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Marc Haefele writes in the L.A. Alternative Press that the LA Weekly, after months of buildup and labor tension, "finally fired perhaps its best-known reporter and editor." Blume also was...
LA Observed archive
for November 2004
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
KPFK and the nation's other Pacifica stations are preempting normal programming on Thursday to raise money for preserving the Pacifica radio archives. From 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., KPFK will...
Some staffers in the LAT Washington bureau have been told that the paper's national edition will close at the end of the year. It's a condensed version of the Times...
Editor Laurie Pike of LA.com writes that the city guide site is rolling out a second blog, Clothes Hoarse. The underline: "What's Worn. What's Scorned." The first several items mention...
• Tonight's "Jeopardy" is the game when champion Ken Jennings is finally dethroned. He won $2.5 million on 74 shows before losing in a match taped in September. The new champ...
• Milton Bradley did it again. The volatile Dodgers outfielder was cited for disorderly conduct after allegedly interfering with a police traffic stop near Akron, Ohio. The winter baseball meetings are...
The former L.A. bureau chief for the Washington Post and founding president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. Most recently,...
The Los Angeles-based radio and TV host announced today that he's dropping his nightly NPR show aimed at African Americans. In an email to NPR stations posted at Romenesko, Smiley...
In a Q-and-A with the Downtown News, outgoing chairman George Kieffer of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce praises Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ("I think we have a very pro-business governor") and...
Andrew Murr of the Newsweek L.A. bureau shares the byline on a piece saying that girls account for most new HIV infections among teenagers and that, more generally, women make...
That's the cover line in the December issue of W (not online) for a story that lets us in on a secret: there's more to Los Angeles these days than...
By one media measure, the contest between Jim Hahn and his pursuers to finish first or second on March 8 kicks into higher gear today. After weeks of mostly event...
Channel 5's news operation has had better months. Already in November, there have been reports that Lynette Romero and Marta Waller are out as co-anchors and KTLA got flack over...
The holiday cheer-spoiling piece about Los Angeles I read over the weekend was Mary McNamara's profile in the Times Sunday Calendar of character actor Michael O'Neill. You know him: he's...
Long before Hollywood came into being, a photographer for motion picture pioneer Thomas Edison traveled the Southern Pacific railroad shooting the first movie footage of locales in the West. Snippets...
Documentary filmmaker and L.A. native Philip Rodriguez's on-screen interviews in Los Angeles Now include Eli Broad, Phil Jackson, Salma Hayek, Yxta Maya Murray, Michael Ventura, D.J. Waldie, Cardinal Roger Mahony,...
CityBeat has added Andrew Gumbel, the Los Angeles correspondent for The Independent in London. They are calling the column American Babylon; this week's first offering advises Kerry supporters who believe...
Steve Wasserman, editor of the L.A. Times Book Review, joined other editors (including Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times) in a roundtable discussion at BookReporter.com. An excerpt from Wasserman's...
By some reckoning, Rick Orlov of the Daily News is the dean of L.A. City Hall reporters. He's been there a long time, knows a lot, and is respected. Add...
Today's L.A. Times Calendar runs a brief confirming Ron Fineman's report that KTLA suspended Sam Rubin for criticizing the "Morning News" set on the air. At least I hope they...
The Los Angeles Conservancy, Art Deco Society of Los Angeles, Mexican American Political Association and other groups announced lawsuits yesterday aimed at blocking plans to raze the Ambassador Hotel. Their...
California First Lady Maria Shriver has dropped her push to have the state history museum in Sacramento reinvented as a women's museum. It will remain devoted to California history. No...
People who live between Palos Verdes and Manhattan Beach are either seriously out of practice with stormy weather or that was some major thunder that woke up a wide area...
Carmine Caridi, the ex-Academy member who lent his complimentary VHS film screeners to a friend who copied and pirated them, has been fined the maximum $300,000 by a federal judge....
The L.A. Times must like Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, quite a lot. Separate Q-and-A's with him ran Sunday in both the magazine and the Calendar movie pages....
My post on last Sunday's story about the Black Dahlia case in the L.A. Times Magazine prompted the following email from Elisabeth Reynolds. Other thoughts are welcome, as are signed...
It's been more than 24 hours since the last post involving Fleishman-Hillard—so here goes. Actually, this news comes from the shop of crisis PR hotshot Michael Sitrick. Today he promoted...
As expected, the county Board of Supervisors voted to shut down the trauma center at South L.A.'s troubled King/Drew Medical Center. Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke abstained, leaving the vote 4-0...
For the cover story in today's Outdoors section, Times staff writer Charles Duhigg goes to Utah and tries to find out what ensues at 2004 Adventure Team, which he calls...
The Sacramento Bee has created a new post of Public Editor and filled it with Armando Acuņa, the paper's sports editor. He used to be Sacramento bureau chief for the...
Once again the LA Weekly posts Nikki Finke's Hollywood column online ahead of the print paper. In this one, she writes about her long-ago New York Observer story on the...
RonFineman.com says that KTLA suspended entertainment reporter Sam Rubin yesterday for making derogatory comments about the new set on "The Morning Show." It would be at least the third suspension...
The drive to win historic status for the residential center of old Van Nuys is picking up momentum. The Times covers the subject today (and mentions me). Patricia Ward Biederman...
The next generation of Los Angeles City Hall reporters and deputies won't have to learn how to spell Miscikowski. The councilwoman from the Westside who is losing her seat next...
The former anchor on channel 5's "News at Ten"—now Mindy Stearns—plays one of the "millionaire's wife" roles on the upcoming TBS reality show, "The Real Gilligan's Island." She qualifies: Franklin...
The mayor has just named Yolanda Fuentes to one of five coveted (translation: high-salaried and full-time) seats on the Board of Public Works. I'm not saying this move is motivated...
The American Journalism Review asks the question in a major piece by senior writer Rachel Smolkin on the financial pressures at Tribune Company newspapers and culture clashes with the L.A....
Retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel is still trying to convince people that his father was a 1940s serial killer who mutilated Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia. His book,...
The Dodgers plan to announce today the hire of former ESPN anchor Charley Steiner as the team's newest announcer, replacing Ross Porter. Steiner is 55 and may have been on...
On the news and opinion website American Reporter, San Pedro correspondent and activist Robert Gelfand gives Controller Laura Chick and the Times credit for putting pressure on the Hahn Administration....
These details are from Copley L.A. bureau reporter David Zahniser, whose story in the Daily Breeze looks at Fleishman-Hillard's other contract, not with the DWP but with the Port of...
Associates of Mayor Hahn approached State Sen. Richard Alarcon three months ago about helping him run for controller instead of mayor, Alarcon says in Patrick McGreevy's Inside Politics column in...
The concept for demolishing the Frank Gehry-designed Santa Monica Place shopping mall has become clearer. Although the developer's idea has been billed as extending Third Street Promenade another block to...
In Saturday's Times and Daily News, Controller Laura Chick keeps up the heat on Fleishman-Hillard and Mayor Jim Hahn over their mutually beneficial relationship. Chick posted online at her official...
Some comments by councilman Ed Reyes in this week's LA Weekly cover story got him in trouble with his fellow council member Tom LaBonge. In the story about Reyes' efforts...
* Updated through the day • Mark Schubb reads the LAT website closer than most, and finds another case of promotional copy for a car dealer being posted as a news...
A week after saying he couldn't make it, Mayor Jim Hahn has decided to attend the Dec. 2 League of Women Voters campaign debate after all. Spokeswoman Julie Wong says...
Hollywood PR power Pat Kingsley of PMK/HBH fired the president of the New York office, Leslee Dart, in a power struggle over control of the firm. Dart's clients include Martin...
Los Angeles is in the midst of its third big growth wave, after the 1920s and the post-World War II suburbs boom, USC history professor Philip Ethington says in the...
This is (probably) the final follow to the Online News Association conference that was held here last week. I noted earlier that the entry fee of $499, among the highest...
A year since Gov. Schwarzenegger took over in Sacramento, KPCC's road-traveling talk host, Kitty Felde, takes Talk of the City to the capital on Friday from 2 to 3 p.m....
The City Controller's Fleishman-Hillard audit has legs: all three local dailies run second-day stories with new details, and the Daily News opines with wishful thinking in an editorial that Laura...
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kevin Ross is in hot water for making comments about pending cases on KCET's "Life and Times" program and for appearing in a proposed TV...
The magazine has hired Steve Oney as a Senior Writer. He fills the slot vacated by Amy Wallace, who left to return to the Times as an editor in the...
The new L.A. Times op-ed columnist hasn't published his first piece yet, but already the LA Weekly's Nikki Finke calls adding Stein the dumbest mistake Michael Kinsley has made as...
The City Council said no deal to the $540,000 consulting contract negotiated with former Port of Los Angeles executive director Larry Keller. One of the objections is that he's a...
The London newspaper's John Hiscock reports in from Los Angeles on the image blemishes at the Getty: Ever since the J Paul Getty Museum opened with lavish celebrations seven years...
Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum calls on Michael Kinsley to stop publishing conservative pundit John Lott on the Times op-ed page. The man is a fraud and the Times demeans...
Monica Bouldin, who has worked at Warner Bros. and Ruder Finn, takes over day-to-day management of the Los Angeles office of Ogilvy PR. She also leads the office's consumer marketing...
City Controller Laura Chick said today that her audit found $4.2 million in "unsubstantiated, unsupported, and questionable charges" billed to the city by Fleishman-Hillard for public relations services. PRWeek reports...
A long-awaited business tax reform plan pushed by Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti is due to be voted on in the City Council Wednesday, with good prospects of passage. They...
In its latest issue, Citizen Culture magazine publishes in the fiction slot a story by Playboy Playmate Divini Rae Sorenson about forced sex and abuse inside the Playboy mansion. But...
There's a little bit of good news out of the Tribune Company. October revenue was up over last year, 2.3% companywide and 1.4% in publishing. At the L.A. Times, though,...
Michael Eisner began his testimony in the Disney shareholder lawsuit in Delaware, prompting recollections of his calling Jeffrey Katzenberg "the little midget" under questioning five years ago. This time, Eisner...
For the second time in recent months, a plane landed on a runway that had already been cleared for another aircraft. Stories in the Times and Daily Breeze....
• Remember that MVP buzz around the Dodgers' Adrian Beltre? Didn't happen. The amazing Barry Bonds won his seventh trophy (no one else has more than three) and became the oldest...
California historian Kevin Starr chats with Saul Gonzales tonight at 6:30 on Life and Times on KCET, then tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. sits down for a half-hour conversation about his...
Wendy Thomas Russell reports in a big package in the Long Beach Press-Telegram on a federal civil jury in Los Angeles that deliberated for 4½ months, drank at lunch on...
GQ's Men of the Year issue includes a piece by former LAT reporter Jeffrey Gettleman—now at the New York Times—on what he saw covering the Iraq war. It's titled "Dispatches...
Starting in January 2006, the Washington bureau of the L.A. Times will share space with eight other Tribune papers, the Chicago Sun-Times says today. Consolidation is being met with "deep...
In the Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine, Joel Havemann of the LAT Washington Bureau writes about his 14-year battle to manage Parkinson's disease and, finally, to undergo intricate surgery to...
When is favorable press something to regret? For Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, when the story is in the L.A. Business Journal. The lead feature in the LABJ's package this...
The Times reports that Mayor Jim Hahn's latest failure to persuade the city council to expand the LAPD could haunt his reelection campaign. In the Daily News (story not online),...
OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano has won the Lilly Scholarship from the Religion Newswriters Association for his reporting on the child-abuse scandal in the Catholic Diocese of Orange County. Rodger Jacobs...
The Online News Association conference began at Hollywood and Highland yesterday and wraps tonight with presentation of the awards I helped judge a few weeks back. There's a substantial barrier...
Sunday is the second apparently-annual Historic Echo Park Home Tour. Advance tickets are no longer available, but $15 ducats are available Sunday at the tour starting place in Williams Hall...
A national Gallup Poll of people who don't live in Los Angeles—and by the looks of it have never visited—rates L.A. as the third most unsafe big city in America....
Seven months after that sexual harassment lawsuit against the producers of "Friends" by fired writer's assistant Amaani Lyle began to be dissected, parodied and commented upon in the media and...
Doug Dowie, still on administrative leave from Fleishman-Hillard, filed a legal response Friday that denies the City Attorney's lawsuit allegations that, under Dowie, the PR firm padded its billings to...
The magazine has put up a site at VanityFair.com with the table of contents and a couple of stories from the print issue, the Fanfair calendar, party pictures, a link...
Janelle Brown gives downtown the 36 Hours treatment in today's New York Times Escapes section. Chinatown galleries, dinner at Ciudad, Saturday morning at the flower market, a walking tour with...
The Times reports today on that mini Internet dustup about tanks supposedly intimidating demonstrators at Tuesday's Westwood protest. The cops agree that, as already pointed out here and elsewhere, the...
Both the Times and the Daily News do stories today on Mayor Jim Hahn's decision to skip a Dec. 2 debate that Channel 4 plans to air. His campaign spokeswoman,...
I've been reminded that Norman "Jake" Jacoby, the veteran police reporter for whom the press room at Parker Center is named, was the subject of a lengthy 1986 profile in...
PR Week's Anita Chabria reports today that an audit confirming that Fleishman-Hillard overbilled the city for public relations services will be released this week next week, according to unnamed sources...
Out in Sherman Oaks, neighbors are divided against each other over closing a walking bridge across the Los Angeles River that connects Rye Street and Sunnyslope Avenue. Councilwoman Wendy Greuel...
• Pete Demetriou of KFWB has joined the L.A. "crime tour" being staged on Saturday by the Society of Professional Journalists. He'll describe some crime scenes he has covered in 27...
During an anti-war demonstration at the federal building in Westwood Tuesday night, two Marine armored vehicles lumbered up, stopped for a bit, then drove off. A post with video at...
Jimmy McLarnin, apparently one of the great boxers to live and fight in Los Angeles, died back on Oct. 28 at age 96. He was known as "Baby Face" and...
In theory I'm all for the city's latest crackdown on illegal rush hour parking. Being the only car holding up a lane of traffic these days is uncool, to say...
Who didn't see this divorce coming? The left-leaning weekly apparently cut conservative columnist Cathy Seipp's freelance rate and asked that her local media pieces stop being rewrites of her blog....
Nikki Finke reports on the LA Weekly website that the New York Times is moving ahead with plans to hire a second Hollywood reporter to work alongside Sharon Waxman, a...
Prospective candidates in the March 8, 2005 primary election took out papers for a second day on Tuesday. There will be stories written, but no real news. It's just a...
Jazz musician Jon Hartmann's third self-produced album pays tribute to the long-vanished Pacific Electric Railway "Red Cars" that used to rattle ever-so-slowly down the center of Los Angeles streets. From...
From Publishers Lunch Weekly: • Joe Keenan, the author of Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz and former writer and producer of "Frasier," sells My Lucky Star to Little, Brown:...
I don't remember what got it started, but a recent search sent me hopping from place to place across the web and, ultimately, diverted me onto the subject of old...
During today's hostage situation at the Mexican consulate near MacArthur Park, Brian Flemming shot video of the SWAT team moving in from his apartment. On his blog he describes dealing...
Dutton's warns anyone who comes to see Tom Wolfe at the Brentwood store next Monday that the author has laid down a few ground rules. Violate them and, I guess,...
This time it's at the Orlando Sentinel, where publisher Kathy Waltz informs the staff: "All of Tribune faces these same economic realities and is taking steps to improve financial performance....
The Southern California Booksellers Association gives its 2004 awards to Jamesland by Michelle Huneven for fiction, The King of California: J. G. Boswell and the Making of the Secret American...
Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg has turned his website, ChangeLA.com, into the most complete online digest of local politics news. This morning there are 24 entries, many from the Times and...
Brandwynne, the assistant news director at Channel 5, gave $2,000 to Sen. Barbara Boxer's reelection fund, RonFineman.com says. The pay site also cites a newsroom source saying that she solicited...
Last week's Times dissing of Bastide—S. Irene Virbila downgraded it from L.A.s only four-star restaurant to one star—gets a full story on page three of the Business Journal. Rebecca Flass...
Mayor Jim Hahn is wasting no time swinging into campaign mode. He spoke up for expanding the LAPD on Warren Olney's Which Way, L.A.? Monday (audio here). On Tuesday he's...
The LAPD press room at Parker Center is named for Norman "Jake" Jacoby, who reported on the cop beat from 1935 to 1991 for City News Service, the Los Angeles...
No postings for a couple of days. Sorry....
Last year's unusually horrible air pollution didn't repeat this smog season because of the mild summer and the October rains. The air was the cleanest it has been in 25...
Forget any talk of national healing. On today's L.A. Times op-ed page, former major league baseball player-turned-Christian broadcaster Frank Pastore warns Kerry voters that America is about "ethnic and religious...
Two months after he began leaving, the Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray gives his final sermon Sunday at First AME Church. He talks with Warren Olney tonight at 7 on KCRW's...
The anonymous, female "A3G" is a former federal law clerk whose blog Underneath Their Robes treats federal judges as celebs—"a combination of People, US Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer,...
The copy editor on the national desk at the Times died this morning, Assistant Managing Editor Melissa McCoy announced to the staff. Barton had been hospitalized for several weeks with...
Lloyd Grove, the New York Daily News gossiper, reported this morning (followed by an LA.com item) that the December issue of Esquire will unmask the anonymous blogger Defamer as Mark...
Today's Home section of the Times veers away from its usual topics with a memoir by writer Michele Willens about earlier days in the exclusive, now-gated Malibu Colony. At a...
Regarding that pledge of blue-red civility and support for the president that blogger Jeff Jarvis made over the weekend, Reason magazine's Matt Welch dissents on his personal blog: To split...
Both CityBeat and the LA Weekly (bottom of column) today run appreciations to the creator of the Golden Apple Comics store at 7711 Melrose Avenue. From Don Waller in CityBeat:...
Erin Aubry writes in today's LA Weekly that councilman Bernard Parks was the toast of the city's black leadership a year ago, but not anymore now that he's running for...
Bobby Shriver, brother of Maria, in-law of Arnold, son of Sargent and Eunice, got the most votes by far in the race for Santa Monica City Council. It was his...
Some Republicans are crowing that George W. Bush racked up the most popular votes of any president in history. It's true, but misleading: John Kerry also got more votes than...
Last week's episode of "LAX" showed a male streaker running through a security checkpoint. On Monday, a Canadian man who was turned away from a Qantas flight to Australia stripped...
The city commission that runs the Department of Water and Power formally offered the general manager job on Tuesday to Ron Deaton, the city council's chief legislative analyst. He will...
S. Irene Virbila writes in today's L.A. Times that Bastide was "the best restaurant in Los Angeles, an absolute jewel for classic French cuisine and the only restaurant to have...
RonFineman.com reports that Lynette Romero will not return from maternity leave as Hal Fishman's co-anchor on channel 5's "News at 10." He doesn't know of a replacement, and there apparently...
If you want to read blog accounts of other people's experiences at the polls today (long lines, fairly smooth procedures), they are up at LAVoice, Blogging.la, Defamer, LAist, BoifromTroy, Franklin...
Jim Hahn was asked yesterday about the Times' stories alleging that one of his contributors, Mark Alan Abrams, put together $300,000 in contributions for the mayor and may have received...
Down in Hawthorne, the site of the home where Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson lived when they began the Beach Boys has been designated California Historical Landmark #1041. The home...
The retirement of Tribune Co. executive Jack Fuller does not bode well for the comfort of occupants in the L.A. Times building, Kate Berry reports in this week's L.A. Business...
High profile New York blogger Jeff Jarvis, reacting to the last wave of "spit and bile and venom" from ultra-partisans as the presidential campaign comes to a close, posts this...
The downtown Long Beach institution with an inventory of one million books celebrates seven decades in business, the last 45 years at 240 Long Beach Boulevard. In a Press-Telegram feature...
The Mexican writer and man of letters is the subject of a piece in today's L.A. Times by Reed Johnson, and he also will speak tonight at the Central Library...
Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts posted last week that Tim Brown will take over from Ross Newhan as the national baseball beat writer at the L.A. Times. He says to...
The Getty complex on the hill in Brentwood is already a paranoid place to work, and now blogger Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes reports he's been told that Getty...
It was news last year when Mayor Hahn's top communications adviser and campaign manager Matt Middlebrook left the City Hall staff for a VP position at Fleishman-Hillard in San Francisco....
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.
