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Archive by Month
June 30, 2004
That's the cover line on CityBeat's lead story on the reinvention of Bernard Parks from police chief-turned-councilman into mayoral candidate. Dean Kuipers went out on...
From this week's Publishers Lunch roundup of book sales: • Film rights to Bernard Cooper's THE BILL FROM MY FATHER, a memoir about his difficult relationship...
As predicted here a couple of weeks back, Kelly Scott has officially been named a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine. On the...
This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is publicizing the names of actors, directors, writers and others who have been invited to...
Dunphy is the pseudonym of an LAPD cop who writes columns about life in the department, with a dose of conservative political viewpoint thrown in,...
June 29, 2004
California will vote on measures covering stem cell research to mandatory DNA testing of felons, and yet again two more on Indian gambling. The propositions...
In tomorrow's Times Calendar section, Anne-Marie O'Connor has a feature on President Bush's man in Brentwood, Bradford Freeman. He tells the story that his brother...
L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik won a Gerald R. Loeb Award for commentary today in New York. The judges said his "Golden State" columns in...
The local knockoff of the New York website will be called LAist when it launches next week. Tom Berman will do the writing. Franklin Avenue...
If the National Enquirer is right, you can forget all that stuff about Rick Fox retiring from the Lakers to spend more time with his...
Mayor Hahn's attempt to defuse community tensions over the arrest and apparent LAPD-inflicted flashlight beating of Stanley Miller hit a couple of snags Monday. African...
June 28, 2004
Candidate for mayor Bob Hertzberg relaunched his web presence Monday with a new site at ChangeLA.com. He posted a multimedia ad and, hoping to take...
At the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards this weekend in San Antonio, two local writers won first place in the Arts Feature category. Kristine McKenna...
No postings until later in the day, if then....
June 27, 2004
For years, writes Jason Kandel in today's Daily News, "when police intercepted cocaine and methamphetamine coming into locations as far-flung as Hawaii and Florida, they...
Reyner Banham in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies coined the label "Plains of Id" for the vast basin of mostly suburbs that surrounds...
Michael Kinsley devotes the entire editorial rail in Sunday's L.A. Times Opinion section to declaring the Bush foray in Iraq a "disaster" — a "monument...
June 25, 2004
Nikki Finke sounds rightfully horrified at the prospect of an "un-sequel" to The Graduate that begins filming next month. It is, she writes in the...
Jonathan Landman, the new cultural desk honcho at the New York Times, seems quite happy that he was able to hire Manohla Dargis away from...
Bill Clinton brings his book tour to L.A. today and tomorrow, and Gayle Pollard-Terry in the Times Calendar section has a feature on the preparations....
That's what Chief Bratton, Mayor Hahn and many community spokespeople are saying about the response over the coming weeks and months to the videotaped arrest...
Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond sang "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" together for the first time in 24 years, helping John Kerry raise $5 million...
June 24, 2004
Top left on the front page of Thursday's New York Times (at least in California), Charlie LeDuff and John Broder of the L.A. bureau proclaim...
Laurie Pike at LA.Comfidential has the lowdown on editor news at Distinction (they have yet to fill the job she left last year), Hollywood Life...
Morale at the L.A. Times dropped a few more notches this afternoon on reports that the New York Times has grabbed three valuable names off...
The LA Weekly's cover story is on photographer Larry Sultan's upcoming book of still images from porn shoots inside tract houses and back yards around...
June 23, 2004
In the Talking Points segment of his Fox News Channel show last night, Bill O'Reilly complained there is not enough media outrage over the beheadings...
Another L.A. institution has been sold. Du-par's coffee shops, which began in 1938 at the Farmers Market, were purchased by the family that used to...
LAPD brass is looking into an arrest this morning during which a TV news camera took video of an officer reportedly using a flashlight to...
There's a couple of wish-I-had-that-back emails in the media news today. On his way out of the door at "Access Hollywood" (to host "The Insider"),...
Rip Rense recollects suggesting to the last publisher of the old Valley News (known to generations of Valleyites as "The Green Sheet") that he change...
The L.A. Times' Tim Rutten steps away from his media column for the day to review the Bill Clinton memoir and finds it a bit...
Fashion dishers Joan Rivers and her daughter Melissa are poised to defect from E! for an $8 million deal at the TV Guide Channel, the...
The Los Angeles edition of Korea Times published a special edition Tuesday following the killing by Iraqi terrorists of South Korean Kim Sun-il. About 200...
June 22, 2004
The Los Angeles Auto Show, an after-New Year's fixture at the Convention Center, is moving to mid-November. The new date begins in 2006....
Michael Kinsley may have trouble getting his editorials into print, but his first of what will be a weekly column ran today on the L.A....
Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist Doug Krikorian said on his radio show on KSPN this afternoon that Lakers owner Jerry Buss met face-to-face with Miami Heat...
New York magazine's Intelligencer reports that L.A. Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff is close to replacing Herbert Muschamp as the lead architecture writer for the...
How insane will it be in Century City when Bill Clinton drops in at rush hour for a 5 p.m. Friday appearance at Brentano's? Here's...
Dozens of sympathy cards and programs from the Reagan funerals are up for sale on eBay, including two pages worth from the Reagan Library event...
Caryn Coleman of art.blogging.la and the sixspace gallery is profiled in this week's Downtown News, with photo by Gary Leonard. It's part of a series...
A Times story in today's paper reports that, in addition to the 62 editorial jobs lost through buyout and layoff, about 100 people have left...
How's this for runaway production. Robert Towne is shooting Ask the Dust, based on John Fante's classic Los Angeles novel of the 1930s, in Cape...
June 21, 2004
The Tribune Company is conducting an internal probe of circulation figures claimed by all of its newspapers, including the L.A. Times, after Newsday acknowledged that...
There's a new summer and fall schedule for the free Public Square lecture series presented by Zócalo and co-sponsored by L.A. Observed. Next up, on...
It's Michael H. Schill, professor of law at New York University and director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at NYU....
The threatened layoffs began today down on Spring Street. Reports vary on numbers, but I'm hearing that somewhere around 20-25 editorial staffers are being dismissed....
A little help for an L.A. freelance writer... Rodger Jacobs is looking for information on an effort in the 1960s to build an escape route...
KCRW is turning over tomorrow's "Politics of Culture" program to Slate blogger Mickey Kaus, who will talk about "politics, the Internet and blogs" with Instapundit's...
The Times has a story out of Ventura County today on Lance Orozco, the news director (and only reporter) at KCLU-FM (88.3) who was named...
The Los Angeles Business Journal's Howard Fine reports (pay only) this week that councilman Antonio Villaraigosa "appeared to be leaning strongly" toward entering the race...
Michiko Kakutani gave a bad review to Bill Clinton's book, but Publishers Lunch says the only surprise there is that the New York Times let...
June 20, 2004
CaliforniaAuthors.com on Sunday notes the release of a new collection of essays from D.J. Waldie, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, published by...
Even though the Dodgers lost 6-2, there was a lot of buzz in the stadium today with the Yankees in the house for the first...
June 18, 2004
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...
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...
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."...
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...
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...
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...
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...
June 17, 2004
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
June 16, 2004
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
June 15, 2004
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
June 14, 2004
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...
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...
"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...
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...
June 13, 2004
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...
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...
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...
It's the fitting way to honor Ray Charles, says Rip Rense....
June 12, 2004
• BoifromTroy was out at a California League of Conservation Voters meeting and swears he heard L.A. councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, the John Kerry campaign co-chair, say:...
Blogger Greg Dewar writes that the Screen Actors Guild has been besieged with complaints that Ronald Reagan's portrait is not displayed with other past presidents...
June 11, 2004
Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine has a cover piece on Craig Newmark, the former IBM programmer and computer security geek who started and still runs Craigslist....
Joel Kotkin, the Valley-based author and political analyst, proposes in The New Republic that Reagan conservatism's ideological heir for Californians is not Bush or anyone...
Elvis Mitchell, host of "The Treatment" on KCRW, is using his time (now that's he's stopped reviewing films for the New York Times) to write...
The Times goes front page today with a Michael Finnegan story on the merging of Hollywood and presidential politics in the marketing of Fahrenheit 9/11....
June 10, 2004
After Bush's pollster complained, Mickey Kaus went right to Los Angeles Times Poll director Susan Pinkus for an explanation of this morning's story that has...
Lonewacko screen grabs Drudge and suggests he give the flashing banner ads a rest for one day:...
My friends at Los Angeles magazine gathered up nine awards — more than any other publication — at the City and Regional Magazine Association competition...
Two Marines who fought in Iraq help tout Evan Wright's new book on the war in a Sharon Waxman story out of Oceanside in today's...
Paul Cullum in the LA Weekly is the latest writer to seek to explain Phil Hendrie, the KFI talk host who relies more than most...
June 09, 2004
As TV news insider Ron Fineman predicted, the local CBS operation is announcing that Miami weathercaster Jackie Johnson will be coming to town. The memo...
Time is bringing back Life magazine in its saddest incarnation yet — as a weekly insert in newspapers such as the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune...
The Livingston Awards are for excellence in reporting by journalists under the age of 35. This year's $10,000 award for international reporting went to T....
Franklin Avenue notes that Rolling Stone has a story this issue on Santa Monica-based FM station Indie 103.1 and calls it "America's coolest commercial station."...
Bruce Feirstein, writing in the New York Observer, imagines making over the front page of the New York Times. EDITOR’S NOTE: After a long and...
Bestselling local Young Adult author Francesca Lia Block has sold her first adult novel Necklace of Kisses to Harper. In the book, her long-running character...
An elected supervisor in Orange County wants to change the name of the airport there to The O.C., after the Fox TV show. Chris Norby...
Charles Perry is not just a food writer (and the author of a history of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene), he is an historian of food....
Next time your guy announces that he is halting campaign events to honor a deceased prez, make sure no pro-Bush bloggers are around. A Moxie...
June 08, 2004
While Jack Nicholson and friends cheered on the Lakers win tonight in the NBA finals at Staples Center, Jim Hahn and his staff (and a...
Michel Thomas is the World War II veteran and language teacher to the stars whose supporters are in a running dispute with the L.A. Times...
Times editor John Carroll confirmed to the staff late today that buyouts and possibly layoffs are coming. His email echoes, and expands only somewhat, on...
The Democratic candidate's Disney Hall fundraiser — called off last night after the death of Ronald Reagan — is now set for June 24. Just...
The cover story in June's California Lawyer visits with lawyers who blog about the law. Among the locals included are, in order of appearance, Denise...
The controversy over the ACLU pressuring Los Angeles County to remove a small cross from the official county seal (which was designed by the father...
A memo to the staff today by L.A. Times Publisher John Puerner — who, incidentally, plays bass in an in-house rock band on the side...
Back in April, Mayor Jim Hahn responded to controversy over city spending on expensive but politically sensitive public relations contracts by promising to get rid...
That's a reduction of 200 staffers across all the Tribune Co. papers, not just at the L.A. Times, a Chicago Tribune story says today. Each...
June 07, 2004
The Westmar Sun is "a Web-based journal of news and opinion about Mar Vista and the Westdales," small L.A. neighborhoods on the border of Santa...
L.A. Times editor John Carroll's provocative calling out of Fox News (retorted by Roger Ailes last week) is still getting around. A shortened version of...
In this media crazy world, some people consume too much news — and some people evidently too little. A woman who lives in Santa Monica...
Aside from the threat of editorial staff reductions at the L.A. Times, there has already been a cutback on the business side that has a...
Five Pulitzers or no, Tribune Publishing president Jack Fuller just threw a pall over the newsroom at the L.A. Times. While rumors swirl about 60...
Angel City Press and CaliforniaAuthors.com took their new anthology of travel and adventure essays to last week's Book Expo America in Chicago. And it was...
Candidate for mayor Bob Hertzberg got a bit of attention in April for starting a campaign blog and discussing on it his nickname of Bob...
I Want Media, the busy website by Patrick Phillips, has started a new feature of short items that are not pegged to the day's news....
La Opinión, in press release speak "the largest Spanish language daily newspaper in the country," today launched a daily business section, "Negocios." The paper also...
Garrison asks the question at The Aesthetic, and runs through the contenders. And while I'm surfing websites: Bob Patterson at Just Above Sunset has the...
Peter Rainer, the New York magazine (and ex-L.A. Times) film critic — and regular on KPCC's "Film Week" — will be the guest host for...
June 06, 2004
Frank Gehry's team may have missed out on the big Grand Avenue design project in downtown Los Angeles, but they still like him at Harvard....
Guests who were planning to attend Monday's John Kerry campaign fundraiser at the Walt Disney Hall have been emailed and called alerting them the event...
Zzzzzzz....
On June 12 it will be ten years since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman that made Bundy Drive, Rockingham Avenue and...
June 05, 2004
Edited throughout the day ABC News came on first with the bulletin that the president who had called Los Angeles home since the 1930s died...
June 04, 2004
Hollywood sources told LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke late Friday that the medical condition of former President Ronald Reagan has worsened. Doctors have gone to...
A Fly on the Wall has made a quick name for his/herself since catching the blogging bug last month. The site posted the news of...
The buzzword around the L.A. Times newsroom today is layoffs. The masthead rushed into meetings, an editors retreat was cancelled and terms like "draconian" and...
I shouldn't be one to poke fun at typos and brain freezes, since they happen to me so often, but just for the record: Jose...
Joz at blogging.la posts on the case of the UCLA student who says she was raped by three Carson High School students who got into...
June 03, 2004
Richard Rushfield is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, the co-creator of L.A. Innuendo and the author of On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood....
The Orange County Register has picked a new bureau chief for Sacramento: Kimberly Kindy. In the following memo from Register "team leader" Mark Katches, the...
Former L.A. Times Magazine staff writer David DeVoss, who freelances for Smithsonian and elsewhere, dishes on Mayor Hahn and L.A. city government in the latest...
Get ready to hear yet again, over the next 24-48 hours, the story of how radio SigAlerts came to be part of the Los Angeles...
L.A. Observed ranked sixth (well, tied for sixth with Gawker et al) among favorite blogs of women in the media who responded to an email-in...
Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa's people were successful last week at getting the media to bite on a labor-sponsored poll showing that he would begin the mayor's...
From some of the local weekly papers: • The Downtown News covers a suspected break-in at the office of the El Pueblo Historical Monument by former...
June 02, 2004
Prints the Chaff was a blog for copy editors written by Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News. Archives that he felt deserved saving...
When the National Magazine Awards were handed out last month, I blew it. There was a winner from Los Angeles. Evan Wright, who writes from...
For more than a week, "California Connected" on KCET has been promoting this Thursday's show featuring segments on Suspect Entertainment (the gang talent agency we...
Dan Weintraub reports on his California Insider blog that Gov. Schwarzenegger has returned from a short getaway to an undisclosed location. The reason the locale...
Sports writers keep saying that the Dodgers lack the cash to bring in better players, because new owner Frank McCourt is so heavily leveraged. Meanwhile,...
The Los Angeles-based staff writer for The New Yorker (and former Harvard Westlake English teacher) riled up people with her March piece in the Atlantic,...
Back on May 6, L.A. Times Editor John Carroll used a speech at the University of Orgeon to lambaste Fox News as a polluted journalism...
June 01, 2004
The silver, chandeliers, furnishings, a 1905 Steinway grand piano and everything else left from the old Perino's will be auctioned this Saturday at 7 p.m....
The woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape won't be referred to in jury instructions as the "victim" -- only as a "person" or by...
Jeffrey Toobin has a great local item this week in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" department. After police arrested Juan Catalan for the...
The former Hollywood Reporter editor and (sometimes) L.A. Times Calendar writer filed suit late last week against jailed private eye Anthony Pellicano, LAPD detective Mark...
Frank McCulloch was, briefly and long ago, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times when Otis Chandler was the fresh-faced young publisher intent on...
Last week it was Patterico shedding the relative comfort of anonymous blogging to reveal he is a local deputy district attorney. Now the former Armed...
Mel Karmarzin resigned today as the number two executve to Sumner Redstone at Viacom, to be replaced by Tom Freston, the CEO of MTV Networks,...
A note to readers in Sunday's Orange County Register from Gene Harbrecht, the paper's nation and world editor, announced that stories picked up from the...
The prominent attorney is under investigation for allegedly violating campaign limit laws by getting his law firm's employees to contribute $20,000 to Mayor Jim Hahn,...
Today's Washington Post runs two unrelated dispatches from the California deserts. The first reports from the Flying J Travel Plaza in Barstow: Inside is a...
L.A. Observed is the newest co-sponsor of the "Public Square" Lecture Series presented by Zócalo and the Los Angeles Public Library. Zócalo seeks to create...
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| The funeral for Mark Lacter will be held Sunday, Nov. 24 at 12 noon at Hillside Memorial Park, 6001 W. Centinela Avenue, Los Angeles 90045. Reception to follow.
Before I lived in Echo Park, there was a tiny 1920s bungalow-cottage-standalone house on N. Occidental in Silver Lake. I...
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