Kevin Roderick started LA Observed in 2003 and is the site's editor and publisher. A journalist for more than two decades, he writes regularly about politics as a Contributing Writer at Los Angeles Magazine and has written for Smithsonian, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, C and L.A. Architect. His LA Observed commentary airs weekly on KCRW-FM in Los Angeles. Kevin was an editor and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times for two decades and led the Los Angeles bureau of the late Industry Standard magazine. He is the author of two books about the city, "Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles" and "The San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb," and is Director of the UCLA Newsroom website. Kevin lives on Mar Vista Hill. Website Email

Bob Baker runs the writing website newsthinking.com. He was a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years before leaving in 2004 to become a novelist and songwriter. (Current project: The heretofore-untold 1952 civil rights movement of left-handed golfers that shaped MLK’s Montgomery strategy.) Baker co-authored the autobiography of R&B radio legend Magnificent Montague ("Burn, Baby! BURN!," University of Illinois Press, 2003). He is also a longtime fan of the Los Angeles Clippers, citing Matthew 20:16: The last shall be first and the first shall be last. He too lives on Mar Vista Hill, but that's just coincidence. Email

Cari Beauchamp is the author of "Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood." She also edited and annotated "Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by the Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and co-wrote "Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival." Her most recent book is "Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s" and she is currently writing "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents," the story of Joe Kennedy's Hollywood years. She has also written documentary films, writes for Vanity Fair and recently won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholararship. In a previous life, she was Press Secretary to Governor Jerry Brown. She lives in West Los Angeles. Email

Bill Boyarsky is vice president of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission and a lecturer in journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communications. He was a reporter, columnist and city editor at the Los Angeles Times, retiring in 2001. He is the author of four books and his new book, California’s Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh, Power Politics and the Art of the Possible is to be published by the University of California Press in September. He lives in Westwood. Email

Jenny Burman is a longtime resident of Echo Park. She has written for the LA Weekly, the Daily News, Tin House magazine and Black Clock. A believer in honoring the past without fearing the future, she serves on the board of the Echo Park Historical Society. She has an M.F.A. in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Email

Adrienne Crew runs L.A. Brain Terrain, an event calendar blog listing upcoming author readings and lectures around the city. Que Books published her book "Blogosphere: Best of Blogs" in 2006. A former Interview Editor at LAist.com, her work has appeared at Salon.com and in the San Francisco Chronicle. Email

David Davis is the author of "Play by Play: Los Angeles Sports Photography 1889-1989" (Angel City Press). He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles Magazine and a contributing editor for the Amateur Athletic Foundation's SportLetter. His writing has appeared in Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Business Journal and other publications. He lives in Highland Park. Email

Veronique de Turenne is a journalist, published playwright and essayist, and is the book critic for NPR's news show, "Day to Day." She has been a staff writer at the Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Pasadena Star News and Ventura County Star and is a longtime contributor to the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for Variety, Salon, Buzz, Wahine and Los Angeles Magazine and is a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune's book section. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank you note from him a week later. She lives 100 yards from the western edge of the continent in Malibu's Paradise Cove. Email

Eric Estrin has written more hours of television drama than he cares to remember for such series as "Miami Vice," "Cagney & Lacey," "Outer Limits" and "Hercules." As a journalist, he wrote a monthly TV column for Los Angeles magazine and worked as special sections editor for the trade paper Television Week. He is currently working on a spec feature which is destined to change the entertainment industry as we know it. He lives in the Ventura County community of Oak Park. Email

Bruce Feirstein is a long-time columnist for the New York Observer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, who has also written three James Bond movies. His work has appeared in New York Magazine, the New Yorker, Spy, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, where he wrote for the editorial page. Before publishing his first book, "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," he worked in advertising, writing corporate and political campaigns. He lives in Hancock Park. Email

Judy Graeme is LA Observed's resident photographer and student of art history, with an emphasis on photography. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and has shot news, features and fashion for Time, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, W and California magazine. Email

Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond crime novels set in today's multicultural Los Angeles. A Fulbright Scholar and former L.A. Times reporter, Denise's novels have been shortlisted for the Edgar Allen Poe and the Willa Cather Award. Denise is also editor of "Los Angeles Noir," an anthology from Akashic Books. Her latest novel is "Prisoner of Memory," set amidst the Cold War and L.A.'s Russian community. Visit her at www.denisehamilton.com. She lives somewhere between NoHo and Pasadena. Email

Mark Lacter was editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal from 2001 to 2005 and 1996 to 2000. Sandwiched between was a two-year-stint as a Forbes senior editor covering media and entertainment. He is credited with establishing the Business Journal as an award-winning major news source, and his weekly commentaries on business and economics won numerous awards. He also worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, Investor's Business Daily and the Los Angeles Daily News, where he was business editor, editorial pages editor and columnist. In 2005, he was named by the Society of Professional Journalists as Distinguished Journalist of the Year. He can be heard every Tuesday morning doing business analysis on KPCC-FM. He also covers business for Los Angeles magazine and is wrapping up his first book, a novel about corporate skullduggery that is set in Los Angeles. He lives in Westwood. Email

Victor Merina is a freelance writer and Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. A former Los Angeles Times reporter, he has contributed essays to the Times Magazine and Sunday Opinion section and the San Francisco Chronicle. Victor is an editor for reznetnews.org, which covers Native American issues, and also speaks widely on issues of diversity, journalism and narrative writing. He was a Teaching Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a Fellow at the Poynter Institute in Florida and the Media Studies Center in New York. A long-time resident of the South Bay, he lives in Redondo Beach. Email

Jenny Price is the author of "Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America," and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Audubon, and LA Weekly. She leads frequent tours of the L.A. River, and is working on a new book, "13 Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A." She lives in Venice. Email

David Rensin has written and co-written twelve books, five of them New York Times bestsellers. His new book, "All For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki 'Da Cat' Dora," is an oral and narrative biography of the once and forever (and late) enigmatic king of Malibu and world wanderer. HarperEntertainment will publish on April 8, 2008. His previous book, "The Mailroom" (2003), was a bestselling oral history covering sixty-five years of what's it's like to start at the bottom dreaming of the top in Hollywood's premier boot camp and ambition factory: a talent agency mailroom. Unless he gets some new, wild idea and goes off the deep end, Rensin's next book will be an oral history of personal altruism in America. To find out more, wander around Rensin's website, Tell Me Everything, where there are no opinions, all the time. He saves those for L.A. Observed, and for his non-stop invective while watching way, way too much television. He should be writing. Email

Sean Roderick once saw nine musicals in six days in New York City. She is majoring in ethnomusicology at UCLA. Email

Her first year in Los Angeles, Nancy Rommelmann, whose work has appeared often in the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Magazine, and Bon Appetit, "celebrated" her 25th birthday at Chez Jay, talking long into the night with the guy on the bar stool next to her, the boxer Jerry Quarry. She spent the next 17 years excavating and writing about swaths of LA culture that often don’t get a lot of light, including LAPD cops hibernating from a hostile public; a child star seeking emancipation from her mother; the inhabitants of a Skid Row bar; the disciples of a Vietnamese spiritual leader, and guests at a Hollywood motel trying to get by on hope. Now living in Portland, Oregon, Nancy documented her L.A. years and the long, slow, inevitable road out of town, on her blog Leaving L.A., fated to be a best-selling memoir as soon as a smart agent gets a look at it. Her current blog can be found here. Email

Erika Schickel is the author of "You're Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom." She contributes to the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, CityBeat and Bust Magazine. In addition to LA Observed she writes online for TheDailyReel.com. A stay-at-home writer, Erika lives in lovely Faircrest Heights, where Mid-City meets the Westside, with her husband and two daughters. Website. Email

Jacob Soboroff is executive director of Why Tuesday?, a non-partisan group working to increase voter participation. In addition to vlogging about our voting system for Why Tuesday?, he contributes video blogs to NPR Sunday Soapbox, a political blog from Weekend Edition Sunday, and was a contributor to the PBS series Wired Science, a production of KCET Los Angeles and Wired magazine. Jacob started vlogging for LA Observed after running into Huell Howser at Los Angeles State Historic Park. In college he was a part-time advance man to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and presidential candidate Howard Dean. Jacob has an MA in political theory and philosophy from New York University.Email

Deanne Stillman brakes for sand. She is the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller, "Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave" (William Morrow). It was named by the LA Times Book Review as one of the “best books of 2001,” Hunter Thompson called it “a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer,” and it's been added to various college courses on literary nonfiction. She is currently writing "Horse Latitudes: Last Stand for the Wild Horse in the American West" for Houghton Mifflin and a book about the desert north of Los Angeles, with photographs by Mark Lamonica, for Angel City Press. This fall, her latest Rolling Stone piece, "The Great Mojave Manhunt," will appear in "Best American Crime Writing 06" (Harper Perennial), and the University of Arizona Press is publishing her book about Joshua Tree National Park, "Joshua Tree - Desolation Tango," with photographs by Galen Hunt. Her work has been published in the LA Times, Slate, the LA Weekly, the New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, the New York Observer, Tin House, the Village Voice, Buzz Magazine and elsewhere. Her plays have won prizes in theatre festivals around the country. Website. Email

TJ Sullivan is an award-winning independent journalist whose work has appeared in scores of daily publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Dallas Morning News. A recipient of the the Sigma Delta Chi Award, as well as top honors from Best of the West, the Associated Press News Executive Council and the Los Angeles Press Club, Sullivan worked in newsrooms for 15 years prior to embarking on a second career as an author. He continues to write trend stories about real estate and has lectured on reporting techniques at conferences conducted by The Poynter Institute and the Society of Professional Journalists. He served in 2006 as an adviser to The Working Press, a college internship program sponsored by SPJ and is currently teaching a journalism course at California State University, Northridge. Sullivan also has taught journalism courses and coached writers at UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin. He has completed two novels and is pursuing their publication. He blogs at TJ Sullivan in LA and lives in West Los Angeles. E-mail

Phil Wallace is a Los Angeles native who has returned to pursue his MBA at the Marshall School of Business at USC. Previously, he served as a Special Projects Analyst for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Before joining the Rays, he was an International Relations Analyst for NYC2012 – New York's bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. He was also the first sports editor for LAist.com. Phil graduated with a B.A. in political science from Columbia University, where he served as the radio play-by-play announcer for the school's football, basketball, and baseball teams. He was also one of the sports editors for the Columbia Daily Spectator and worked as an investigative reporter and columnist. E-mail