about restaurants for Angeleno.
Here's the job description for a full-time associate producer for Patt Morrison in her new role as special correspondent at KPCC. Pays $41,672 to $62,508.
The newspapers that make up the Los Angeles News Group have been gradually blending over recent months, and today take a big step toward being a regional news operation with the emphasis on digital — and less on geography. One upshot: Daily News editor Carolina Garcia has a new role and title.
In the wake of Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher's departure from the paper, the LA Times has re-hired Chris Lee and moved Gina McIntyre over to be the lead writer and editor on the Hero Complex blog.
Catherine Davis, the Los Feliz woman bludgeoned to death last week by an emotionally disturbed actor, was the mother of the Los Angeles author-journalist Margaret Leslie Davis, and had a large family of friends in Hollywood who had stayed at her "writers villa" through the years.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently paid $20 million for a think tank at USC, gets a segment on "60 Minutes" tonight to give just enough mea culpa on the whole cheated-on-Maria thing to sound like it was a blip. But at the Daily Beast, Ann Louise Bardach says the chronology given to CBS' Lesley Stahl and in Arnold's new memoir is anything but true
KPCC is taking the unusual step of having president Bill Davis stop in to "Airtalk" and chat with Larry Mantle about the recent programming changes, including the resignation of Madeleine Brand.
Reynolds tweeted this morning that she was just informed that her "Good Day L.A." days were over. Steve Edwards' new co-host is Maria Sansone.
Ex-KPCC host Madeleine Brand, who left the station last week, tells Current.org that "outside offers just became too attractive” for her to remain at the station. She doesn't specify any offers, but says she will be staying in Los Angeles.
If things go right, there will be fewer media choppers hovering pointlessly above the ends of the closed 405 freeway during this weekend's traffic event. Or non-event, whatever.
In 2006, an LA Times and Paramount promotion for "Mission: Impossible III" went awry. They settled with the federal government for $75,000.
It turns out this morning's evacuation of the Miracle Mile building that houses KNX, KFWB and other media outlets may have been caused by suspicious beeps in a promotional package sent by the Black Entertainment Network.
For them it's about the quality of the content, the most precious commodity in the competition for readers' brains.
Village Voice Media owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin announced Sunday night that they have agreed to sell the chain of 13 weeklies — a mix of papers they created and big established titles they acquired, including the LA Weekly and Village Voice — and will get out of alt journalism. The buyers are a new company formed by ex-editors and publishers of the New Times chain that Lacey and Larkin helped start in Phoenix in the 1970s.
Boucher, who left the Los Angeles Times earlier this month after clashing with his editor, posted the memo from Entertainment Weekly managing editor Jess Cagle on Facebook.
So much for all those pretended sounds of happiness from KPCC over the forced merger of morning show host Madeleine Brand with newcomer A Martinez.
Chris Paul graces the cover of GQ, newspaper moves of local note on Spring Street and in Las Vegas, and more media notes from the in-box.
The job opening was posted without explanation of what the vacancy may say about the incumbent deputy. The Times book department is down to three full-timers who all contribute reviews, features and blog posts, including this week's "Is creativity better in the nude?"
Immigration reporter Cindy Carcamo's opener of a three-part series this past weekend in the Orange County Register was a doozy. With illegal overland entry into the United States from Mexico getting harder and harder, immigrants increasingly turn toward the Pacific Ocean. On Oct. 1, she starts covering the Southwest for the LA Times from Arizona.
This week's edition of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles totals 148 pages — "the largest in our 26 year history," says editor Rob Eshman. "It is also completely redesigned, with a new masthead, new page layouts, new features."
Philips is the former LA Times staff writer who left the paper shortly after editors fully retracted his 2008 story naming names in the murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. He will break what he calls a new story Thursday via tweet.
"It is very strange and sad to leave the paper after 21 years but it is completely my choice," the ex-Calendar writer and comics blogger posts. "I'm going to gamble and bet on myself and what I've learned over these past few years with the Hero Complex success."
Following a blow-up with editors last month, high-level discussions and a Florida vacation could not keep the Calendar writer and Hero Complex blogger around. His exit has staffers and outside observers both talking about editor Davan Maharaj's choice of assistant managing editor over arts and entertainment.
Editorial board predicts an Obama win will mean death panels and "an effort to get 'In God we Trust' removed from U.S. symbols, including our money."
The hiring spree continues at the Orange County Register. A listing has gone up at the Investigative Reporters and Editors jobs page for three "top-notch investigative reporters in order to expand its watchdog/investigations team."
I have to give it to Steven Mirkin, the Los Angeles music journalist. He makes lemonade of impaling his testicles on an iron fence while house-sitting for a friend — while locked out of the house, with a dog who tried to bite the paramedics.
The newest music writer on the LAT staff is Mikael Wood, most recently a freelancer for the paper and elsewhere. Here's the newsroom memo:
Somewhere in Orange County is a humbled bicyclist with a shiner and a damaged "$2,000 carbon fiber-and-unobtainium bicycle....(slash) penis extension."
Former co-host at "Good Day LA" says the new boss told her she "made his eyes bleed." That's what you like to hear when you're on-camera talent.
Scott Timberg's recent series of pieces for Salon on the struggles of architects, journalists, video store clerks and others in the "creative class" has got him a book deal with Yale University Press. The book, tentatively titled "Creative Destruction," is supposed to "detail the evisceration of an entire class of cultural workers under the onslaught of warp-speed technological change, economic slump, and both longstanding and shifting attitudes regarding the values of art and the creative life."
The Daily News columnist feted earlier this year as The Bard of LA by the Huntington invokes both Charles Bukowski and Dylan Thomas and writes: "I am pleased to enter my name today as a candidate for poet laureate of Los Angeles."
Nancie Clare and Rip Georges, the former editor and creative director, respectively, of the late Los Angeles Times Magazine, are moving toward launching a mystery-oriented tablet magazine they are calling Noir. "The first of its kind iPad magazine for the mystery, thriller and true crime genres in all mediums: books, movies, TV, graphic novels and video games" is how they describe it.
Catching up to this unusual Los Angeles Times correction from last week — a reader pointed it out to me today. Um, don't say someone declined to comment unless they actually did.
David Chalian is the Washington bureau chief for Yahoo who last month floated that weak and mysterious story asking if Antonio Villaraigosa was poised to become the first Latino president. Today he was fired over something he said during a webcast at the Republican convention.
Russ Stanton, the former Los Angeles Times editor in chief who is "Vice President, Content" for KPCC these days, has taken to the comments section of the station's website to further explain this morning's announcement that KPCC would drop the Patt Morrison show. She will keep doing the Comedy Congress segment and be involved with the station's other shows.
These internal moves at the Los Angeles Times aren't nearly as newsy as they used to be, either in LA or around the media biz. But still worth noting: Scott Kraft, the LA Times' former national editor and current page one editor, will now take a spin as the deputy managing editor for the front page, Column One and projects. In that role he succeeds Marc Duvoisin, who recently was named managing editor.
Gene Warnick, the sports editor at the Daily News, will expand his duties to oversee sports across the Los Angeles News Group papers. His appointment follows the promotion of Daily News opinion editor Mariel Garza to a similar LANG-wide role. Also announced by Michael Anastasi, the group's new vice president and executive editor, is that LANG will fill four reporters jobs in sports, including Lakers beat writer. Read the memo.
The other shoes have fallen at KPCC from the addition of A Martinez as co-host with Madeleine Brand in the morning. Larry Mantle's time slow move, and Patt Morrison's show ends.
Zocalo Public Square likes to tape featured speakers answering a few personal questions in the green room before events. Carla Hall talks about her best friend, her dancing style, her last voicemail, the time she spent the night with a newborn elephant, and the TV show that got her to LA.
Everyone got down safely, but there was a scary moment over Hollywood Monday afternoon. Helicopters for Channel 5 and Channel 2 were covering the report of a gunman in Hollywood when Stu Mundel, the pilot for KCBS' SKY2, noticed smoke spewing from the engine of KTLA's Sky5.
KTLA sportscaster Rebecca Hall's weekend oops — in which she jokes during an on-air tribute to Vin Scully that he "should get his shit together" — has been pulled down from Big Lead Sports. Copyright claim by Tribune, which owns Channel 5, is the explanation. Well, the Tribune suits haven't made it to Deadspin yet, apparently.
Bill Davis, the station's president and CEO, tells a complainer via email that the Madeleine Brand and A Martinez pairing on KPCC checked out in focus groups and audience testing, is here to stay and will be expanding to two hours day: "I know a thing or two about public radio programming --and I like what I hear with these two." He recounts and pooh-poohs the complaints that came in from previous program changes, including the addition of Brand in the first place.
LAT columnist Michael Hiltzik argues that the anti-doping system "is the most thoroughly one-sided and dishonest legal regime anywhere in the world this side of Beijing," a position directly opposed to the case made here last week.
Dodgers fans can breathe easy for another year. Check out our new story on Scully's five most memorable calls, by guest author Paul Haddad.
KCRW's Warren Olney and KPCC's Larry Mantle crossed paths at the Tampa airport. Both are in town to do shows from the Republican convention.
The reporters will be familiar to some in Southern California. Left unclear in the LAT memo is whether they are paid for by the Ford Foundation grant announced a few months ago.
The pledge pitches in public radio are getting more creative all the time. Watch bigger.
If those who post anonymously on KPCC's website are any gauge, the NPR station's gamble to pair veteran morning host Madeleine Brand with public radio newcomer A Martinez could be in trouble. Brand took to the web tonight to plead for patience: "I totally understand your anger and confusion now."
The new leadership team at Channel 4 continues to make changes in the newsroom lineup. Today the station will announce that Michael Brownlee will be getting up really early from now on as co-anchor of "Today in LA" with Alycia Lane. Plus some other moves
Carrie Kahn, who has been based at NPR West in Culver City since 2004, is shifting to Mexico City to be NPR’s correspondent covering Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America.
Patrick Goldstein doesn't explain the end of his film column, but he seems to be defending how he went about it. The piece begins "When I began writing this column...
ABC is moving Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show into head-to-head competition with Jay Leno and David Letterman. "Nightline" flips back to 12:35, a big disappointment to the news types.
Nyad's Twitter feed posted at 7:42 a.m. Eastern time that "Diana has been pulled from the water. We'll have more information when it becomes available." She had been swimming for 63 hours since leaving Cuba on Saturday, and suffered numerous jellyfish stings.
New details on the hiring that owner Aaron Kushner's team at the Orange County Register has authorized. Sports editor Todd Harmonson, who last week put out the word that he...
Once the LA Weekly dropped his longtime comic strip, the end was inevitable. "It was particularly aggravating that I wasn’t being printed locally in Los Angeles," Groening said. "If 'Life in Hell' were still in LA Weekly, it would probably have kept me going."
Diana Nyad's team says that she has swum 46 miles since leaving from Cuba on Saturday, and has made it through a storm and several jellyfish stings. Tonight she was joined by a pod of dolphins.
Not just a paywall, but an emphasis on print. Many fewer blogs. No push to mobile phones. Possible new fulltime food writer and film critic — just like in the old days. And more, via OC Weekly.
KLOS has its replacements for Mark and Brian. They will be Heidi Hamilton and Frank Kramer, starting Sept. 4.
Mariel Garza has been the opinion editor for the Daily News, and then took on added responsibilities for the Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram when those papers were put under DN editor Carolina Garcia, Now Garza will oversee the editorial pages for the whole Los Angeles News Group chain, based in West Covina. Here's the newsroom announcement.
Longtime Channel 7 photographer Artie Williams died over the weekend while diving with a friend off Catalina Island, the station announced.
A news story in the LA Times calls the California Teachers Association "arguably the most potent force in state politics." But Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes "Who really wields political power in Cal? Not the teachers union, but the 1%, and they want even more!" His Sunday column blasts Prop. 32, a conservative-backed measure to undercut union influence.
KPCC's long search for a Latino to pair with Madeleine Brand has led to A. Martinez, the former host of "Dodgertalk" and most recently at ESPN Radio in Los Angeles. KPCC's morning show reboots Monday as "Brand and Martinez."
The host of Marketplace Money since 2006 will step down in November, America Public Media announced today. There was no successor named. She will continue as a contributor. I don't...
Brian Phelps, half of the long-running "Mark and Brian" morning duo, had been negotiating to stay on after the retirement of his partner. But he announced on the air this morning that the end has come. Off to "recharge" then do a podcast.
The newly acquired Register has put out the word that it wants to staff the Dodger Stadium press box again. But there are some requirements, and a strong preference for Spanish fluency. And yes, they know it's near the season's end.
As many know, Los Angeles writer, journalist and more Xeni Jardin is being treated for breast cancer. After an especially unpleasant session today with the blood takers at Cedars-Sinai, she posted an image and message that I suspect many people who have been patients will endorse.
The Carlyle Group announced Wednesday it will take a controlling stake in the photo archive.
Says the editor at Red Hen Press: "Before we moved to Pasadena from the Valley in 2009, there was a lot of discussion about where we should go. We really wanted to move to a place that celebrates arts and culture."
Here's how the New York Times itself puts it: "In choosing Mr. Thompson, a veteran of television who has spent nearly his entire career at the BBC, The Times reached outside its own company, its own industry and even its own country to find a leader to guide it in an uncharted digital future." Indeed.
The center in Berkeley will announce tomorrow a partnership with Univision to jointly produce investigative stories for Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States and Latin America.
Leaving the Los Angeles Times staff is Dean Kuipers, recently the nightlife editor in Arts and Entertainment. Read his farewell email. Plus an editor joins Pacific Standard magazine, and Nieman Journalism Lab explains HuffPost Live.
Helen Gurley Brown was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazines for three decades and the author of the 1962 bestseller, "Sex and the Single Girl." "Helen Gurley Brown was an icon," said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., CEO of Hearst Corporation.
Busch, the former Los Angeles Times reporter who was threatened over a story by Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano and his cronies, appeared frail and frightened-looking in court today, says The Wrap.
Karl Fleming covered the civil rights movement in the South and Los Angeles for Newsweek, started a local magazine and was the editor of Chanel 2 news. His memoir was "Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir."
Martínez, the writing professor at Loyola Marymount University, lived for a time beside the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, searching for truth and meaning and the guidance to break his drug habit. A review of his new book, plus an excerpt of a new mystery by Miles Corwin.
Lauritzen is portrayed as "a laid-back evangelist of the classical radio world" in a short Times feature by Scott Timberg.
Charles McNulty's review sounds completely fair, while saying what had to be said. "The unretireable Minnelli owed her success on Saturday as much to her signature strengths as to her often parodied weaknesses."
Here's a bit more intelligence on the House of Pies, the Los Feliz survivor that attracted some appreciative attention recently from a blogger at The Paris Review. The LA Weekly got there first.
Sharon McNary, a KPCC political reporter, unfolded her story on Twitter, which is fitting I guess since it began with her looking at VP candidate-designate Paul Ryan's Twitter account and becoming curious that he follows just one other account.
HuffPost Live will begin with eight hours of live web programming out of New York and four hours out of Los Angeles each weekday. It's starting with ten hosts, including the former LA Observed video contributor Jacob Soboroff in the Beverly Hills studio, plus contributions from Huffington Post editors, bloggers and readers.
At Saturday night's local Emmy awards, the Governors Award for lifetime achievement went to Susan Stratton, Chick Hearn's producer on Lakers broadcasts for most of three decades. In the station count, NBC4, ABC7 and KTLA5 each won seven Emmys. Link to full list of winners inside.
Nice Column One story by the LAT's Kurt Streeter on confronting his fears of the water so he can help his two-year-old learn to swim.
"It was no surprise; he'd been talking about it for months. He even named August as when it would happen."
A 'Marketplace" reporter made the drive out to the city of San Fernando to do a radio piece on the upset over closure of the town's once-popular J.C. Penney store. The story begins with a historical error but goes on to explore the hopes of some in town that the chain will either reconsider or the Penney's will be replaced by something better.
It's Marc Duvoisin, currently the deputy managing editor for projects and enterprise. The newsroom's number two job has been open since Davan Maharaj was elevated to editor in December. Here's the memo.
The pop culture and deputy television editor of the LA Times' calendar section gets the newly created job of Books and Culture Editor. Press was a book critic for VLS as well as culture editor at the both the Village Voice and Salon.
John Rabe of KPCC enticed me out to Northridge on Wednesday for an "Off-Ramp" story, and since it was midday in the West Valley, in the middle of a heat wave, and Rabe's an intrepid reporter slash radio host, he brought along the makings of a classic journalism experiment. The temperature was a few notches over 100, but was it hot enough to cook an egg? Find out inside.
For more than five years, Sacramento's CBS TV affiliate has been investigating reports by drivers in Northern California who get parking tickets from the city of Los Angeles when they swear they weren’t there. The latest case involves a Sacramento area man who says his new car has never been in LA.
Judith Crist was the critic for many years on the "Today" show and in print at TV Guide and elsewhere. She had two long stints at TV Guide &mdash the first before they fired her in favor of computerized summaries of films, the second after a deluge of reader complaints forced the editors to ask her back.
Cord Jefferson, who started Monday as the West Coast editor for the Gawker gossip and blog empire, penned an opening greeting post that says he's "the first California staffer since Seth Abramovitch left in January. I'm also the first staffer (on record) to watch hardcore pornography in Fred Willard's favorite Hollywood peep show." Oh, and he's black.
A couple of readers have noticed the familiar voice of Jennifer York doing traffic reports for KNX 1070 radio. York was the very popular airborne traffic reporter on KTLA Channel 5 for 13 years, until she and the station parted ways in 2004.
The Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley will curate the new YouTube channel, billed as "a hub of the best investigative reporting from around the world." It's funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Video contributions are expected from ABC News, BBC, The New York Times, Al-Jazeera and others.
Rather than be just another Hollywood type who complains about the unprofessionalism and blackmail of the Deadline founder, the ex-agent and producer dares Finke to prove her clout.
I'm assuming there's no actual impetus for the story, other than a lazy sidebar to the symbolic role Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been cast in for the Democratic convention later this summer. He does says in the story that he would like to be governor.
"Did I miss much while I was away?" the Los Angeles bureau chief for The Independent tweets after Twitter lifted his suspension. Twitter sent an email notifying Guy Adams that NBC had dropped its complaint about Adams posting the email address of a network executive as part of an Olympics rant.
John Bogert is the South Bay columnist who announced in his final column last month in the Daily Breeze that he had stopped treatment for his colon cancer. The paper has just posted the news that Bogert died Sunday afternoon at home in Pasadena.
These will be stationed in Business, and include yet another body devoted to coverage of entertainment industry awards and another covering TV, plus the return of a slot based in New York.
James Rainey has been covering media as a reporter since his bosses at the Los Angeles Times dropped his media column back in October. He will now post items to the paper's Politics Now blog, per Friday's note to the newsroom from national editor Roger Smith.
Not the best weekend to unveil a major new project, given the mass shooting rampage in Aurora, Colorado, but the LA Times is committed now. The paper has unveiled the promotion campaign for a five-part series on global population growth, by the journalists who produced the Pulitzer-winning Altered Oceans series awhile back.
Unfortunate extra letter on page A12 in the Las Vegas sheriff story in some print editions of today's Los Angeles Times. It was fixed in my print copy, but not in those of a couple of LA Observed readers who sent it in. Update: Times assistant managing editor emails.
Cal Coast News.com, the website that the late journalist and professor George Ramos was leading when he died last year, says that a San Luis Obispo County supervisor is pressuring advertisers and sources to shun the site.
The Pacifica Foundation's head office has notified the network's five local radio stations, including KPFK here, to prepare for deep cuts in budgets and staffing. The latest alarms at the perennially strapped stations were apparently prompted by an audit of the books that concluded there is “substantial doubt” that Pacifica can "continue as a going concern.”
Tribune's plan, endorsed by several of the company's largest creditors, would transfer ownership of Tribune Company — owner of the Los Angeles Times, KTLA and numerous other media outets around the U.S. — to a group of hedge funds and banks based in LA and New York.
The Los Angeles Daily Journal had two staff photographers, Todd Rogers and Robert Levins. They have been cut loose in favor of freelancers and pictures taken by reporters for the legal paper. New cameras are on order, editor David Houston says in his note to the staff this morning.
KCET's longtime home near Sunset Junction, turned over to the Church of Scientology in April, will become the home of a religious broadcasting center to promote Scientology teachings over TV, radio and the Internet. No timetable was given.
NPR national correspondent Ina Jaffe is taking on the newly created aging beat, starting today. "In this new role, Ina will cover all aspects of aging: from finances and work life, to health care, relationships and the broader demographic realities facing the country," says an NPR spokesman.
"Global L.A." debuts July 24 at 8 p.m. on KCET and will be "examining the region’s ties to a number of destinations and cultures around the world," the station says. Zay Harding will host.
Philip L. Fradkin, a native New Yorker who I believe became the first environment reporter at the Los Angeles Times, died Saturday of cancer at his home in Point Reyes Station. After the Times he went on to write numerous books about California and the West, focusing on earthquakes, water, history and the natural environment.
Many of us still remember David Brancaccio as the host of LA-based "Marketplace," and now he will be host of "Marketplace Tech Report." He'll be doing the tech report from New York City.
Ordinary skywriting turns into a headline and story about UFOs at Laguna Niguel Patch, with a bunch of related links for past local stories about — UFOs. And the comments go biblical.
Michael Anastasi, managing editor of the Salt Lake City Tribune, takes over August 13 as Vice President and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles News Group. He spent 11 years as a sports editor for LANG and the Daily News before he went to Utah.
In a piece being well received at the Los Angeles Review of Books, television critic Phillip Maciak calls Aaron Sorkin "one of the only commercially bankable and socially conscious screenwriters now working; his writing style is fast, fluid, and instantly recognizable..." And yet.
Photographer Gregory Bojorquez talks about the months since he was at the scene of that deadly shooting rampage at Sunset and Vine.
David Houston, editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, sends Evan George off to "Which Way, LA" and "To the Point." Plus a promotion at the legal daily.
Michael J. Ybarra, a freelance writer from Los Angeles who had a regular gig writing about extreme sports for the Wall Street Journal, died in a fall while mountain climbing in the Sierra Nevada.
Jia-Rui Chong Cook, a former LA Times reporter now in media relations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was on Friday's airing of "Jeopardy" — she was one and out on the show. But she got a nice little story out of it .
David Savage, the Los Angeles Times' long-time Supreme Court expert in Washington, gets a nice pat on the back for his coverage of the health care ruling in this note to the newsroom from Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin. Interestingly, we learn in the email that the Times website had six alerts of various flavors pre-written to be sent once the news broke.
News artist, designer and visual journalist Charles Apple compiled and critiqued the front pages of more than 75 newspapers that covered this week's Supreme Court decision on the Obama health care reform law.
Hector Tobar loves this LA summer so far, and I agree. The news is that this is Tobar's last A2 column in the Times. He's going to the books desk to write about literary LA.
Banfield, a television presence in Los Angeles for 43 years, had cancer. Also: Cindy Frazier, city editor.
The affected employees are not on staff at the Register but at other Orange County units of the parent company.
Tablet magazine bills itself as "a new read on Jewish life," and it's through that lens the publication profiles the LA Times' food writer Jonathan Gold.
Kirk Honeycutt won't stop reviewing films just because he was laid off in November as chief film critic at the Hollywood Reporter. In addition to teaching a graduate course at Chapman University, he also is posting reviews at Honeycutt's Hollywood.
Gordon Edes, ex-national baseball writer for the Los Angeles Times (and before that beat writer on the Dodgers and Kings), did an entire Red Sox game at the mic.
Ephron grew up in Beverly Hills, made a name for herself as a journalist in New York, got into screenwriting via collaboration with then-husband Carl Bernstein on a version of "All the President's Men," and grew into what People magazine calls today "one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood as the creative force behind such blockbusters as 'You've Got Mail,' 'Sleepless in Seattle' and 'When Harry Met Sally.'"
It's Paige St. John, who won the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting last year in Florida. Read today's newsroom announcement.
Barry Smolin's show devoted to the music of the Grateful Dead and beyond was on the air at KPFK from 1995 until slipping into hiatus a few months ago. "The Head Room" debuts Friday at 10 p.m.
A laid-off newsman starts Newspaper Alum to tell the stories of those who have blazed a new path. Plus: Relaunch for the food site Zester Daily.
Friday's Sandusky convictions broke with plenty of time for the Daily News, Daily Breeze, Bakersfield Californian, Oakland Tribune, Sacramento Bee and even the Fresno friggin' Bee to go big with the nation's biggest news story. At the Los Angeles Times, the story landed on the inside LATExtra section, at least in some papers. Michael Schneider does the math.
In Monday's edition, founder Sue Laris will tell readers that advertising has fallen out and the 40-year-old weekly needs $5 a month from readers. For now no editorial staffing changes are planned.
John Bogert figures he has written 6,500 or so columns for the South Bay Daily Breeze since he became the paper's columnist in 1984. In his final column, running today and accompanied by a story, he says the colon cancer he told readers about a couple of years ago has essentially won. He is off treatment, and also off the Daily Breeze payroll.
So, let's see. if a small power outage in Studio City knocks out two stations for a prolonged period, I guess we should write off the CBS stations in a big earthquake.
Jon Thurber, who left the Los Angeles Times recently after 40 years or so in the newsroom, is joining The Wrap as a senior editor. He will be reunited there with Lisa Fung, the executive editor. They were colleagues in the Calendar section at the Times for some years.
Eli Broad talked at length about his new book, The Art of Being Unreasonable, with Warren Olney on tonight's "Which Way, LA?" on KCRW. Broad said he's not unreasonable so much as impatient with too much discussion or pondering on major decisions. At some point, he says, you have to just do it. Listen to the interview.
Los Angeles Times foreign editor Bruce Wallace is indeed leaving town for his native Montreal, as we noted last night. Nicholas Riccardi, whose exit we posted on Monday, will cover politics for AP. We have details.
The City Council has approved a $50,000 reward for information on the May 31 murder of chiropractor Robert Rainey at his office in Palms. James Rainey, the media writer at the Los Angeles Times, spoke this morning about his brother at a press conference at the scene. Watch the video.
The video showing the assault on a Los Angeles freeway driver near downtown only got in the hands of authorities — and seen by you — because of an unemployed croupier and casino dealer across the Atlantic — and an alert food writer at the LA Weekly.
Bruce Wallace appears headed back to his native Montreal to edit a policy journal. Meanwhile, newly retired LAT veteran Craig Turner has pointed analysis of the Laurie Ochoa and John Corrigan moves from earlier today, and criticism of LAT editor Davan Maharaj.
It was ten years ago today that Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch found a dead fish on her car. There was a rose in the fish's mouth and a note that said: "Stop." She took it as a warning about her reporting — and she was right. Her life now is all about exposing corruption, she tells the Hollywood Reporter.
The liberal policy and politics magazine in Washington with the LA connections says it received a grant that pushed recent donations over $1.2 million, ensuring continued operation for now.
Andrew Sarris, the former film critic for the Village Voice and the New York Observer who died Wednesday morning, taught American moviegoers to obsess about directors.
Positive Frontiers bills itself as "the nation’s only HIV magazine for gay and bisexual men." It's from Frontiers Media, which publishes other gay-oriented publications
The Inland Empire-area papers of the Los Angeles News Group are leaving their relatively new printing plant and will now be run off the presses at the Orange County Register. Plus: the San Bernardino Sun will actually move a newsroom back into the city's center.
Cassell's has been on 6th Street in what is now Koreatown for a long time, though not so long in its current location. Soon the place christened a couple of media generations ago as the home of LA's best burger will be moving again — and after many months of darkness, perhaps rebooting again with a new menu.
Stephanie Zacharek will be laid off as chief critic at Movieline on July 13. The news, reported earlier by Matt Singer at IndieWire, has set off fresh concern about the future viability of film criticism as an actual career, or even as a job.
There's a new trickle of newsroom exits going on at the Los Angeles Times. The same day that editor Davan Maharaj announced that entertainment editor Sallie Hofmeister would be moving on, former Denver bureau chief Nicholas Riccardi sent his colleagues a nice if brief newsroom farewell.
Today's oddly timed and poorly choreographed reveal by Microsoft of a new tablet computer took place at the Milk Studios in Hollywood.
Most media outlets that have written stories pegged to Microsoft's plans for a secretive, 3:30 p.m., invitation-only presser in Los Angeles agree that the subject will be a new tablet computer. But the real story is in the details.
Last year's California Watch series detailing failures in the way that the state ensures the seismic safety of public schools was singled out for a special prize at this weekend's national convention in Boston of the journalism group Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Ever since Davan Maharaj became LAT editor, the newsroom has waited to learn whether arts and entertainment editor Sallie Hofmesiter would move up, leave or carry on. She's leaving. The Register's hiring of new media guru Rob Curley will create more buzz in the greater newspaper world.
Spencer Beck, the editor of Los Angeles magazine from 1997-2000, has been named editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Confidential.
Union organizers recognized the Walmart public relations rep who showed up in Chinatown yesterday to press the firm's case for a new store. Her card said Stephanie Harnett, senior associate at Mercury Public Affairs. But earlier this month, she came to an anti-Walmart news conference and interviewed activists as USC student journalist Zoe Mitchell. Busted.
As he stood in Staples Center on Monday night and absorbed the emotion in the building, and truly realized what the Kings accomplished, the LA Times' Bill Plaschke got religion.
Longtime Los Angeles Kings broadcaster Bob Miller got his turn with the Stanley Cup last night at Staples Center. More celebration photos from Rich Hammond at LA Kings Insider.
Kate Aurthur, the West Coast Editor of The Daily Beast, personally endorses a story in Sunday's New York Times about sexual abuse by teachers at an exclusive New York private school, Horace Mann. That's because she spoke to the story's writer, Amos Kamil, and editor, Ariel Kaminer, about her own groping by a teacher with a reputation while she was a student.
As of this fall, Tom and Ray Magliozzi will stop recording new "Car Talk" shows for NPR. The archived shows will go into syndication, the network announced. Let the brothers explain.
With the June 24 banquet at the Biltmore honoring Watergate reporting legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the LA Press Club lined up Martin Sheen to give them the President's Award.
The eight editors and designer who lost their jobs last week at Good magazine (or opted out) posted a message in which they admit to being scared about the lack of income, and their regret that some of them may have to move out of Los Angeles. But they also wish Good well in its new direction, and say they intend to work together as a team one more time on a magazine concept that has a name. Plus: Good explains the firings.
The vacant position at the top of the Channel 4 newsroom is going to Todd Mokhtari, who has been at KIRO-TV in Seattle but is a former managing editor at KNBC.
Dorothy Lucey, let go last month as the longtime co-host on Fox 11's "Good Day LA" show, talked about it this morning on rival station KTLA's morning show. Go inside to watch her video clip.
Fans who have gotten used to watching the Los Angeles Kings in the Stanley Cup Final on NBC will possibly be disappointed tonight. Game 3, starting at 5 p.m., will be only on the NBC Sports Network, which is a completely different animal.
Good magazine's job posting for a features editor has changed to a large ASCII sad face in the wake of last week's mass firing of the staff. Update: It's their 404 page, couple of observers say.
Fashion magazine Marie Claire devotes a one-page photo feature in the June issue to Liza Richardson, the longtime KCRW DJ and music supervisor for movies and TV. The angle is that she also surfs. But then a blog noticed the photo editing.
On Thursday night, Los Angeles-based Good threw a party at Atwater Crossing for its latest issue. On Friday, executive editor Ann Friedman and at least five other editors got the axe, pretty much clearing out the top levels of the Los Angeles editorial office. Here's what we know.
Road and Track leaving Southern California, Jo Mora map on "Patt Morrison," LA's tweeting scanner monitor, Charlie Tuna and more.
David Houston, the editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal, has some nice words in a newsroom note this morning for departing reporter Casey Sullivan (see today's LA Observed Morning Buzz) and for reporter Ben Adlin. The latter scribe gets credit from the boss for yesterday's scoop on the federal investigation of former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. Read the memo
The Dodgers yesterday afternoon kindly sent out PR images of the first Vin Scully bobblehead doll. Here you go - bigger inside.
Dave Morgan, the former LA Times and Yahoo sports editor who has just overseen a massive change in personnel at USA Today, explains that it was about getting the right kinds of journalists in the right places for the future.
News, blogs and community get the emphasis over the radio station's programming in the web design unveiled today (after months of use behind the scenes.) Nice to see: a news staff list with beats and bios for 78 reporters, producers, editors, hosts and others. Read the memo and links
Potential advertisers in the Beachcomber in Long Beach can secure a nice featured story for the same price as their ad, according to this pitch that went out from an advertising rep at the bi-weekly.
Davan Maharaj has only posted 26 tweets thus far — including two today noting that he has had to change his password.
The Houston Chronicle announced this morning that Los Angeles Times associate editor Randy Harvey is joining the paper as sports columnist. Harvey was a longtime sports writer, editor and columnist before becoming a masthead editor under Russ Stanton at the LAT.
The morning show on Channel 11 has kept the same chemistry since 1995 or so, except that it became clearer through the years that Steve Edwards' female co-hosts didn't much like each other. Now Lucey's contract was not renewed, Jillian Reynolds will switch to freelance status, and on-air auditions will be held. Details
At least one journalist tried to warn Los Angeles County voters people before they elected Noguez in 2010. That was Jeffrey Anderson, who was reporting on corruption in the unwatched southeast cities long before the LA Times rediscovered Bell and went on to win a Pulitzer.
Stan Lee was supposed to be the center of attention on the final day of the Hero Complex Film Festival this weekend in Downtown. But his people say the 89-year-old comic book icon is clearing his schedule. The festival will now end a day earlier, on Sunday. Read more
This tweaks the model for how to pay for big-city newspaper journalism. The Los Angeles Times, still one of the biggest newspapers in the country and by far the most potent in California, has accepted a $1 million grant to hire new reporters on selected beats. The money comes no strings attached, says the memo from editor Davan Maharaj. Read the memo
Donna Myrow, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit that publishes LA Youth, emails: "We've received $187,000 from individual donors. Fundraising continues and the presses roll next week [on] the May-June issue." Statement from her inside.
The Los Angeles woman who everyone in the media seems to be talking about this week is Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year-old mother of two and also a lactation consultant and breastfeeding advocate. She blogs about breastfeeding, mothering and "attachment parenting" at I am Not the Babysitter, but the site seems to be down. Not surprising, given the emotional frenzies sparked by her still breastfeeding her soon-to-be four-year-old son, and Time putting them on the cover in such a provocative pose.
The Register's news mob swarm of the Angels' season opener worked so well that they're doing it again next month when Disney's California Adventure relaunches.
An LA media person sent this along. Ms. magazine is looking to hire an associate editor to work in Los Angeles.
Jon Thurber, the Los Angeles Times book editor since 2010, is leaving the paper at the end of the summer. He's one of the few remaining 40-year employees. The note from editor Davan Maharaj is silent on what Thurber may be going off to do, or on the future of the books staff. Read the memo inside.
Eli Broad speculates in ""The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking" — with a foreword by Michael Bloomberg — that the LA Times will be for sale once the Tribune's bankruptcy closes and says he's interested again. Broad is also now on Twitter and Facebook and has started to blog.
In another nod to the importance of what the paper does online, the Los Angeles Times is stationing veteran foreign correspondent Carol J. Williams on a desk in the newsroom to write for the paper's World Now blog.
As part of its CityThink efforts, Los Angeles magazine hosted another of its breakfast conversations this morning at Kate Mantilini, this time with Ben Hecht, the president and CEO of Living Cities. The May issue features a return of the 52 Great Weekends feature, and a profile of KFI power talkers John and Ken, and a Q&A with Controller Wendy Greuel.
Harold Meyerson, the LA Weekly's executive editor and chief political writer at the time of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, is one of the alumni whose jaw dropped when the current LA Weekly posted a blog item yesterday claiming that the alt-weekly did not cover the riots when they happened. (Alas, I fell for it.) In a note to LA Observed, Meyerson explains what actually went on.
Peter Hong was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times who, he writes today, got his newsroom job because of the 1992 riots that tore up Los Angeles after the acquittal of white LAPD officers in Simi Valley. His career "roughly covered the rise and fall of newsroom diversity." Now he's a deputy to Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.
Trying to get a handle on highlights from the Los Angeles Times, KPCC and other sources.
One of the milestones of LA Times lore from Shelby Coffey's era as editor was his use of scissors to repel rioters trying to climb through a smashed window in the LAT Magazine's first-floor suite. He writes about the episode at the Daily Beast.
According to LA Weekly blogger Simone Wilson, who went back through the paper's archives, in 1992 "two full issues went by without any mention of the riots." She was wrong. The LA Weekly covered the riots in a big way. Wilson has posted a correction.
There has been so much terrific journalism published and aired and posted around the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 riots. It's been an especially awesome week for "Which Way, LA?", started by KCRW right after the riots with Warren Olney providing the steady hand.
This is more interesting than the exercise of tweeting the sinking of the Titanic, because as you read the mundane tick-tock of events from the trial of the officers who beat Rodney King you know that something really big is coming. The idea came from Olsen Ebright, a member of the digital team at NBC4.com.
Shooting the Times places "near USC" is actually five miles away in Baldwin Hills. The LA Times building itself is closer to the campus. For whatever reasons, grokking the inner map of Los Angeles is just not an LAT strength.
The two disturbing corpse photos from Afghanistan that the Los Angeles Times published today were the least gruesome of the 18 that the paper received from a solider in the 82nd Airborne, reporter David Zucchino said.
Jesse Linares, the city editor of Hoy Los Angeles, died on Saturday after a battle with cancer. From El Salvador, he had previously worked in the newsroom at La Opinión.
At the Times website, editor Davan Maharaj and national editor Roger Smith took part in a live chat with readers this morning. "At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions," Maharaj said.
Speaking of Arianna Huffington's news empire, the AOL Patch site for Echo Park has expanded into adjacent Silver Lake as of today.
Talk about a new era at the Pulitzers. The Huffington Post just won its first Pulitzer Prize, in the national reporting category for David Wood's 10-part series on the lives of severely wounded veterans and their families. "We are delighted and deeply honored by the award, which recognizes both David’s exemplary piece of purposeful journalism and HuffPost's commitment to original reporting that affects both the national conversation and the lives of real people," said Arianna Huffington. Politico's political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, who is from Los Angeles, wins too. Click for list of winners.
Sharon Waxman of The Wrap has now read the script that Joe Eszterhas turned in for the Mel Gibson production of a film about the Jewish hero Judah Maccabee. It's very bloody, but true to the story.
The Hollywood publicist choked on a meat sample at the Gelson's in Century City on March 24 and died after two weeks in the hospital, The Wrap reports.
Today's the day that television station KCET has to be out of its historic former movie studio on Sunset Boulevard. Everyone has been told to vacate by 3 p.m., I'm told. The new home is in Burbank in a media building adjacent to NBC.
After readers on Twitter objected to the wording of this tweet, Los Angeles Times editors send out a fix and tinkered with the story headline that fed the post....
Somebody at the KPFK studios on Cahuenga Boulevard downloaded via BitTorrent a copy of "A Beautiful Mind." NBC Universal complained to the internet provider, and you can read the email to the staff that resulted.
The Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley just announced that it will be launching an investigative news channel on YouTube with $800,000 in support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. "One of the goals of this partnership will be to raise the profile and visibility of high impact story telling through video," says CIR executive director Robert J. Rosenthal.
Those plans we told you about last month to swarm the Angels' season opener with a "news mob" turned out just fine.
Los Angeles filmmaker and actress Nicole Kian Sadighi's short film on the killing in Tehran of Neda Agha-Soltan will be shown at the American Pavilion during the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Romney spoils the party for California, more financial trouble for City Hall, Alarcon court case update, how one profiles Sheriff Baca, Jonathan Gold in the green room and more.
The television newsman who pretty much invented the style of the tough interview in the early years of the medium died Saturday at a care facility in Connecticut. His last appearance on "60 Minutes," and on TV, was an interview with Roger Clemens in 2008. We have vintage video as tributes pour in.
Endorsement in DA's race, a meeting for Brad Sherman, parsing the Farmers Field EIR and more.
He accuses Al Gore and Joel Hyatt of reneging on agreements and bungling the television channel. Current calls the allegations "false and malicious."
Some mainstream media websites seem willing to publish just about anything to squeeze a few more clicks out of visitors.
Sheriff's official takes inmate golfing, City Hall moves forward on ban of paper bags, stadium EIR to propose widening of 101 freeway, LAPD radios out for 12 hours and more.
More Assessor shenanigans, pepper spray at Santa Monica College, USC to get Coliseum, City Hall wants to charge you for paper bags, list of Peabody Award winners and big remodeling at the Huntington.
Today's list of finalists for the National Magazine Awards includes two writers for Los Angeles magazine.
I doubt that the Angels paid to have their web ads show up in the LA Times' online gallery of photos from yesterday's mass shooting of college students in Oakland.
George Lewis, the recently retired NBC News correspondent in Los Angeles, reflects on the wars he has covered and a career "running toward the guns."
Warren Olney will host a little radio debate tonight between the Valley congressmen who are running against each other.
Water main breaks in the Fairfax area and why, donor to the Assessor gets a big tax break, changes to high speed rail, Ron Paul coming to UCLA, Al Martinez grieves and museums join the Google Art Project.
Goldberger had been at the New Yorker since leaving the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1997. Is this the end for architecture at the New Yorker?
More investigations of the sheriff's department, can the new Dodgers buyers make a profit?, another award for California Watch, and Toronto looks to LA as a model of transit.
The Sacramento Bee announced the death of the paper's editorial cartoonist on Friday of cancer.
Kimberlng, the art director of Los Angeles magazine from 2000 to 2009, died Thursday of complications from cancer.
A memorial service is set for April 4 at Hollywood Forever for "the coolest news cat in town" and a revered figure at KCAL 9.
Since we've been doing magazine covers that celebrate blending, here's one a reader sends along from 18 months after the Los Angeles riots.
Mayor and the city retirement age, a tunnel for NoHo, Lohan walks away a free woman, the Langer's effect on the Expo Line, what's in the new Slake and a nice feature on downtown photographer-artist Ed Fuentes.
On the night the Dodgers sale was announced, I noted how it was unfortunate that the LA Times website was a little behind the news after baseball writer Bill Shaikin...
Pasadena police zig on Kendrec McDade case, more Dodgers sale reaction and head-scratching, Adelson says Gingrich is at the end of the line, assemblyman quits the Republican Party, "Downton Abbey" ratings are boffo and KCAL's Chuck Hollis has died. Plus more inside.
hort stack for today. I'm out early to take part in an exercise for the city's Survey LA program of identifying historic properties around Los Angeles.
From the Daily News regarding a duplicate Al Martinez column.
The boards of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting and the Bay Area News Project voted today to merge their organizations.
Read the memo about the newspaper's unprecedented mobilization for Albert Pujols' first day on April 6.
This morning's Los Angeles Times quietly returned to using the "By" on story bylines — and went back to the simple datelines that newspapers used for generations before Tribune's innovations guru got confused.
Racial profiling at the LAPD, DiFi is running just quietly, gun-toting lawmaker gets probation, suing over Newhall Ranch, more waste and possibly worse in the sheriff's aero division, and more.
Between this month's 
Fun photo of Ed Asner with city room staffers circa 1980 — and plans for a big reunion of Daily News alumni.
David Haldane, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, doesn't blame you for wondering: he's a 63-year-old divorcee who had an affair, and she's 33.
Brown's tax plan has the lead, Garcetti's toughness issue, Orlov's Tipoff, new 9/11 book by ex-LA Times reporters, the old Mary Pickford studios in West Hollywood endangered and chatting with...
Ann Brenoff, a senior writer at the Huffington Post, recounts the day three years ago when she was tapped on the shoulder to be laid off as the Hot Property...
Los Angeles magazine's cover variations on mixed-race Angelenos may not be so original.
A reader emails to point out a few errors in the web slide show that goes with a photo essay by Lise Sarfati on women in Hollywood, in Sunday's New...
David Poland of Movie City News takes off from the news that Variety is for sale to put in a bit of jaded perspective the four media outlets he says function as the closest thing Hollywood has to trade publications.
The state capital reporter and blogger for KQED in San Francisco (and by extension for other public radio stations around California) is going to be the political editor for Sacramento's ABC-TV affiliate.
"I have every confidence that under new ownership, Variety will continue to thrive, innovate and provide fantastic insight into the sector," says Variety President Neil Stiles.
Today the station named Melanie Sill, former editor of the Sacramento Bee, as executive editor.
Short jokes at the Herb Wesson roast, Jackie Robinson's history in Sanford, Kim Kardashian gets flour-bombed, and more.
Festival of Books schedule, Daily News hiring, City of Malibu statement on restaurant death and more.
Frank Bruni is the latest prominent food critic to reveal that he has been diagnosed with the painful disease called gout.
After this week's layoffs, the group started in 2008 has grown to 153 members.
LAFD ordered to give the info, Yaroslavsky's deadline, Maxine Waters' nepotism, another young Kennedy comes through town, fracking in Inglewood and more.
James O'Shea, whose short span as editor of the Los Angeles Times bridged the eras of Dean Baquet and Russ Stanton, writes in a piece for Nieman Reports that if he had it to do over, he would totally reorganize the paper's news-gathering.
Baca's jails and LAFD response stats, Game Change's Steve Schmidt, remembering the old LA Weekly, LA Times' first female news reporter, Cathy Seipp and more.
Craig Turner confirms that he stepped forward for a buyout and will be retiring from the Los Angeles Times.
The involuntary layoffs in the Los Angeles Times newsroom that began last night are rolling through the ranks today, falling hardest on the features floor downstairs from the main newsroom.
An ambulance for Porter Ranch, hating the paper bag ban idea, LAUSD hires ex-TV reporter to run social media, New York Times cuts back on free articles, a possible return of McDonnell/Douglas the radio show, and more.
Longtime health writer Shari Roan gets a call at home to tell her she's out, plus Laurie Ochoa joins The Hollywood Reporter and Slate's Culture Gabfest is in town. And more.
Topics included the LA Times, the LA Weekly, Jonathan Gold and more.
Media and politics notes now that my Internet is working again, plus a couple of radio programming notes.
The Daily News columnist who spent decades at the Los Angeles Times and writing books and TV scripts is being celebrated in an exhibit of his work it the West Hall of the Huntington Library.
California primary could matter for the Republican nomination, redistricting vote likely today, revisiting the Spring Street green lane again, weatherman Kyle Hunter alleges job discrimination, California Watch wins another honor and Tom Hoffarth explains why he wrote about that bogus Dodgers bidder.
KPCC has posted a form that makes it easy for listeners to confidentially submit their recollections of the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King in Lake View Terrace.
DA's race field set, no answers in Mitrice Richardson death case, sheriff's staffers are blocked from seeing Witness LA blog, 70,000 stop sign tickets from those cameras in the mountains, plus dependency court on "SoCal Connected" and more.
Kai Ryssdal opened Wednesday's "Marketplace" from American Public Media with a stunning personal announcement — he was leaving as host of the show.
Only the LA Weekly's Gene Maddaus demanded proof, called people on their bluffs and came up with a heck of story.
Villaraigosa insulted at state Capitol, fire chief does the mea culpa, doomsday budget at LAUSD, KTLA can't say if John and Ken are off the air, the prisoner who became an expert on hieroglyphics, and more notes.
After a decade of retreat, the Times' California editor announces today the paper's "reoccupation of Orange County."
More backlash to bad LAFD response data, downtown lobbyist types raise money for Janice Hahn, GOP's Jon Fleischman featured, a "downtown" condo that isn't, NBC 4's annoying news crawl during "SNL" and the NYT does Long Beach State.
KPCC's billboard might get more views each hour than the current iteration of KPFK gets listeners, based on these ratings numbers for local public radio.
He was fired for a satirical cartoon skewering Brentwood's white residents that AOL Patch editors deemed "blatantly racist."
ImpreMedia has agreed to a strategic partnership with US Hispanic Media Inc., a subsidiary of Argentina’s S.A. La Nación, which will become the strategic and controlling shareholder of the company.
Doonesbury's abortion strips, Romney's California challenge, McCourt and the LA Marathon, and more for a Monday.
What you need to know to see the LACMA boulder arrive early Saturday morning, but plus more notes.
Ethics Commission raises LA campaign limits, LAUSD district redrawing, a "Desperate Housewives" courtroom spoiler and more.
Koreatown vs Wesson, Shimon Peres in town, a local media figure stays busy after retirement, who's playing Cesar Chavez in the movie and palm tree rustlers on the freeway.
This came in yesterday, trying to capitalize on the Rush Limbaugh controversy.
High speed rail's costs soar again, how Trutanich is cheating after-school kids, Garcetti as hipster and Latino, more problems for Emmis, another correction on the Hollywood sound studio that burned — and a way to get your fiction judged by Michael Connelly and Denise Hamilton.
Arrests in Sacramento, Schwarzenegger fined, a comment on food writing, Fox 11 hires, another studio musician dies and more.
Larry Mantle explains on his blog that KPPC suffered a complete crash of its digital audio system this morning.
A page one profile on Sunday featured an advertiser whose son is married to the daughter of the paper's new owner.
When Jonathan Gold returns to the Los Angeles Times this month, he will be both food critic and columnist.
Raising money for marriage equality, Rush Limbaugh, Riordan and Trutanich, politics and media notes and more.
Mickey Kaus, a Democrat who was one of right-wing web mogul Andrew Breitbart's friends from across the ideological aisle, writes at the Daily Caller that Breitbart always believed the charges...
Rebecca Schoenkopf, the former editor of the CityBeat weekly in Los Angeles and a longtime blogger as Commie Girl (as well as other journalistic pursuits) is the new editor of Wonkette
Read the memo: Channel 4's news chief is headed back east.
Herman Cain and Pee Wee Herman are on the cover of the Jewish Journal's spoof cover for Purim this year.
Andrew Breitbart was deeply engaged on a mystery project that would mark "a transition into a different kind of journalism," his chief deputy tells the LA Weekly.
Albert Abrams surrenders to FBI, redistricting moves forward, John and Ken not on KTLA, yet another new section from the Huffington Post and more.
Andrew Breitbart's websites announced thus morning that the conservative commentator and founder of a number of news and political websites died overnight of natural causes.
Yvette Cabrera, voted last year's best OC columnist by the Orange County Press Club, was laid off today by the Register, according to the Latino Journalists of California, where she is the president.
Susannah Rosenblatt, a Los Angeles Times staff writer for five years until 2009 (part of that time on the county beat) who is now living inside the Beltway, will appear on "Jeopardy" on Thursday night.
The last words of the Los Angeles-raised reporter for the Wall Street Journal, before he was murdered by his captors in Pakistan in 2002, were "I am Jewish."
Police Commission modifies impounds for unlicensed drivers, most support ever for gay marriage, new proposal to make abortion more widely available, more bike lanes coming in county, fewer fees to visit the forest and the end of Studio City's Sushi Nozawa.
Dogs in restaurants, that tragic after-school fight in Long Beach, USC's Selden Ring Award and more.
Mary Melton, the editor of Los Angeles magazine, will add the title of editorial director for parent Emmis Publishing a year from now on April 1, 2013.
Villaraigosa's pre-Oscar party, the political Chacons of southheast LA county, state fish and game leader bags a mountain lion, waiting for layoffs at the LA Times, Kobe breaks his nose plus a selection of good reads from the weekend.
The Times also kills its standalone Food, Health and Home sections and puts that content together in a new Saturday section.
KCRW music director Jason Bentley introduces The Cue, a channel that sounds like it will be used to curate videos from around the web.
Plus the comments from CBS' Lara Logan.
I've been meaning for a few days to post this. The fired editor of the Culver City News tells all and reveals how the local free weekly works. Scott Bridges...
The Florida newscasters don't seem cool under pressure as much as....oblivious? Not a bad line by the in-studio anchor about high gas prices.
Noguez denies wrongdoing, Cedillo complains about being redistricted out of his home, LA Weekly vs. Trutanich, new media people hires in the mayor's press office, EsoWon Books moves and more.
A state Court of Appeal has affirmed an arbitrator's ruling that Wendy McCaw owes former News-Press editor Jerry Roberts $900,000 for all the crap she has put him through.
Jonathan Gold's new job at the LA Times includes front page pieces on culture — while the LA Weekly also loses Elina Shatkin to Los Angeles Magazine.
Marie Colvin of the U.K. Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik have been killed while reporting in Homs, Syria. From a statement by John Witherow, editor of The...
Berman-Sherman debate coverage, Bernard Parks on redistricting maps, Villaraigosa now an Obama co-chair, Steve Lopez remembers his father and more.
The final episode of "Downton Abbey" season two on Sunday night attracted a 2.3 rating and a 4 share in the Los Angeles market, ranking ahead of the programming on...
The headline meant to suggest that Kobe Bryant's divorce is going ahead despite the appearances of a public Valentine's Day kiss.
Editor Maria Streshinky explains the Santa Barbara-based magazine's evolving mission.
Baca chided by Times, county politics, Chevron politics in El Segundo, Magic Johnson's new network, another defection from Village Voice Media and the success of "Grammar Girl" plus more.
The entreaties from Village Voice Media executive Mike Lacey didn't work. LA Weekly editor Sarah Fenske posts on the LA Weekly website.
A food blogger for the Village Voice misread our latest post on Jonathan Gold and wished Gold the best of success at the LA Times, saying that LA Observed confirmed the move. Except, of course, we didn't.
Stephen Colbert returns, the WGA honors "Midnight in Paris" and "The Descendants," LA Times moves, Will Lewis reups for another term as president of the LA Press Club, and more media notes.
California Watch, the Bay Area-based non-profit, only started up in 2009, but it employs the largest investigative team of any journalism operation in the state and keeps spinning out noteworthy investigations.
Los Angeles Times watcher Patrick Frey, who blogs as Patterico, has been waiting years for America's most-quoted so-called "man on the street" to finally break into the pages of his favorite (not) newspaper.
Chicago News Cooperative, an online alternative to the Tribune and Sun-Times run by former Los Angeles Times editor Jim O'Shea, will shut down later this month.
Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Patrick J. McDonnell tells a horrific story in his online tribute to the New York Times' Anthony Shadid.
The popular and respected food writer Jonathan Gold was spotted shaking hands in the Los Angeles Times building yesterday. The buzz is that he will rejoin the paper shortly after his upcoming Gold Standard tasting event, but the Weekly would like to keep him.
Xi Jinping's day in LA, Herb Wesson politicizes the City Council, Richard Alarcon's bad week, why Stephen Colbert took off, the LAPL takes to Pinterest and remembering the heyday of Gold's Gym in Venice.
KFI said today it is suspending the popular talk show pair "for making insensitive and inappropriate comments about the late Whitney Houston." They called her a "crack ho."
Interesting remarks by Hollywood Reporter editorial director Janice Min at Mediabistro via Fishbowl LA.
Jack Klunder, the publisher of the Daily News, Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram, has just been promoted to president of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.
Obama moves on to OC, China's Xi Jinping arrives, redistricting panel redraws council districts again, Rep. Laura Richardson in hot water again, and Jim Ladd is back on the air — again.
Jeffrey Kaye worked at the San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Herald Examiner and The Hollywood Reporter, and wrote for TV Guide and the Los Angeles Times.
Cold rain expected, an audit of Animal Services, Frisbee rules to back for rewrite, redistricting gets testy, Villaraigosa on chairing the Democratic convention, and a disabled placard stunt with Steve Lopez and Dennis Zine.
Nonprofit funds vanish, Whitney Houston goes home to Newark, FPPC softens oversight of candidates, Dems endorse Janice Hahn, Bernard Parks comes back from surgery and blogging Dudamel's trip to Venezuela.
The Times wants two reporters to cover the Vietnamese and Korean communities in the West, while KPCC is still advertising for a co-host of the soon-to-be Latinoized Madeleine Brand show.
The Channel 4 anchor was in Philly pursuing her lawsuit against CBS and a former co-anchor who snooped in her email. She claims he damaged her career, though the backstory includes plenty of signs that Lane may have helped her own downfall.
Why LAUSD paid Mark Berndt to go away, dangerous stalker escapes from mental hospital, Pete Schabarum says term limits has missed the mark, sheriff watchers speculate on a shakeup and debating whether Carmen Trutanich is indeed a liar.
Superintendent John Deasy and UTLA president Warren Fletcher will be on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC this afternoon.
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told KPCC that a student's account of Miramonte Elementary School suspect Mark Berndt being helped by another teacher was fabricated and not true.
Justice Kennedy and Prop. 8, Speaker Perez and tuition, Grammy party gets into Getty House, no city for East Los Angeles, Lana Del Rey draws a big crowd in Hollywood and more.
Former L.A. Times reporter Anne-Marie O'Connor's book on the Adele Bloch-Bauer painting lands, Louise Roug returns from Denmark, paidContent sells, Sam Rubin reups plus a name for Aaron Sorkin's HBO newsroom and more.
Jerry Brown's pardons, DWP's high pay, renaming City Hall East, LAT's Korea reporter headed for Las Vegas, a new book and more.
The best hope for newspapers online is a temporary, narrow anti-trust exemption to let publishers collude on a web pay wall, says a former reporter now at UCLA Law School.
Awaiting the Prop. 8 ruling, Brown takes a hit, Pete Wilson joins Romney, helicopter traffic reporter laid off, getting the burrito story wrong and a blogger takes on Wikipedia.
Technical problems at parent Tribune Company, staffers say on Twitter. White screen at LA Times.com, nearly so at Channel 5.
Rick Caruso leaves the Republican Party, Jim Newton goes to a Supes meeting, city reduces Occupy LA damage bill, Sacramento Bee fires its altering photographer, Miramonte Elementary closes for two days plus more.
Artillery founder Tulsa Kinney has posted her interview in the magazine with Mike Kelley, possibly the last interview with the artist who apparently killed himself at home in South Pasadena earlier this week.
AEG to unveil convention center plans, Trutanich to sue Northern Trust, Larry Mantle to talk about Westside vs Eastside, "Marketplace" retracts plus a job opening at AP Los Angeles.
The restored "Final Curtain" screened to an appreciative audience last month at Slamdance, where the two men got to talk about Wood.
Both sides are claiming victory in a Los Angeles civil trial that was noteworthy because the judge said reporters could not cover the case because of sensitive income tax information to be discussed.
Who attended the First Lady's fundraiser last night, Steve Lopez on high speed rail, the Coliseum's bags of cash, opening juvenile court to the media and reopening the Pulitzers deadline. Plus Susan G. Komen drops Planned Parenthood.
In the last presidential election, Tribune Company boss Sam Zell's most prominent statement about politics — other than "it's unAmerican not to like pussy" — was that his preferred candidate would be "anybody but Clinton."
The George Polk Program at Long Island University wants to help experienced journalists finish that investigative project that's crying out to be done. Grants are expected to range from $2,500 to $10,000.
Fired teacher arrested for lewd conduct on 23 children, Michelle Obama comes to town, a redevelopment agencies explainer, film critics who lost their cars to the Hollywood arsonist get some wheels, Ed Padgett talks about LAT firing, and more.
In the long legal fight over Sam Zell's dubious use of employee funds to acquire control of Tribune, the good guys have won, more or less.
Mister Los Angeles, getting ready for his 63rd season in the Dodgers press box, is the local sports broadcasters' choice for best radio play by play. Oh, you think?
That's $212.9 million in professionals' fees since Sam Zell's Tribune Company slipped into bankruptcy court in 2008, plus another $17.8 million in lawyers’ expenses.
KCET's weekly news show "SoCal Connected" will receive this year's Public Service Award from the Los Angeles Press Club for exposing "lavish and out of control spending at the Los Angeles Housing Authority.
SAG Awards winners, Gov. Brown defends high-speed rail, Mayor Villaraigosa on CNN and at USC, a question for Carmen Trutanich, who runs the LAPD and a detective goes on trial for an old murder.
Foo Fighters for Obamajam, Wesson punishes City Council rivals and an LAPD detective arrested, plus more.
San Fernando ticket controversy, James Franco upsets USC and more
Since taking over as editor of Los Angeles in 2009, Mary Melton has "continued to push the publication beyond its former Westside comfort zone into the far corners of our megalopolis," says The Frying Pan News, the city and politics website from the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy.
Geraldine Baum's farewell note to the Times newsroom reminds you what a collegial family a newspaper is to its inhabitants
News, politics and media notes plus a melting Prius
After 42 years (28 of them in Los Angeles), George Lewis' last day at work at NBC was today, not yesterday.
Former Orange County Register reporter Thanhha Lai "spent 15 years grinding away at a sprawling novel she could never quite get right. So, five years ago, she turned her creative energies to a verse novel about a single year in her childhood as a Vietnamese émigré."
Fighting over LA turf in redistricting, a post-election chat with Joe Buscaino, Steve Lopez stakes out disabled placard cheaters, LAPD will search the Calabasas landfill for gun and tough words for Frank McCourt from ex-Dodgers exec.
It's unclear whether this was in the works when Russ Stanton stepped down as editor of the Los Angeles Times in December.
George Lewis, the venerable NBC News correspondent in Los Angeles, is hanging up his microphone on January 31. What's he doing today, on his last day in the field? Covering the Oscar nominations.
"It's been 40 years since I took a vow of poverty and became a newspaperman," Dennis McCarthy writes in his column announcing he will retire from the Daily News on January 31.
Eleven Oscar nomoinations for "Hugo," nine best picture candidates, Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. goes to trial with Dick Clark, Westfield will serve food at LAX, Cadiz water project is back, an Occupy protester gets jail for hitting cops, plus the New York Times moves Hancock Park to "downtown Los Angeles."
The board of directors of the Los Angeles Press Club selected CBS2/KCAL9 investigative reporter David Goldstein for this year's Joseph M. Quinn Memorial Award for journalistic achievement and distinction.
A fee dispute between the wealthy widow of sub-prime mortgage magnate Roland Arnall and her former tax attorney has gone to a civil jury trial in Los Angeles. That's not...
Those of you who remember Dean E. Murphy from his days reporting around town for the Los Angeles Times might want to take note of the piece he has in the Modern Love column in Sunday's New York Times.
Sherman wins a round against Berman, what sets the two congressmen apart besides their backers, Jim Newton on Herb Wesson, Channel 4 rebrands news, and more.
Channel 4 swept the best TV newscast awards at Saturday night's Golden Mikes, and KPCC picked up nine trophies in the radio categories.
Curt Sandoval of Channel 7 tops Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth's annual list of the top 10 sports anchors and reporters on Los angeles television. A local female reporter leads his bottom ten list.
The CBS 2 and KCAL duopoly launch new morning news shows this weekend with Serene Branson and Kaj Goldberg anchoring.
Cheech Marin will be the first guest on the new Gerald Rivera show that debuts Monday at 10 a.m.
The longtime Business Week correspondent in Hollywood is leaving Bloomberg BusinessWeek to be the Los Angeles bureau chief for Reuters.
If he didn’t work at The Economist, Andreas Kluth "would still be precisely the type of cosmopolitan his magazine would want as a reader," Andrés Martinez writes for Zócalo Public Square.
Rick Perry out, Jerry Brown at City Hall, Antonio Villaraigosa at breakfast in Washington, a new radio talk show and Jonathan Gold's eulogy to Angeli.
Arianna Huffington and AOL chairman Tim Armstrong have been dropping hints about the Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN.
From the Daily Breeze, sent in by a reader. And is there a single media outlet in Los Angeles that hasn't headlined, or written into the news lede, the...
Wikipedia and other sites go dark, Brown coming to town after speech, Alarcons in court, Hahn on Buscaino's election and more, including a book sale by the original MTV veejays.
The Sacramento-oriented weekly published by the York family of Malibu announced today that Thursday's ink-on-paper edition will be the last. The publication will continue on the web.
Berman raising money fast, Brown's State of the State coming, Yaroslavsky gets exasperating, plus HuffPo, NPR's Alex Kellogg and a girls' basketball team on the Eastside.
Good on Cheryll Devall of KPCC for working up a radio piece on today's 70th anniversary of the day that Hollywood comic actress Carole Lombard died in a plane crash. Famously married to Clark Gable, Lombard was honored by FDR as the first American woman to die in the line of duty during World War II.
Pioneering and wildly popular Los Angeles-based blog Boing Boing will take down all content temporarily on Wednesday, Jan. 18 to protest the proposed Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act pending in Congress.
Playboy Enterprises, founded in Chicago by Hugh Hefner in 1953, has been slowly moving west.
Just to close the circle in a story we reported earlier.
It seems the web people at the L.A. Times forgot that certain tags pop up when a mouse rolls over a photo on the paper's site.
High speed rail, impounding the cars of unlicensed drivers, a Wendy Greuel audit, growth at the Natural History Museum and more.
Student murdered in the Valley, City Hall park plans, making fun of TV critics, Olivia Munn gets naked, interviewing with Arianna Huffington, the KKK's membership roster in OC and more.
Judge OK's Dodgers deals, LAUSD may propose parcel tax, City Hall faces life without the CRA, a new editor for Huffington Post and more.
The Wrap just announced it has created the position of Executive Editor and filled it with Lisa Fung, most recently the online editor for arts and entertainment at the Los Angeles Times website.
Politics, media and more.
The reigning Mister Los Angeles will be the subject of the last bobblehead giveaway of the coming season at Dodger Stadium.
Stodder, you may recall, reported to federal prison authorities last February to serve a term for his part in the Fleishman-Hillard episode that roiled City Hall a few years ago.
Those wacky Burkharts, Chargers to stay in San Diego, LA's potholes in the NYT, arguing Proposition 13 and more.
Read Nikki Finke's note to Variety executives, including this line: "When is Variety going to stop stealing Deadline's scoops without any credit?"
Being attacked these days isn’t the result of saying something badly, "it’s the result of saying anything at all," Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Meghan Daum writes in a long essay on the instant commentary (and abuse) culture so prevalent online, including and perhaps especially at LATImes.com.
'Nuff said. Look at the photo.
Berman and Sherman, John and Ken, Buscaino and Furutani, and more.
They had a cake yesterday at the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press for special correspondent Linda Deutsch.
The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens doesn't honor very many L.A. journalists with an exhibition, so it's notable that they will mount a show for Al Martinez this spring.
Burkhart charged, heat records, lawmakers return to Sacramento, endorsements in the 15th council district and the Huffington Post moves into science now.
Charles McNulty's year-end lookbacks "demonstrated anew [the paper's] curiously constricted view of the importance of the other LAT — LA theater."
Steve Chiotakis has host "Marketplace Morning Report" since 2008. He will be the afternoon news anchor during "All Things Considered."
Joe Torre joins Caruso bid for Dodgers, Wesson wields the gavel, Jan Perry as mayoral candidate, more on the deputy who nabbed the arson suspect, MTV caves to Movie Smackdown and an auxiliary bishop admits fathering two children.
Cartoonist and satirist Lalo Alcaraz has relaunched Pocho, his news y satire site, to target Latinos nationwide. Bylines include Barney Asada (get it?) and posts from Alcaraz, including his review of 2011 in cartoons.
Villaraigosa's fiscal health game, LAWA looking for PR help, Dukakis jumps into Sherman-Berman, the Union-Tribune rebrands in San Diego and an L.A. journalist writes about the death of his brother over the holidays. Plus it's caucus day in Iowa.
Senior communities are being changed from the inside by aging baby boomers. Headline for the Orange Coast magazine cover story: "Sexagenarians, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll."
Twenty two years after the Herald Examiner folded, its final edition papers over a new pizzeria.
The guys at the KTLA Morning News had some fun the other day making new intern Irene bring them coffee on the air. Then anchor Megan Henderson stepped in.
The Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations (and the Anthony Weiner frolics some months earlier) provide fresh material for the January profile.
ProPublica landed a major California investigation this week, using internal memos to show how the Democrats secretly and very successfully manipulated the new congressional district lines.
Heikes is the former LA weekly editor. Read the memo on the new Sacto reporter.
On this morning's show, the weatherman and his colleagues made light of him storming off a live camera the other day.
Neil Saavedra, the KFI/AM 640 marketing director, will host the new Saturday afternoon show that's due to start Jan. 7.
A roundup for a holiday week.
Video: KTLA's morning weatherman stalks off camera after his segment is cut.
He can't write yet about the reason, but it came as a surprise, Padgett says.
Patrick O'Connor posts on his blog that "This week's cartoon is my last print cartoon for the LA Weekly. I've been on staff since January of 2009 and it's been...
he Los Angeles Times has tapped Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist David Horsey to revamp the Top of the Ticket politics blog with cartoons and commentary.
Dan Walters, the venerable political presence in Sacramento, is the latest holdout to fall.
City Council tensions, Bay Area's Warren Hellman dies, giving credit to Dalton Trumbo and celebrating Esther MCCoy, plus more.
I can't imagine that Channel 2 weathercaster Jackie Johnson could be too happy at how the station's website arranges its photo galleries.
The Levitated Mass boulder is still in Riverside County, despite what Los Angeles magazine says.
Two local Hamlets remain from the chain that made its mark in part by hiring African Americans in visible positions when many L.A. restaurants didn't.
Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was on stage in 1986 when KCRW held its first live music show ever, at the Olympic Auditorium.
The posting for a new co-host to work with Madeleine Brand has reached Journalism Jobs, and it's a little more svelte than the original detailed posting we told you about...
The station's longtime producer, voice and spokeswoman has a note on the KCRW members blog.
Pomona Freeway stays closed, State Senate pays for sexual claim against Rod Wright, Villaraigosa defends Asia trip, Hahn won't endorse and another housing authority report tonight on "SoCal Connected."
The author and Vanity Fair contributing editor has died of cancer at a hospital in Houston, the magazine announced.
The note is from Marcia Parker, West Coast Editorial Director for AOL's Patch websites.
60 freeway stays closed into weekend, Laura Chick endorses Buscaino, Gerald Rivera coming to L.A. talk radio, the Kinde Durkee story, Golden Globe nominations and the owner of Junior's Deli dies — plus more.
Time's Person of the Year cover was designed by Shepard Fairey from a Ted Soqui photograph of an Occupy LA protester in Downtown.
LAUSD cuts, animal shelter tech fired, a 2006 view of Herb Wesson, the Christian film John Atterberry was working on, a Lenin bust on La Brea and more.
In its story tonight about editor Russ Stanton stepping down, the Los Angeles Times introduces in the fourth paragraph the idea that the "mutual decision" to leave comes amid dissension over more newsroom cuts. Did the axe man lose his stomach for more cuts?
Shock and dismay in the Burbank newsroom over News Director Vicky Burns deciding to let reporter and sometime-anchor Jennifer Bjorklund go.
More Housing Authority, poll says Brown looks good on taxes, Brokaw and Olney to be feted, and more.
Major League Baseball and its partner association of sportswriters have become the first major sport to issue dress guidelines for the media working games. It applies to camera people and...
In an Occupy video of the Nov. 30 LAPD raid outside City Hall, City News Service reporter Calvin Milam is observed being thrown to the ground and arrested after he crosses (outbound) through the police skirmish line.
Good deed by music writer Kevin Bronson, Ridley-Thomas responds to Times, Mike Downey has an idea for the Dodgers, Steve Lopez writes on his father's deteriorating choices and Bill Moyers returns to KCET
The L.A. Film Critics Association is tweeting out the news from their annual vote.
The longtime talk radio host takes over mornings from Peter Tilden, paired with Terri-Rae Elmer, until this week a fixture at KFI.
Actually, it's the pictorial spread the former actress did for Playboy. Here's one somewhat safe for work example.
Anyone who has spent much time around new media and blogs in the past ten years, especially in Los Angeles, has read or heard Xeni Jardin.
Even the janitors at the New York Post and NY Daily News are probably having a good laugh about La-La-Land and the "citizen journalism" power of Twitter and cellphone cameras.
Award-winning site lays off four, cuts budget and refocuses the core mission.
Prop. 8, Kinde Durkee, Walmart pepper spray, Occupy LA arrestee and more.
Reporter Mona Shadia, who was born in Egypt, has been assigned to write a weekly column about living as a Muslim-American in Orange County for the three Times Community News papers.
Edison says the power is on, more Housing Authority on KCET, who really runs the jails, Romney leaves town with $1 million, Joan Didion on "Bookworm" and more.
The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will honor these local journalists.
Mayor chooses distance from Housing Authority scandal, DWP approves water rate increase, more politics and media notes, plus the most powerful images of 2011.
Artist Gaelan Kelly draws what public radio reporters and hosts look like in his head, based on their voices.
Voters want a do-over on high speed rail, DWP board takes up rate hike, a different Villaraigosa joins the Young Democrats, naming a Navy ship after Cesar Chavez and more.
In exchange for a special early viewing of David Fincher's "Girl With a Dragon Tattoo," David Denby and other members of the New York Film Critics Circle agreed to embargo any reviews.
Brown's poll numbers, $1 million-plus for Rudy Montiel, JIm Newton calls for a raise in DWP rates, and Giuliana Rancic goes for the double mastectomy.
Bill Fulton, a well-known writer on California affairs and the nitty gritty of urban planning before and since he became an elected official in Ventura, is moving away largely because he is losing his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa.
Today, like every other day this year, artist Erik Shveima will interpret what he sees on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and post his drawing on his blog.
Lumachi died early Saturday in a car accident in Florida, where he was attending a conference in St. Petersburg.
Steve Soboroff shared a photo after last week's news about the e-book of "Fahrenheit 451." Plus: a typewriter documentary?
Media and politics notes, plus a Hollywood obituary and more.
San Gabriel Valley catches a break from winds, Occupy LA arrestees still in jail, Villaraigosa headed to Asia and Cuomo coming to town, plus more.
Winds close schools and more, Baca was told of jail abuse but did nothing, Occupy LA aftermath and more.
"I'm so proud," she told co-host Steve Edwards during the live feed of the ceremony on "Good Day L.A."
High winds, Westwood loses four movie screens, an old local pol dies and more.
Gov. Brown on pepper spray, mayor tested by Occupy LA, Chief Beck tweets, blaming the tar pits and more.
KPCC's head office has wanted to do something with a Latino flavor for awhile. Read the job posting.
Jim Romenesko contacted Jasna Hodzic after her photo of campus police Lt. John Pike using pepper spray on passive students hit the web.
Arellano moves up from managing editor after the resignation, effective Dec. 2, of editor Ted Kissell.
Villaraigosa hits the airwaves, somebody is polling on Rick Caruso, Arianna Huffington interviews Scarlett Johannson and more.
Tom Petruno, the longtime markets columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said back in September that he would be leaving the paper right around now to try out some other pursuits.
The co-host of the Korean-language Prime News on Los Angeles-area TV channel LA 18 was found dead in her Koreatown apartment last Monday after not reporting to work.
Newsman-turned-artist Bill Lagattuta's latest project appears to be photographs behind the scenes of Channel 2 anchor Kent Shocknek at work.
The mayor's office has put out the call for a 4 p.m. media op in his 3rd floor conference room "regarding Occupy LA and the closure of City Hall Park."
"I'd like to be in a scene with Yoda! Or Princess Leia for god's sake!!! "
Possible end days for Occupy L.A., City Hall PR deal collapses, foreclosed homes become parks, plus politics and book notes.
City offers Occupy LA a deal, that City Hall PR contract gets messy, a new dance company from Benjamin Millipied, new board members at the Press Club and Father Dollar Bill dies.
Dick Adler, who used to write the cheeky Page Two feature at the old Herald Examiner, and more recently a book reviewer and blogger, died on Nov. 11.
UC president decries pepper spraying, mayoral candidates unsettling to watch, Beck's big test, and Wesson's too.
Jim Romenesko's first post at the new website is titled "How I ended up leaving Poynter."
The national focus of the Occupy activities has suddenly become the University of California at Davis, showing the massive power (once again) of YouTube to capture relatively unfiltered events and disseminate them widely to great effect.
Lowering expectations on Natalie Wood case, tearing down the 6th Street bridge, media notes and a local sports death.
More on Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, latest on Occupy, Trutanich endorses Buscaino, and the National Entertainment Journalism awards.
Protesters blocking Figueroa St. this morning, Beck mellow on Occupy L.A. camp, more state budget cuts coming, court to rule on Prop. 8, Kovacik sues over Polo Lounge attack and more.
The L.A. Press Club will bestow its President's Award on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein next June, almost on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in they covered as Washington Post reporters.
Lefty icon Paul Krassner and conservative culture warrior Andrew Breitbart actually got together by mutual assent to discuss their respective world views.
Reporters, editors and other staffers at the Daily News offices in the Valley have been told to stop feeding the wildlife.
Coverage of the police crackdown on Occupy Wall Street protest and the media who cover the scene (and tried to cover the arrests) has spurred new discussion of one of the trickier questions posed by new media.
Simon did unpaid work for Texas Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign for awhile. Plus: Tina Dupuy on Occupy.
Villaraigosa to make "major address," City Council reneges on South L.A. park, killing the City Hall lawn is a good thing, KOST-FM goes holiday and a Munchkin dies.
It's dining editor Pete Wells, according to an internal announcement at the New York Times.
LAPD chief Charlie Beck said Tuesday that he expects long negotiations today with Occupy L.A. on a timeline for protesters to leave the camp outside City Hall.
Mayor wants to trim trees too, the dangers of ignoring Mexico, Chelsea Clinton, Teresa Hughes and The Wave goes Christmas.
The recently installed CEO of Dean Singleton's MediaNews chain of newspapers isn't shy about saying that his papers — a group that takes in the Daily News, Daily Breeze and a bunch of other smaller papers in SoCal and NorCal, including the San Jose Mercury — will be changing.
On Nov. 5, ESPN Senior VP Joan Lynch woke up in her home to find a front tire of her vehicle slashed. This is notable for two reasons.
During today's "To The Point" on KCRW and across the country, host Warren Olney read a comment regarding the controversy over his Friday show.
Punishing deputies with jail duty, Stevie Wonder drops in at Royce Hall, USC enrolls most foreign students and more.
The Florida paper bills this weekend's package, The Money Machine, as its latest of 13 major investigative stories about the Church of Scientology since June 2009.
The Atlantic Wire picked up my post from last night remembering — with photographic evidence! — the time when Mark Willes commissioned a sniff test comparing the smell of his L.A. Times with other papers.
For reasons that aren't really clear, Jim Romenesko's bosses at the Poynter Institute have put up a long post wringing their hands about as if they just discovered some issue with the way Romenesko has posted for them through the years.
The news site has been a welcome addition from day one, reporting on City Hall moves and politics without rants, hidden agendas or anonymous comments.
Change at the top at county jail, Villaraiosa wants to borrow Measure R funds, what Occupy LA plans for Friday, Kirsten Dunst, Tyler Shields and the Getty acquires some photos.
Ex-LAT staffer Laurie Winer reviews Jim O'Shea's book and recounts the Sam Zell years in a piece titled "Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead." Subtitle: On the Dismantling of a Once Great Newspaper.
Leaked poll in the mayor's race, costs of Occupy LA mount, Valley Democrats endorse Sherman over Berman, Metro's blogger calls for Dodger Stadium to move Downtown, and more.
Readers of the LAT's Fabulous Forum sports blog voted Sandy Koufax the greatest figure in Los Angeles sports history.
La Opinión political columnist Pilar Marrero has reactivated her blog with a post about Latino immigrants as a sleeping giant in U.S. politics.
Mayor appeals to car dealers, Madeline Janis steps down, Yaroslavsky takes a ride, Playboy moves back to Beverly Hills, Kirk Honeycutt out at THR and more.
Baca (and Lohan) and the jails, Durkee and the money, Jim Ladd gets to say goodbye, UCLA warns patients and more.
CBS News announced that Rooney died Friday night in a hospital in New York City of complications following minor surgery.
When Daily News editor Carolina Garcia was named editor over the Daily Breeze and Press-Telegram as well, it seemed pretty clear more moves were coming. Now they have come.
Jan Perry leaves council leadership post, ethics inquiry for Rep. Laura Richardson, "Funny Girl" postponed, "Twilight" star does a good thing and more.
O'Malley and other possible Dodger buyers, Occupy Oakland, Jerry Brown shuts down transparency website, more Gensler fallout, Walter Mosley's L.A. childhood, Google opens in Venice and more.
Lindsay Lohan, Guy Crowder, John Cage, Edward Headington and more.
Durazo tells City Hall that Occupy LA should stay, Occupy Oakland wants a general strike, Freedom sells its TV stations, finalists for entertainment journalist of the year and much, much more.
The daily circulation of the printed Los Angeles Times was 572,998 in the latest audited numbers released today. It used to be well over a million, at the paper's peak.
High speed rail even more costly, legal opinion says some campaign donations can be given twice, a warning about Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, members of the jails commission and more.
Former Press-Telegram executive editor has died, plus more news items.
Baca's staff warned of jail brutality, Occupy LA and SFV, a new editor for Company Town, pressure on Village Voice Media over sex ads, plus more.
The Los Angeles novelist and sister of Steve Jobs breaks her media silence on his death.
Making ready for the coming week, with Jim Ladd, Zev Yaroslavsky, Steve Lopez, Dawn Hudson and more.
James Rainey will no longer write a media column for the Los Angeles Times, but will continue to cover the media as a reporter for the arts and entertainment desk. Read the memo.
"Yes, a great game and never mind the early stuff," says the New Yorker writer.
Frank Buckley of Channel 5 says his idea for an international thriller called "Portofino" is being made by JC Chandor, the director of "Margin Call."
The Pasadena Star-News has posted two disturbing videos of children receiving "treatment" at a so-called boot camp in Pasadena.
Brown's pension reform, John & Ken at Occupy L.A., Occupy SFV is next, the City Maven Radio Hour and more.
USC Annenberg's Center for Health Reporting has partnered with eight ethnic media outlets to gauge the impact of the impending closures of more than 300 Adult Day Health Care centers.
The familiar names keep falling in L.A. radio.
Patrick Kevin Day, the deputy editor of The Hollywood Reporter's website, is leaving after just two months to return to the Los Angeles Times as a senior web producer. A...
McCourt and baseball talking about him selling the Dodgers, how Oakland weighs on city officials hoping to move Occupy L.A., redistricting challenges rejected, dumb burglars and get this: Big Fur is actually based in West Hollywood, the first city to ban fur sales.
Ladd tells the Register's Gary Lycan that he was stunned to be told he was laid off.
Legendary Los Angeles radio personality Jim Ladd has reportedly been dropped at KLOS (95.5 FM.)
Current and former employees of Tribune have agreed to accept $32 million to settle a class-action suit over their Employee Stock Ownership Program funds that became part of Sam Zell's takeover of the Tribune Company.
Caruso, the editor of Los Angeles magazine between 1995 and 1997, was named Oct. 19 as editor-in-chief of Smithsonian.
Supes OK more Newhall Ranch homes, city spreads out pension costs, car wash workers unionize, one paper adds a book section and honoring Wanda Coleman.
The longtime L.A. sports figure has been laid off.
Roger L. Simon's mostly politics and media operation is morphing from the L.A.-based Pajamas brand into PJ Media, as he explains.
Marcia Parker, Patch.com's West Coast editorial director, sent this note out to the other local Patchies about staffing for the mixed Spanish-English news sites.
Villaraigosa on pensions and taxes, where in Asia he's going, Obamajammers tweet, what Steve Jobs said about the New York Times and more.
Editor David Houston's latest memo nforms DJ reporters they will now be evaluated in writing every month, on the quantity and quality of their output.
Heikes announced to the staff and his freelance writers today that he is stepping down as editor of the LA Weekly.
Chinese carmaker BYD opens but where are the jobs, Hollywood heavies schedule Elizabeth Warren funder, Villaraigosa planning trip to Asia, Harold and Belle's sweet deal, urging a bigger mall in Woodland Hills and tiring of Occupy L.A. Plus more.
Former radio reporter Joel Bellman, now the communications deputy for Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, remembers in a piece for KPCC how radio legend Norman Corwin became his mentor.
Carolina Garcia, the editor of the Daily News, will now be the executive editor for the Daily Breeze and the Press-Telegram in Long Beach as well.
HuffPo, Lohan, CareNow, LAPD's tweeting detective, apron parking and more.
Times employees were filled in this afternoon in an all-staff email from president and chief operating officer Kathy Thomson.
Another nice ticket offer for LA Observed visitors.
The note to the staff from Daily News editor Carolina Garcia doesn't make clear if this is downsizing, but it's being taken that way.
The magazine posts a 2009 interview with its former columnist and an appreciation from editor John Lehrer.
An unfamiliar lull in California elections, jail visitor beaten while cuffed, sewer bills go up, L.A. to consider making homeowners responsible for sidewalk damage, Maxine Waters and controversy, and a quake drill this morning.
Mary Grady, the LAPD spokesperson for ten years until this past June, has been named Director of Public and Media Relations at Los Angeles World Airports.
Audio interview with Norman Corwin, initiative targets illegal immigrants, Hiltzik on 9-9-9, city cool to Occupy L.A. on banks, John & Ken apologize, and former Rep. Marty Martinez dies.
"The best radio writer-producer-director in the whole history of radio," said longtime friend Ray Bradbury.
Shalit freed, Supes take up jail oversight, campaign fund losses, girding for Berman-Sherman, part 2 of the LAT vs. Kabbalah and more.
A new Knight Foundation report makes a case study of eight of the biggest local news startups across the U.S., including Voice of San Diego and The Bay Citizen in San Francisco
Rancic, the longtime host of various E! Entertainment shows and recently the co-host of the Style Network reality series "Giuliana and Bill," went on NBC's Today this morning to talk about her treatment for breast cancer.
Miller, a former TV newsman who came to the LAPD from New York with then-chief William Bratton, then became a national security official, is returning to the news business.
It has become almost traditional for Ken Auletta to weigh in at length in the New Yorker on major media figures, and Jill Abramson certainly qualifies.
LAT goes after Kabbalah, LAPD loses a bunch of submachine guns, Baca tries a few steps of the mea culpa on jails, state politics crave L.A. city jobs and lots more inside for a Monday.
It wasn't quite like when Jacob Sobroff ran into Huell Howser in that Downtown park. This was pre-arranged, but fun nonetheless.
The Los Angeles Kings began the NHL season with two games in Europe, which meant a first time overseas for Rich Hammond, the traveling beat writer who the Kings employ.
Michaels, Sam Zell's right hand at Tribune until last fall and that New York Times story about his sexcapades and frat boy mentality, was arrested early Friday morning near Cincinnati and allegedly failed three field sobriety tests.
Louise Roug Bokkenheuser, the former Los Angeles Times staff writer, is now host of a foreign affairs radio show in Denmark.
McCourt's big gamble, FPPC and Kinde Durkee, deputies' code of silence, killing the lawn at City Hall and Politico loses reporter over plagiarism. Plus more.
Pretty good month for Los Angeles in the print and web pages of the Atlantic, leading with Kate Bolick's cover story on what's happening to marriage now that men are on the decline.
Here's a story of frustrating government bureaucracy — and it could affect dozens of promising media startups.
Korean broadcaster TVK24 did a feature story on Jewish Journal editor Rob Eshman's garden and cooking for the Sukkot holiday.
Lorraine Ali is the new pop music editor for the Los Angeles Times, where she began writing for the longtime pop music editor Robert Hilburn.
It was on this day in 1913 that the pop-up town of Van Nuys — located at the intersection of a vast former wheat field turned dustbowl and a sandy seasonal flood wash — got a newspaper.
Worst mass killing in OC history, new sheriff abuse report, feds to target media in pot war, Art Walk tonight and KCSN gets rock star support.
As of 1:43 p.m., Blackberries in L.A. are texting and beeping again. But it was tense there for awhile.
California Watch says federal prosecutors are preparing to target newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets that advertise medical marijuana dispensaries in the state.