Weekly archive
May 1 - May 7, 2005
Saturday, May. 7
Organized labor's most influential Los Angeles leader apparently suffered a fatal heart attack late Friday. Contreras suffered from type 2 diabetes; most media sources put his age at 52, but...
Friday, May. 6
• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if Monday's launch of the Huffington...
Eight months ago, the Jewish Journal's singles columnist wrote a piece arguing against marriage. Seth Menachem ends today's column by proposing to his girlfriend, Carrie. So what's changed? I no...
Thursday, May. 5
The Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia plans to induct three more baseball figures into its distinctly non-traditional Shrine of the Eternals in July. The late Dodgers star Jackie Robinson is already...
Hear that roar? Those are the after-burners kicking in on Air Villaraigosa. For the period from April 3 to April 30, the councilman raised $2,211,367 to Mayor Hahn's $763,325. Viewed...
• Friday's City Council meeting was cancelled so those who wish can attend the funeral of slain LAX police officer Tommy Scott. Why do I expect it will be a mayoral...
The television program produced by KCET and three other public TV stations in the state begins its fourth season on a new night — Fridays. Tomorrow's opener airs at 8:30...
Editors of the Times' op-ed page were surprised and chagrined to learn the other day (from the Daily Breeze via L.A. Observed) that Tuesday's commentator Fernando J. Guerra is not...
Longtime L.A. scribe Jan Golab, author of the 1993 book The Dark Side of the Force: A True Story of Corruption & Murder in the LAPD and a writer for...
Commercial services that clean up the detritus at death scenes are in a growth biz. In today's LA Weekly, Christine Pelisek goes around with the husband-and-wife team that created Clean...
Ouch. Harold Meyerson leads today's LA Weekly column with a great Jim Hahn anecdote. Recently, he writes, four Stanford academics studied the effect on voters of a politician's appearance by...
Wednesday, May. 4
• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. He left KABC in...
One of the assumptions skeptics seem to have made about the Huffington Post is that the celebrity contributors will, inevitably, use their assistants, advisers and agents to polish or even...
Fresh off his LAT Book Prize, Evan Wright has sold his next book, The Seed — about his experience at a drug recovery camp in the 80s that used radical,...
The day after Villaraigosa launched a TV blitz calling his rival an ethical slug, Hahn fired back Tuesday with his own spots that slam those controversial Florida donations that Villaraigosa...
Tuesday, May. 3
In today's Daily Breeze, David Zahniser looks at the nearly $1.5 million being spent on the mayoral runoff outside the usual $1,000-per-person contributions limit. Legally, the money has to be...
Steve Wasserman is moving to New York. Today's press release is below, followed by this afternoon's memo to the Times staff saying a successor "will be named soon." First, the...
Late on this, but the L.A. Times has hired freelancer Borzou Daragahi for the Baghdad bureau. He was a Pulitzer finalist this year for Iraq stories in the Newark Star-Ledger...
A new website, LAPDauthors.com, compiles links and information on books by almost two dozen current and former Los Angeles Police Department officers, from Bill Parker to Joseph Wambaugh to Bill...
The outgoing L.A. Times Book Review editor may be considering life as a book agent, says Steven Zeitchik on the Publishers Weekly website. [That's confirmed now.] Also, Tim Rutten —...
Wonkette carefully polled her readers, threw out the numbers and declared the winners in the Inside the Bubble Washington Journalism Awards. Her pick for nicest Washington correspondent:...
These things are estimated in the ten years between national census counts, which themselves are purposely off the mark due to political, uh, sensitivities. But by the latest official guess...
Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, a free agent in the mayoral race, turns to the headline cliche to explain Antonio Villaraigosa's new commercial, which began airing Monday. It rips Jim Hahn...
The Lakers invited their TV game-caller, Paul Sunderland, not to return next season. Turns out he was not the second coming of Chick Hearn. Next! Also: I hope that someone...
Today's New York Times carries two pieces on our freeway shootings, a staff news story by Nick Madigan of the bureau and a more personal treatment by author and editorial...
Monday, May. 2
Today on the 14 Freeway near Santa Clarita, gunshots reportedly from a dark-colored low-rider Acura or Honda smashed windows but didn't hurt anybody. Saturday night on the Golden State near...
Ex-mayor Richard Riordan will be on KCRW's Which Way, L.A.? with Warren Olney this evening at 7 p.m. Riordan, who's backing Villaraigosa, will talk about the schools in the mayoral...
Sources at the L.A. Times confirm the buzz that Steve Wasserman is out as editor of the LAT Book Review. There since 1996, he informed his staff on Friday, after...
Later today the newspaper industry releases its latest bad news about circulation declines. An early peek by Banc of America Securities (yes, that's really how they spell it) found the...
PR Week quizzed the LA Weekly's Deadline Hollywood columnist about how she landed at an alternative weekly, what she thinks of other reporters on the entertainment beat, and how she...
This spring Malibu is reading the original Frederick Kohner novella Gidget, inspired by the surfing subculture his daughter Kathy joined at the beach there one summer in the fifties. The...
In Gregory Rodriguez's op-ed piece in today's Times, we get some fascinating personal insights about the men who are running for mayor. I learned that Jim Hahn does not like...
Sunday, May. 1
Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca, the Daily Journal says...The Times...
By now everyone should know that more people live in the Los Angeles portion of the San Fernando Valley than in any U.S. city except New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston...
