Weekly archive
June 13 - June 19, 2004
Friday, Jun. 18
Phil Jackson told Jerry Buss today that he won't be back as Lakers coach. Kobe opted to become a free agent. And Shaquille O'Neal asked to be traded, sounding as...
David Lamb, the dean of Los Angeles Times correspondents (now a Washington-based national correspondent), leads the list of veterans who have chosen to go in the current buyout wave. A...
Richard Rushfield of LA Innuendo peruses the Times' Calendar section very closely and reports the findings on his new blog, now renamed "The Magazine Reader." Today, he goes through the...
Friend of Cathy Seipp, that is. The subject of her media column in this week's CityBeat is Rob Long, her pal and fellow National Review contributor who recently took over...
The L.A. Times — the left wing rag with Michael Ramirez as its editorial cartoonist and Max Boot as an op-ed columnist — on Monday begins picking up the conservative...
I didn't see last night's TV coverage (if any), but the defection of four Jim Hahn commissioners got Bob Hertzberg's campaign for mayor the trifecta of local print coverage: stories...
The Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the largest business group in town, today endorsed the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative that will be on the November ballot....
Thursday, Jun. 17
In his first writing venture as Editorial and Opinion Editor at the Los Angeles Times, Michael Kinsley came up against a tough editor: himself. He confirms to L.A. Observed via...
Yesterday at 5 p.m. was the deadline for reporters, editors and other L.A. Times editorial staffers who had applied for the buyout to rescind their requests if they changed their...
National Public Radio will send out a feed from the Ray Charles funeral tomorrow at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church on South Harvard Boulevard. KCRW will air the service...
Councilman and ex-police chief Bernard Parks' entry certainly makes the coming mayor's race in Los Angeles more interesting. He doesn't have any money yet (while Jim Hahn has a lot,...
Every so often, the mail brings something that lets L.A. Observed give a glimpse behind the scenes of how things really get done. This installment is an email from Joe...
A year ago, Mayor Hahn's $9 billion plan to modernize LAX was on the fast track and city councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski was persona non grata with the mayor's friends and...
That is, the founders of blogging.la, Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo, have launched a network of similar group websites under the label of Metroblogging. Today L.A., New York, San Francisco...
Wednesday, Jun. 16
Downtown L.A.'s tallest skyscraper was on the first list of targets for the Sept. 11 hijackers but was rejected by Osama bin Laden, the commission investigating the 2001 attacks reiterated...
The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke got a rude response when she phoned up New York Times Washington correspondent (and former L.A. bureau chief) Todd Purdum to ask about his Monday...
Not on the right (of course they still loathe him), but on the left. From Marc Cooper's blog, chiding liberals who feel good about Bill Clinton, on the eve of...
A five-stories high, five-acre pile of broken concrete slabs has been spreading dust over a Huntington Park neighborhood since shortly after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The debris, called La Montańa...
With a few more weeks to work on it, a triple byline of L.A. Times writers follows up today with a fuller but no more scandalous profile of Vanity Fair...
The Animal Defense League's favorite tactic to press for more humane treatment of pets at city shelters is to picket with amplified sound in front of the homes of city...
Tuesday, Jun. 15
Detroit 100, Lakers 87. And it wasn't as close as that. The Pistons win the NBA championship, and the Lakers go home to await being dismantled....
Nikki Finke, Matt Drudge and L.A. Observed together again in the Online Journalism Review, where Mark Glaser contrasts the role of blogs and web sites in spreading the Reagan is...
It's the Olympic torch. The procession begins at Venice Beach at 9 a.m. with Mayor Hahn passing to either Sylvester Stallone or Jay Leno [it was Sly] and ends at...
Janet Clayton, who used to be the Times' Editor of the Editorial Pages, has taken up her new job as Assistant Managing Editor (State and Local). She's now the editor...
Romenesko has NPR's press release (dated tomorrow) on plans to hire 45 new reporters, editors and producers in three years, a 15% increase. There will be more foreign bureaus, more...
CNET reports on why popular news websites were down on Tuesday morning....
Having a National Public Radio studio in Los Angeles (well, Culver City) and "Day to Day" produced here has raised California's profile on NPR immensely. L.A. writers, commentators and stories...
Richard Rushfield (scroll down) smacks a $50 fine on GQ for gratuitous L.A. bashing in the latest issue's interview with Jake Gyllenhaal and shopping guide to Los Angeles. The fine...
The Downtown News is all over a story about low-income tenants being evicted from the Bristol Hotel at Eight and Olive streets to make way for renovation into another boutique...
My email program ate my inbox last night, so if anyone sent me mail in the last few days and is waiting for a reply, please send again....
The daughter of Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin began her reporting career at the L.A. Herald Examiner, later wrote for the New York Times and NY Daily News, and penned scripts...
Back before Internet Economy became the punch line to a bad joke, when web-savvy 20-somethings were going to reinvent Hollywood — you know, four years ago — the New Media...
Monday, Jun. 14
Gustavo Arellano of OC Weekly delivered a commentary on today's NPR show "Day to Day," saying that despite the scandals that have hurt the Roman Catholic Church in recent years,...
Winners were announced Saturday night at a banquet in Century City. "Journalists of the Year" were John Daniszewski, Alan Abrahamson and Brian Vander Brug (spelled wrong on the Press Club...
"Six Feet Under" writer and supervising producer Jill Soloway emails Tiffany Stone, thanking her for some blog praise and revealing how Soloway came to be quoted in an L.A. Times...
The New York Post reported last week that Elvis Mitchell is pitching an "unusual" book on Richard Pryor. In today's Page Six, Pryor says he's got his own book in...
Sunday, Jun. 13
The L.A. Times team investigating city corruption hasn't been turning up big stories, but it does come up with interesting revelations Monday on Hahn Administration parks commissioner Christopher Hammond. It...
Jacques Steinberg in Monday's New York Times advances the backstory behind the pending budget cuts and possible layoffs in the L.A. Times newsroom. He reports on a hasty June 4...
In its 25th anniversary edition, the Los Angeles Business Journal proposes an agenda of 25 reforms and steps to improve the city. One of those ideas is an online newspaper...
It's the fitting way to honor Ray Charles, says Rip Rense....
