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Michael Kinsley doesn't start until June 14 but he is introducing himself around the L.A. Times building today. He also expounds a bit on his new job as editorial page...
LA Observed archive
for April 2004
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Antonio Villaraigosa tells the Times that he has known since losing on election night in 2001 that he would run for mayor again. The only question is when. He says...
Today is Bob Edwards' final day as the host of "Morning Edition" on NPR after 24 years. L.A. Times radio reporter Steve Carney weighs in. His final days have been...
A veteran Czech-born performer who goes by the nom de porn Jessica Dee worked with infected star Darren James on March 24 and got the news yesterday that she has...
The guy who claims he was the one to pelt candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger with an egg at Cal State Long Beach back in September has told his story to the...
Mike Hiltzik's "Golden State" column in today's LAT skeptically analyzes the media ripples that followed Reuters' April 21 report that Sony was close to buying MGM. The report created a...
Newsweek's former Los Angeles bureau chief, most recently the magazine's senior editor for news development, is going to the Dallas Morning News to be the Assistant Managing Editor for Sunday/page...
SWAT teams summoned. Only in the spoof world of George Wolfe's LALATimes. Also in the new issue: "Bush Declares California Disaster Area - In General" and "Celebrities Who Look Like...
For mayor of Los Angeles, that is. Writes Harold, no Hahn man to begin with, in today's LA Weekly: Against all odds, L.A. is going to have itself a bang-up...
During the Valley secession campaign in 2002, the city's Department of Water and Power hid its plans to ask for massive rate hikes, the Daily News charges in its lead...
The federal grand jury investigating the city commissions wants to talk today with its first commissioner, James Acevedo, a Valley-based political consultant appointed by Mayor Hahn. Acevedo directed the first...
Michael Kinsley plans to fly back and forth between the two cities when he takes over June 14 as editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, op-ed and letters...
KNBC reported that the LAPD has issued a threat advisory after federal officials received an "unsubstantiated potential threat of an attack" planned against an unspecified West Los Angeles shopping mall...
Lucian Haas worked for the old Daily News and was a leader of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild in the 1940s and 50s. He later worked as a press secretary...
Yesterday's final entry of Gregg Easterbook's blog sucked up, as he puts it, to everybody from George W. Bush to John Kerry to the New York Times. As of today,...
The Sacramento Bee columnist would appear to be no fan of Jim Hahn as mayor. Hahn and his mayoral reign have been likened, not without cause, to Gray Davis and...
Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic, Harpers and Slate, is joining the L.A. Times as editor of the editorial and opinion pages. Janet Clayton, who has run...
Nick Tosches announces his death with a tribute at Selby's official website. Hubert Selby died often. But he always came back, smiling that beautiful smile of his, and those blue...
The Daily News' James Nash reports on an unusual court hearing yesterday where Bob Hertzberg's ex-wife asked that he be stopped from running for mayor. Karen Moskowitz argued that Hertzberg...
Jon at the website Dodger Thoughts interviews Mark Langill, the team's historian and publications editor. There is also a special place within Dodger Stadium, tucked away from the obvious landmarks...
Since blogging about The Office almost two months ago, I've wondered how Aleks Horvat's venture to rent work tables in a communal space to writers is faring. Turns out the...
Bad day in literary L.A. In addition to Paul Holdengräber's exit (see previous post, below), Mark Sarvas reports at The Elegant Variation that the reading series Spoken Interludes is leaving...
Paul Holdengräber, the creative force behind the county art museum's Institute for Art and Cultures, has resigned. His departing email is short and sweet: Subject: Farewell For the past five...
In the May/June issue of Mother Jones, George Packer writes that there is "something peculiarly stale and tired" about political blogs. He reads them anyway. First, a confession: I hate...
Local author Thomas Greanias's Raising Atlantis was a bestselling ebook on Amazon and a Web phenomenon. Now the novel about an iconoclastic American archeologist and a beautiful Vatican linguist, rivals...
The lede of a story in the Sydney Morning Herald was written to prey on the worst fears of Australians and decent people everywhere: Sydney has been warned that it...
Air America Radio CEO Mark Walsh said Monday he has left the liberal radio network. The Chicago Tribune, which seems to be covering the Air America experiment more closely than...
All those competitors who have been taking potshots at Fleishman-Hillard for its city contracts may rue the day. Mayor Hahn today called for all outside public relations deals with the...
The L.A. Business Journal reports (subscribers only) that five of Infinity's seven local radio stations will be moving to the former E! Entertainment (originally California Federal) tower on the Miracle...
The L.A. Times has hired a new Metro desk editor to oversee City Hall coverage. It's John Hoeffel, who ran the San Jose Mercury's coverage of the Gray Davis recall...
The New York Times has been unfair to Mel Gibson and his hit film The Passion of the Christ, Variety editor Peter Bart (an ex-Timesman) writes in his column. After...
From 2 to 4 p.m. today, the station will air the war debate that occured yesterday at the Times Festival of Books between Robert Scheer, Christopher Hitchens, Mark Danner and...
Ex-city councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., now a City Hall lobbyist, is raising eyebrows for distributing a newsletter that boasts of his prowess at getting his clients to donate cash to...
The newest copy of Fortune has a long piece looking at Barry Diller's moves to build a company, InterActiveCorp, that intends to get a cut of every Internet transaction it...
The L.A. Times Festival of Books is a great community event, no question. People have a good time, it's free, authors meet readers and many books are sold. The paper's...
Radio artist and playwright Joe Frank teamed up with Sandra Tsing Loh in an anti-Ruth Seymour stage performance back on April 9, and he vents on his website about his...
Freelance writer Candice Reed looked at the grisly photos of charred American bodies dangling from an Iraq bridge and thought, Thank God that isn't anyone I know. Then came the...
Pete Dexter (Train: A Novel) gave the funniest acceptance speech, Anthony Hecht (Collected Later Poems) the most poignant, and Bruce Wagner and R.L. Stine were the most entertaining presenters, based...
How seriously do the bosses back at Fleishman-Hillard headquarters take the public relations agency's media hits here in Los Angeles? Pretty seriously, according to a story in today's St. Louis...
David Zahniser, the City Hall bureau chief reporter for Copley News Service, writes in the Sunday Daily Breeze that insiders are "amazed" at Mayor Jim Hahn's political vulnerability. Only a...
Washington Post Metro columnist Donna Britt came to town and had her say about Los Angeles in a Friday column. The email correspondent who called it to my attention wrote,...
The official line from Camp Anschutz is that yesterday's Wall Street Journal profile of the boss, while accurate, did not quote him directly. Reporter George Anders wanted us to think...
It's not the writing that Tim Rutten likes about the new Bob Woodward book, Plan of Attack. He writes in today's LAT review, "Woodward's prose can charitably be described as...
Variety's Pamela McClintock reports that changes in the New York Times film-reviewing roster are expected to include Elvis Mitchell leaving the paper. He may already have resigned, but wouldn't comment,...
In today's LA Weekly, David Ehrenstein argues against journalists' use of unnamed sources in a piece that begins with a scene from the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" and ventures into...
A rare profile of Philip Anschutz on the front page of the Wall Street Journal -- with an even rarer direct quote, and a line drawing -- portrays the billionaire...
Avalon owner Steve Adelman claims in a Page Six item today that Vanity Fair writer George Wayne demanded two free first-class tickets between New York and Los Angeles in exchange...
Toby Young, the Brit journalist who used to write for Vanity Fair, is writing the Slate Diary this week about living in L.A. for three months while he works on...
For the third time in 10 days, a power outage has hit LAX. This time they blame a crow. In Wednesday's incident, the crow on the utility pole behind the...
Today on KPCC's "Talk of the City," Kitty Felde will have on ABC's Cokie Roberts and Greg LaVoi, the author of Barbie Loves L.A.: America's Favorite Doll Sees the Sites....
Add Robert Hertzberg, the former state Assembly Speaker, to the list of candidates who will be running against Mayor Jim Hahn for the next year. Hertzberg is a moderate to...
An Internet message board with an obvious slant, AntiPolygraph.org, has a thread alleging to be inside info on problems in the LAPD polygraph unit. The thread includes numerous anonymous emails...
The strident host of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now" show brings her book tour to Wilshire Boulevard tonight, but first the Times' Greg Braxton weighs in with a Calendar section (meaning...
Mack Reed at LAVoice.org is skeptical about the decision by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation to release the stage names of porn actors who may have had recent...
The Times Festival of Books is this weekend at UCLA, which means there will be a lot of authors around the city (doing TV and radio, making bookstore appearances, giving...
Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus dings the LAT's Mark Z. Baraback over some political analysis, and predicts that Wonkette (and by extension the other Nick Denton-run gossip site, Gawker) could...
Michael Huffington clarifies the record in a piece by Robin Abcarian in today's LAT, saying that he is bi not gay, intends (unlike ex-wife Arianna) to stay a Republican, did...
It's official: the liberal radio network of Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Marty Kaplan won't return to KBLA. Air America announced today that it's in talks to get back on...
Fleishman-Hillard's St. Louis headquarters announced today that the PR giant will withdraw from its three controversial Los Angeles city contracts. The agency has gotten a ton of bad publicity lately...
Scott Collins, the L.A. Times TV writer on book tour for Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, shows up on the New York...
Mayor Jim Hahn delivered mostly good news in his annual "state of the city" address yesterday in a fire station hangar in Sherman Oaks, then took off while rivals Bernard...
Lake Elsinore blogger Kynn Bartlett (Shock and Awe) has begun writing a column every other week for the Californian in Riverside County. His first this week is about supporting the...
A couple of key positions have been filled in local TV news, according to RonFineman.com. Channel 4 has brought in Keith Esparros, a former executive producer at KCAL and KTTV,...
Retired L.A. Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg appears in today's Broadcasting and Cable with the first of what will be a recurring guest column on the editorials page. Today's topic:...
Columbia has picked up Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies with plans for John Calley to produce a feature film. Some other local sales in this week's Publishers Lunch newsletter: Steven...
The cover of Los Angeles magazine this month is 25 Great Weekends. Cover lines to stories mention R.J. Smith's piece on how L.A. car culture bad boy Von Dutch became...
Here it is Monday morning and Air America's old spot at AM 1580 is still being filled by Spanish-language news and talk. The liberal radio network's website offers no clues...
L.A.-based publications such as the L.A. Times Magazine, Robb Report, Angeleno and the Advocate are riding a big jump in ad pages over last year, the L.A. Business Journal says....
The cover story in CityBeat by Chip Jacobs is about Jerry Schneiderman, the Hollywood real estate developer and agitating political gadfly whose formative episode as a businessman may have been...
Rob Wagner, who wrote Red Ink, White Lies about the early history of L.A. newspapers, recently left his job as features editor at The Stockton Record to serve as managing...
Jack Miles, the former LAT Book Review editor and Pulitzer Prize winner for God: A Biography (and current senior adviser to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust) reviews...
From SpaceDaily, via Boing Boing (which got it from somebody else): Russian-born University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok says he can foresee major quakes by tracking...
U.S. Attorney Debra Yang has shocked City Hall and given her corruption probe a newly threatening edge by formally asking that every email to and from Mayor Jim Hahn and...
Variety reports that the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation and Adult Video News, the industry's trade publication, have called for all porn production to shut down for two months...
Folks at Forbes are a mite amused by a pitch from the PR rep for LA.com, asking if the website's president and editor can meet with the magazine's Los Angeles...
In the world of L.A. neighborhood activists, former "General Hospital" regular Shelley Taylor is the force responsible for putting Westwood North Village on the map. She lived in the home...
Cybele at blogging.la has posted an item there (with pictures) on the display of old Los Angeles street lamps planted in the shopping center parking lot at the corner of...
It doesn't look like the business dispute keeping the liberal radio network off the air in Southern California and Chicago is going away. Air America's brass continues to insist the...
Will Fowler was the first reporter on the scene of the Black Dahlia murder and kept a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer at the Examiner, and also quit...
Used to be that the Sunday magazines in L.A. newspapers were packed with ads for swimming pool builders. New pools became rare in the suburbs for awhile, but with home...
The wife of Hahn fundraiser Ted Stein, herself a member of the city's Board of Public Works Commissioners, voted four times to benefit Kaiser Permanente during the time the HMO's...
Michael Silverblatt's guest today on "Bookworm" is novelist Octavia Butler, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Kindred. KCRW's new Tuesday book commentator, David Kipen, had a piece in the San Francisco...
A reader emails that Hal Fishman's commentary on tonight's KTLA "News at Ten" defended Sharon Tay, who was the subject of that "Are Anchors Too Hot?" story in today's Times....
Hollywood sees journalists and our ilk as the next great comedy foils, the Boston Globe writes. Lawrence O'Donnell ("West Wing") is doing a half-hour comedy for HBO set in a...
The liberal talk network bounced a big check and owes more than $1 million to its radio outlets in Los Angeles and Chicago. KBLA, the dim-watted outlet Air America rented...
Local journalist Deanne Stillman writes in today's New York Observer about the Robert Blake and Phil Spector murder cases, which she has been covering since the start. As I’ve become...
Mayor Hahn's appearance at the City Ethics Commission yesterday to argue for his package of reforms drew four television cameras and merited stories today in the Times, Daily News and...
Ron Fineman's complaint on his website a few weeks back about the way Channel 5 anchor Sharon Tay dresses turned into a full-blown story in today's L.A. Times Calendar section...
Laurie Pike at LA.com is on a roll today [not so fast...see below *], blogging that her old job as editor of Distinction magazine has gone vacant again. She reports...
The Pasadena Weekly's April Fools edition (no longer online, far as I can tell) pushed some noses out of joint, including that of the Pasadena superintendent of schools, Percy Clark....
The 2003 Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Excellence in Journalism, from the Society of Professional Journalists, include prizes for the L.A. Times and Ilsa Setziol of KPCC (89.3 FM). She...
The U.S. Attorney has subpoenaed the emails of Port of Los Angeles executive director Larry Keller, as part of the unfolding probe of possible city department corruption, the Times' Noam...
LA.com has Heather John's departing email: she's leaving as Style editor for Bon Appétit, where she writes, "as a senior editor I'll be covering wine and spirits, some travel, kitchen...
Caltech (soon to be USC) history professor William Deverell delivers a paean on the L.A. Times op-ed page: Kevin Starr is nothing short of the John Muir of our times....
The Greater L.A. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (website here) is launching a series of monthly "mixers" at what they hope will be historic or journalistically significant locales....
Since last week's Inglewood vote (and L.A. Observed item) pushed a few buttons, here's a follow through from L.A. blogger Armed Liberal over at Winds of Change, who posts to...
Carol Lay, whose comic "Way Lay" appears in papers all over the country, drew a strip on her Franklin Hills neighborhood recently. "Things I Love About My Neighborhood" features the...
It's been decades since anyone has written a serious biography of Hugh Hefner (Hef's Little Black Book, co-authored by Hefner and Bill Zehme, to be published in May by HarperEntertainment,...
LA.com blogs that Adam Moss at New York magazine may (or may not) be looking for a Hollywood columnist since Anne Thompson was let go by his predecessor. Before her,...
A tribute to Spalding Gray will air on KCRW (89.9 FM) on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. The half-hour special by independent producer Jon Kalish features excerpts of interviews he did...
The California Studies Association, based at Berkeley, is having its annual conference in L.A. at Loyola Marymount on April 21-23. The keynote luncheon speaker is author Gregory Rodriguez, and entertainment...
Police chief Bill Bratton, a favorite of the New York tabloids, has been out of the city for 128 days since the start of 2003, the Daily News toted up...
Sunday's L.A. Times Book Review carries reviews of the new books by Eric Lax and Joe Domanick, and sees Richard Clarke displace Suzanne Somers from atop the non-fiction bestseller list......
That's a hot Hollywood rumor about the pseudonymous Rance, says Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin....
U.S. Attorney and District Attorney investigators separately looking into L.A. city corruption have begun to cooperate and are expected to merge into a single probe, the Times' Greg Krikorian and...
Former E! Online columnist Andy Jones today begins a new weekly gig for FilmStew.com about party life. It's called SWAG: See Where Andy Goes. In the first installment, he writes...
It's been a month now since Times travel writer Susan Spano began her online journal from Paris. She seems to have settled into posting once a week, and her column...
On the L.A. Times op-ed page today, the National Review's Jay Nordlinger reacts to the Inglewood vote against Wal-Mart with a big kiss for Sam and friends. Along the way,...
Barbara Becnel, the journalist who has reported on and collaborated with Crips founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, is the guest this Sunday on Barbara Osborn's "Deadline L.A." media show on KPFK...
The cover story in today's Jewish Journal of Los Angeles is on author Michael Chabon's venture into comic books with "The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist,” based on his Pulitzer-winning...
The "One Question" feature at I Want Media asked Marty Kaplan of Air America and the USC Annenberg School to define "broadcast indecency." His answer: "Indecency is the right wing...
Laura Chick disclosed Thursday that she will run for reelection next year rather than go after Mayor Jim Hahn's job. So far she's yet to take back her early endorsement...
Talk is around City Hall and other PR shops in town that the FBI served subpoenas yesterday on Fleishman-Hillard in connection with the federal grand jury looking into possible corruption...
Just to finish the thought from a posting here in February about Laurie Niles, who hoped to audition for an opening with the Los Angeles Philharmonic... She got her tryout...
The headline of David Carr's piece in today's New York Times says "highish brows" are furrowing at the thought of an auto writer winning a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. But...
CityBeat's cover story says that Los Angeles is home to "the most dangerous publishers in America." The piece by Mick Farren profiles Adam Parfrey and his Feral House, and Richard...
The LA Weekly's John Powers gives Air America a try and says liberal talk radio has some growing pains to get through. Air America has a long way to go....
LGF is a Los Angeles-based warblog by Charles Johnson that generates 3,000 comments a day and invites strong opinions about the war, Islam and questioners of Administration policy. Critics consider...
That's the rampant gossip in San Diego, says a writer for the local CityBeat there. Head guy David Copley is ill and the company's acounting department has been asked to...
L.A. Times Calendar writer Scott Collins chats up his new book, Crazy Like a Fox: The Inside Story of How Fox News Beat CNN, in today's "Media People" interview with...
The New York Post's Page Six dishes on the just-concluded Los Angeles fall fashion shows: L.A. Times fashion writer Booth Moore was barred by Sue Wong because of a bad...
Bernard Parks will start raising money to run against Mayor Hahn, the man who ended his LAPD career. He tells the Daily News: "People from throughout this region look to...
Hollywood, Interrupted, the book by Mark Ebner and Andrew Breitbart, includes a chapter about Heather Robinson, who says she used her job at AOL to purloin the screen names of...
Too Much of Nothing is the title of a new novel by Michael Scott Moore set in the fictional South Bay town of Calaveras Beach, in which a Jewish surfer-teenager-ghost...
L.A. Times editor John Carroll is set to be on with Charlie Rose tonight, along with Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post (from Iraq) and playwright Tom...
The president of the city Airport Commission resigns but denies in strong terms any suggestion of corruption. In his statement, Stein also blasts City Controller Laura Chick, whose audit of...
Thursday night on California Connected (KCET, 10 p.m.), host Lisa McRee will guide a discussion about talk radio among John Kobylt of KFI's "John and Ken" show, Marc Cooper of...
Chill Out LA is a website and weekly newsletter "devoted to helping you become a happier, healthier, more centered Angeleno."...
An email correspondent to Romenesko passes along some backstory in the career of Dan Neil, the LAT automobile critic who won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday. Writes Todd Morman: I'm sure...
Architect Pierre Koenig died Sunday at his home in Brentwood. His Case Study houses #21 and #22 helped put Koenig among the elite modernist architects who gave Southern California a...
Reason magazine's June cover will be devoted to a cool exercise in technology: the 40,000 subscribers will see individualized satellite photos of their neighborhood, with their homes circled. The New...
Stories in the national media about the L.A. Times' pick up of five Pulitzer Prizes -- the second biggest sweep ever -- talk about a resurgent paper and credit Editor...
The LA Weekly's (and the Nation's) Marc Cooper has a new blog. Next! * And: Jon Wiener too. It's mostly the lineup for his weekly show on KPFK, audio archives...
National security advisor Condoleeza Rice's testimony before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will be aired live Thursday morning on KCRW (89.9 FM). The coverage anchored...
NPR commentator and autism expert Christina Adams has turned an essay about her son's recovery that she wrote last year for the L.A. Times Magazine into a memoir. Publishers Lunch...
It's to be Bruce Orwall, the longtime ace entertainment industry reporter in the Los Angeles bureau. The bureau staff was told he's the guy to replace Jonathan Friedland, who left...
The Times' winners are Sacramento-based editorial writer Bill Stall for pieces about state government, photographer Carolyn Cole for her work in Liberia, automobile critic Dan Neill for columns in his...
In some depth, by Mack Reed of LAVoice.org (who didn't get the job to be the site's editor). The site - almost two years in the making with heavy investment...
The Los Angeles-based show from Minnesota Public Radio aired for the final time today. Host Diana Nyad announced on the air (on KPCC) that "The Savvy Traveler" could not survive...
Anna Richardson, the British TV journalist who accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of groping her during a 2000 interview, says she'll file a libel lawsuit against the governor this week after negotiations...
PaidContent.org, which authoritatively tracks media efforts to make money on the web, is now listed among my links on the left side as a Los Angeles website. Founder and editor...
The LAT's Bob Baker has a piece in the Calendar section on the newly younger and hipper magazine put out by AARP, the group for people 50 and older that...
It was bad enough that Liz Smith reported in her New York Post column last Tuesday that the old Perino's building was demolished the day after the recent LA.com party...
After taking its lumps for a couple of weeks, the World Journalism Institute has toned down its Christian advocacy mission statement. It no longer states the goal is to train...
The Society of American Business Editors and Writers at the University of Missouri cites the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Business Journal in its Best of Business awards...
Some media and books things going on around town in April. The calendar gets updated through the month:...
On her new blog, Arianna Huffington pledges not to cash her $494.20 car tax refund but to turn it over to the California State University Foundation. In order for me...
Yesterday's Christian Science Monitor tossed up a little feature on Wonkette Ana Marie Cox: A political blogger, untamed, rattles cages in D.C. Previously at LAO: Wonkette revealed...
Alexandra Jacobs summarizes the recent Sandra Tsing Loh dustup in her "Palmy Days" column. The only factoid I recognized as new is that KPCC will pay Loh $175 a week...
City Controller Laura Chick announced yesterday that she plans to use her audit powers to dig into the $9 million public relations contract between the Department of Water and Power...
The L.A. Times investigative team chasing the City Hall corruption story is out with a piece that says an engineering company, URS, has told the feds it lost business at...
Blogging.la was just April Fooling when it reported on selling out to LA.com, but the serious word is that Gawker is getting close to trying out its blog-for-profit formula in...
I won't be posting for much of Thursday. Fair warning......
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
