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Edgy it's not, but the Times' not-quite-a-blog on inauguration week has had some pretty good items. Today Steve Hymon went to Hahn's free exit lunch on the City Hall portico...
LA Observed archive
for June 2005
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
The Times' Larry Stewart broke online the news that Spero Dedes will replace Joel Meyers as the Laker's radio play-by-play announcer. Meyers went to the TV side. Dedes is 26...
Up in Sacramento, Political Pulse bought the Capitol Weekly website and newspapers and plans to launch a state political news portal later this summer. The portal, a partnership with Scott...
I've also copied below the Villaraigosa transition's list of diginitaries attending the Friday swearing-in. It's for readers whose enjoyment is in the details. I count 43 consuls-general and Mexico's ambassador...
Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa will be sworn in to office on Friday by Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Reinhardt is something of a lightning rod...
The search for a Times book review editor is starting to drag on, considering that Steve Wasserman told his bosses he was leaving before the Festival of Books in April....
At the Times' online Inauguration Notebook, Daniel Hernandez looks at how the local Spanish-language media has been getting ready for the Villaraigosa era. Hoy has been running a front-page countdown...
KCRW says their daily podcast traffic jumped tenfold to 100,000 when Apple released the new iTunes on Tuesday. The latest version of iTunes lets users easily subscribe to podcasts. Unique...
Someone who observed today's City Council farewell to Cindy Miscikowski emails that both Hahn and Villaraigosa showed up (along with ex-members Zev Yaroslavsky and Joy Picus.) The video tribute included...
Reporters Matt Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times go to court today to be sentenced for contempt in the Valerie Plame affair. It's quite likely...
Outbound: • Hahn chats with Tina Daunt about the future, goes dirt-bike riding with Jackson and Katrina, and tries to score Rolling Stone tickets for the Hollywood Bowl: "I've seen the...
The Times has finally named a fulltime radio reporter. Martin Miller is the first staffer asigned to the beat in a long while. [* Update: On the Calendar side anyway....
LATimes.com is posting a running Inauguration Notebook. It's starting out slow, though Daniel Hernandez picked up on the not-intended-for-the-public job applications showing up on the Villaraigosa website. The Times also...
Burson-Marsteller just announced that Fred Muir, formerly a reporter and editor at the Times, is taking over the Southern California office as "market leader" and managing director in the media...
You might not want to be around the Civic Center on Friday unless you are there to partake in the festivities. Here's the word from Villaraigosa Central. [* Plus an...
According to to the pay site RonFineman.com, Channel 2 was thinking seriously of taking Jim Hill out of the sports anchor slot. Hill didn't want to go, and he got...
The Times sent Valerie Reitman to cover the last rites at the Redwood, which began Friday night and spilled over into Monday. Turns out the old bar closed because business...
In response to Ken Reich's blog rant last week about the low turnout of Times people at a Little Tokyo event for the Frank del Olmo Legacy Lecture Series, the...
L.A. Business Journal editor Mark Lacter gives the details on long-time political reporter Howard Fine's shift onto some new beats. His email also says that next week's issue will add...
On Friday morning the long windup ends and Antonio Villaraigosa's term as mayor actually begins. To prepare, the Times interrupted former government editor and City Hall ace Jim Newton's book...
When they weren't invited some years ago to join Steve Wasserman's Institute for the Humanities (which some members call The Geniuses), journos Mickey Kaus and Ann Louise Bardach countered by...
Big ink for KCRW's Nic Harcourt in the NYT Magazine, where Jaime Wolf anoints him "The Star Maker of the Semipopular"...The NYT also does a feature on Christians in Hollywood...
The office of state Assemblyman Mike Gordon announced that he died today from the brain tumor that was diagnosed in February, shortly after he took office. Gordon was from El...
Folks, one of our protectors was killed yesterday doing his job in the city of Hawaiian Gardens. Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Jerry Ortiz, attached to an anti-gang unit, was...
Summertime, and the living is easy. So just shorts today, but check the tail end for updates. • Controller Laura Chick released a highly critical follow-up audit that says overseers of...
John Balzar becomes a senior writer for the weekly Home, Food and Outdoors sections at the Times. Bettijane Levine, the former fashion editor, joins Home. Steven Barrie-Anthony becomes one of...
Hollywood freelancer (for the New York Times and others) Ross Johnson has fallen into the blogging web. And for his first meaty entry at The Ross Files, he names names...
Julius Shulman is rightfully legendary for his architectural photography, but as he slides well into his 90s he's getting more known for his irascibility. I'd heard that at last Saturday's...
Longtime L.A. Times rock critic Robert Hilburn is asked by a reader in today's Calendar Weekend section: "What do you do to protect your hearing at concerts?" Hilburn: I'm not...
The mayor-elect told the Times that cuts are necessary to correct a growing deficit. He declined to get specific, but said "people are going to be surprised" by what he...
They happened Tuesday night on the southbound Harbor Freeway near Adams Blvd. The victims were both wounded, but the driver got off the freeway, got back on northbound, and drove...
If it seemed to you like reaction to the L.A. Times wikitorial split along the lines that often divide those who get the Internet from those who don't have a...
Nikki Finke says in the LA Weekly that Anita Busch, the former Hollywood Reporter editor and writer for the LAT and NYT who was threatened over pursuing a story on...
Luke Ford reports at his blog that Andrew Breitbart, the West Coast editor for the Drudge Report until he left in April to help launch the Huffington Post, returned to...
Updated with new entries at the bottom... • It's official: the Dodgers' star reliever Eric Gagne is done for this year and the start of next season — at best. He's...
Bob Hertzberg, Eric Garcetti and Bernard Parks all came out Tuesday as supporters of former Speaker Herb Wesson's candidacy for the city council. He wants the 10th district seat soon...
More than 1,300 law enforcement officers raided homes of the Vineland Boyz/Boys starting at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday, serving 43 search warrants in three counties and arresting 23/36 gang members on...
Several of the personnel moves posted here recently have been Style desk writers on the Times' features floor taking new assignments -- Roy Rivenburg to Orange County, Mimi Avins and...
Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist Doug Krikorian has been doing sports talk on L.A. radio since 1992. On Monday, he got the axe at KSPN (710 AM). His radio partner, Joe...
Lisa Beebe at Blogging.la noticed a Mary Kay cosmetics peddler making sales to passengers on the MTA's 152 bus. When Beebe got on again two hours later to go home,...
I bumped up the main font just a hair. If it bothers you, let me know. By the way, I designed the site so most new browsers can adjust the...
FishbowlLA turns sleuth and checks on the cred of a semi-anonymous trendy mentioned in last Thursday's New York Times Styles section. The trail leads, possibly, to Alexandra Kerry. Fishbowl also...
Retired Times writer-turned-blogger Ken Reich raps his former LAT colleagues on the virtual knuckles for not turning out last night to support a book of columns by the late Frank...
As if freelancers weren't already feeling pensive about the coming remake of the Times Sunday magazine, they now have good reason to expect fewer assignments. Four staff writers are being...
Martin Ludlow's coronation as labor boss of L.A. County hit a snag when some unions refused to go along. Instead of the 10th district city councilman sailing through at a...
Porn photos posted late at night doomed the L.A. Times wikitorial, the New York Times reports Tuesday. Deputy editorial page editor Michael Newman suggests the hardcore stuff came in after...
Jim Hahn — I'll have to check, but I believe he is the mayor of Los Angeles — makes a rare public appearance on Saturday in San Pedro. He will...
Mondays are always so busy... • This news won't help the layoff jitters sweeping the LAT's newsrooms this week. Tribune Company stock was downgraded Monday to "neutral" from "buy" by brokerage...
Jim Flanigan's column has been a fixture in the Times Business section for more than two decades. His last piece as senior economic editor runs July 3, then he's leaving...
Well, you knew this was coming. The Times has taken down its first experimental wikitorial, explaining: Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few...
The LA Weekly picked up four first-place AltWeekly Awards, the most of any paper. From the release: The Los Angeles paper won not only for Jonathan Gold's sterling food writing...
• Change is coming to the third floor press rooms. At the City News Service desk, Art Marroquin is coming up from San Diego to take over for Erin Park, who...
In a Week in Review piece in today's New York Times, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff dishes on the design of most stadiums and says Frank Gehry — building a new...
Tyler Green, reviewer for Bloomberg News and the blogger at Modern Art Notes, lives on the East Coast but keeps up on museums out here. He has posted scoops on...
It has been a while now, but some might remember when then-Times reporter Anita Busch was threatened in 2002 over a story she was pursuing on actor Steven Seagal and...
Robin Kramer will return to the third floor of City Hall as the chief of staff to Mayor Villaraigosa; she previously served in the same capacity for Richard Riordan. The...
The innovation du jour at the Times editorial page is a lead editorial, titled War and Consequences, where readers are invited to go online and improve it. It's accompanied by...
• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect until July 1, of course....
Well not exactly the Times, but this was the top Google ad tonight on the California news page on LATimes.com: Topless in Vegas Folies Bergere at the Tropicana Gorgeous Women...
The experiment called the L.A. Times editorial page veered off in a new direction today. In place of editorials and letters to the editor, they blew out the whole page...
Jacoba Urist is 28 and worked as a lawyer in the New York office of O'Melveny & Myers for eight months, before quitting two years ago. Page Six says she's...
Obits are praising the accomplishments of Carlo Maria Giulini, conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1978-84. "We have lost one of the greatest musicians of our...
Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opens today at LACMA. The last time Kig Tut's treasures were here it was a mega-event. The museum and the exhibit's promoters,...
The first Villaraigosa inaugural invitations are going out. As you can see on the full-page PDF file, dining and dancing with the mayor-elect won't come cheap. For the June 30...
Yeah, the photo is familar. I ran it in March — but it's a great downtown image from 1923, showing the old Farmers and Merchants Bank that still stands at...
The Liberty Film Festival, which got some attention for its debut last year as a West Hollywood showcase and schmoozefest for conservatives, is coming back around. They're going to do...
Mayor-elect Villaraigosa flies to Fort Worth today to speak to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention. Meanwhile, the Times' Patrick McGreevy and Jessica Garrison confirm yesterday's post that a...
Michael Kinsley's old friend and Slate colleague Timothy Noah writes today that the L.A. Times should just do away with unsigned editorials. Excerpt: If the newspaper editorial were, in itself,...
• Times feature writer Roy Rivenburg is going legit, transferring to the Metro staff in Orange County. Writes Style editor Rich Nordwind, in a memo to the staff today: "The O.C....
There's no rest for the politics weary. No sooner is the mayor's race over than the drumbeats begin for the governor's agenda-pushing special election, called for Nov. 8. I'll gin...
Ben Stiller was on KCRW's Design and Architecture this afternoon, talking with Frances Anderton about the city and the new book he co-edited, Looking at Los Angeles. The audio should...
Councilman-elect Bill Rosendahl is going to take the ceremonial oath of office at Venice Beach. He will do it Saturday, July 2, from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. The email...
Longtime award-winning L.A. reporter Warren Wilson announced his retirement from KTLA yesterday. When we last heard from him, Wilson had hired Melanie Lomax to press discrimination claims against the station,...
Phil Jackson will be announced as the next coach of the Lakers at a 2 p.m. press conference. Just this morning, the Times reported that the Lakers want him to...
David Brown is stepping down as host of American Public Media'a Marketplace, the daily business and finance show produced here in L.A. Brown says, "I am very excited about starting...
Since the so-called 3-12 work schedule for officers went into effect, crime is down [pretty much everywhere...] and morale and recruitment are up, but it takes longer to get a...
Stanley C. Jaroszenski, who is 64 and lives downtown, was arrested Monday on a federal indictment listing 117 charges of sending hypodermic needles and threatening letters to numerous people, including...
Former Fleishman-Hillard executives Doug Dowie and John Stodder were in federal court Monday and got an extension on their conspiracy and wire fraud trial. Their attorneys said that more than...
Howard Kurtz's column this week in the Washington Post visits with Stephanie Miller, the L.A.-based host for Air America, the talk radio-for-liberals service. As recently as 2000, Miller hosted a...
ChoiCentral tracks the sudden rise to popularity of Dodgers first baseman Hee Seop Choi, who this weekend opened a lot of eyes by clubbing six home runs. I believe I...
* Never fails. Something new comes in every time I post one of these shorts lists. Fresh shorties at the bottom. • The Times live-blogged the runup to the Michael Jackson...
You can't say that Michael Kinsley hasn't gotten people talking about the L.A. Times editorial and opinion pages, though Kinsley and his colleagues might wish that more of the chatter...
Our friends and colleagues in Santa Maria can come home now. Jacko not guilty on all counts. Much ado about not much....
The Daily News' Rachel Uranga lands the first story since the election about Corina Villaraigosa, "a soft-spoken educator and mother who shies away from the limelight...." Her father was a...
Eric Stone, the Silver Lake author of Wrong Side of the Wall: The Story of Blackie Schwamb, the Greatest Ballplayer in Prison History, is driving the country for a summer-long...
A To Our Readers note on Sunday from L.A. Times Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez introduces some upcoming changes to his page (and his former paper, the New York Times,...
That gentle but noticeable 8:41 a.m. earthquake was actually decent sized, a 5.6 (preliminary (downgraded to 5.2) magnitude ground shudder centered below the desert six miles east-southeast of Anza, Calif....
Bob Giraldi, a commercial and music video director, explaining in the New York Times why he went ahead with shooting a promo film for New York's apparently doomed Olympic hopes:...
Michael Lewis has been stricken from the online menu of Sunday Opinion columnists at the Times since I observed last Wednesday that his presence there was moot. The same day,...
People are buzzing about how L.A.'s mayor is suddenly spotted everywhere these days, giving speeches, meeting the folks, dedicating a new ride at Universal City, throwing out the first ball...
The quote is how Tijuana journalist Jesus Blancornelas began his remarks last night at the 47th annual Southern California Journalism Awards. He accepted the L.A. Press Club's Daniel Pearl award...
Readers of Mickey Kaus's blog at Slate know he's no fan of the local paper, but the Times really got him going this week. On Wednesday he blasted the LAT's...
The Daily Bruin at UCLA is on to a good story that doesn't turn up anywhere else on a Google search. It seems that the Geffen School of Medicine last...
Today's Daily Journal report on Steve Sugerman, the latest ex-Fleishman-Hillard exec to face charges, says that prosecutors expect Doug Dowie to plead guilty when he appears in federal court Monday...
The Times sends three reporters after Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz, and they come back with reports of lavish spending, petty demands and much resentment. Excerpts: Munitz is a man...
It has been one of those shorty kind of days... • The westbound lanes of the Century Freeway were shut down for two hours this afternoon to investigate another shooting. The...
Now we know who one of the key government witnesses will be against Dowie Dowie and John Stodder, the former Fleishman-Hillard executives charged with fraudulent billngs and conspiracy. Steve Sugerman,...
Staffers close to Antonio Villaraigosa say that Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas is at work on a book about the mayor-elect's rise and the state of Latino politics. They knew...
• Antonio Villaraigosa intends to become chairman of the MTA board when he takes ofice. The mayor gets to appoint three other MTA members, and he vowed to look at extending...
One of Deputy Managing Editor John Montorio's ambitions for the features side of the Times is a stand-alone weekly section called Image. He thinks it would be a perfect fit...
Times-watcher Patterico points out on his blog that the LAT Sunday Opinion section has not run its innovative Outside the Tent feature since April 24. He writes: There’s no lack...
When he was a rookie on the Palos Verdes Estates police force 23 years ago, Dan Dreiling arrested a home burglar named Charles Vaca. Dreiling is now the chief, but...
Slate's Mickey Kaus complains that yesterday's freeway chase-shutdown story should have been on page one of this morning's L.A. Times, not B-3 with a teaser on B-1. He blames the...
Randy Archibold, who used to be a reporter for the L.A. Times and the Daily News, is returning to town as a national correspondent for the New York Times. The...
• As expected, Martin Ludlow will leave the City Council to take over the County Federation of Labor. He will make $37,000 a year more than Miguel Contreras, the late...
Participants in the Congress for the New Urbanism meet in Pasadena from Wednesday through the weekend. Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa will deliver remarks about his vision for Los Angeles at the...
Anne Bancroft, an actress for fifty years, has died of uterine cancer in New York. She was 73. Of her many roles, she might be best known today for playing...
The San Bernardino Freeway is closed in both directions in Alhambra while a SWAT team negotiates with a kidnapping suspect. A robot just brought the suspect in the white van...
Maria Shriver tells the New York Daily News' Lloyd Grove that she had no contact with anyone at NBC about the Schwarzenegger biography by Laurence Leamer. "It never came up,...
Sitrick and Co. executive Kelly Mullens has a fulltime office at Dodger Stadium these days, and the strategic PR company's tab to help team owner Frank McCourt change his image...
Union leaders have called a noon news conference, presumably to announce that Councilman Martin Ludlow has been named executive secretary of the County Federation of Labor. The Times story quotes...
Antonio Villaraigosa's chief media adviser in the campaign, David Doak, has signed on to do the same for Fernando Ferrer in New York. Ferrer is a Democrat who trails the...
The Times is converting a seat on the editorial board into a three-month visiting fellow slot, as a way to bring in more thinking from academics and foreign journalists. The...
In this week's Downtown News, Jay Berman looks back at the story of legendary Los Angeles lawyer Joseph Scott. He arrived in town in 1893 and practiced law here for...
The 47th annual Southern California Journalism Awards have come on as a sponsor of L.A. Observed. That wouldn't necessarily merit an item on the blog, but there's a story percolating...
The entire editorials column in Sunday's L.A. Times was devoted to the first effort in what appears to be an ambitious months-long campaign against malaria in Africa. The 1,400-word piece...
The ocean phenomenon where red algae bloom, bacteria deplete the oxygen, fish die and the beaches look and smell bad is apparently pretty extreme now in the South Bay. "Michael...
That was the amount in so-called independent expenditures — not subject to limits — during this year's city election campaigns, the Times' Jeff Rabin reports. In the mayoral runoff, one...
O'Leary, a former nun, ran the political consulting firm O'Leary and Associates in Los Angeles and served twelve years on the Democratic National Committee. She died of lung cancer in...
Laurence Leamer, author of Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, lost a shot at promoting the book on "Today" because of Maria Shriver, according to David Carr's media column in...
At the end of his Monday column about Deep Throat and Watergate, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz touches on Times political writer Ron Brownstein's marriage to the communications director...
Over at the Huffington Post, former L.A. television news anchor (now actress, production exec and blogger) Bree Walker takes a shot at ex-husband (and likewise ex-anchor) Jim Lampley. Maybe. It...
Soon-to-be-ex Mayor Jim Hahn gave his first extensive interview since the election to Rick Orlov of the Daily News. Orlov has known Hahn a long time and wrote that the...
I'm not certain that I had ever heard his name until now, but Emil Praeger was the architect and engineer of Dodger Stadium. He and his 43-year-old creation, and especially...
An evolving post, with the newest items at the bottom: • If true, this will open up some movement in local politics. According to email from a senior staffer at City...
Turns out that Sen. Hillary Clinton's appearance at Roland Emmerich's house was just the kiddie portion of her Wednesday night stay in L.A. She raised about $450,000 earlier in the...
The paid informant known as "Psycho Mike" who is the chief source for the notion that "Suge" Knight conspired with an LAPD cop to murder Notorious B.I.G. in 1997 says...
The Times identifies Steve Sugerman, a former Fleishman executive and ex-Riordan deputy, as one of the unnamed (and uncharged) co-conspirators. The LAT also says that Dowie is likely to be...
• Bob Hertzberg, chairman of the Villaraigosa transition team, will be on KPCC's Talk of the City Friday at 2 p.m. with guest host Jon Beaupre. • Mayor-elect Villaraigosa has signed on...
Mayor Hahn is seeking soft landing spots for some of his key aides. He has moved to appoint chief of staff Tim McOsker to the City Employees' Retirement System board...
City Controller Laura Chick, whose audits brought some attention to the Fleishman-Hillard PR contracts, released this statement about today's indictment of City Hall figure Doug Dowie. "I want to congratulate...
City News Service has moved an urgent advisory, saying that Doug Dowie, the former head of Fleishman-Hillard public relations in Los Angeles, has been charged with conspiracy and fraud. The...
With grim editor faces and private meetings up on the sixth floor fueling rumors about new cutbacks coming at the Times, the business section has filled a key opening. Davan...
Chris Morris, music editor of the Hollywood Reporter, contributes a piece to this week's CityBeat about the new Ry Cooder album "Chavez Ravine." It was inspired by Don Normark’s book...
A Defamer operative files a report from last night's $125-a-head Hillary Clinton fundraiser: The beer and wine flowed freely, for those guests brave enough to cross Emmerich’s mud-filled lawn to...
Antonio Villaraigosa's Washington trip went well, with the mayor-elect being asked to sign copies of his Newsweek cover and getting good reviews. He spoke to a Latino Leadership lunch ("attended...
The LA Weekly's recurring Weekly Literary Supplement has a cover piece on eighteeen local independent presses, sidebars on Tosh Berman’s TamTam Books, Feral House, Tsehai Publishers and Josh Kun writing...
Sharon Waxman reports in Thursday's New York Times that, with his star Tom Cruise increasingly pushing Scientology and acting oddly while promoting War of the Worlds, Paramount chief Brad Grey...
A week before Johnnie L. Cochran died in March, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving a disgruntled former client of the famed lawyer. Ulysses Tory...
Copley's David Zahniser details in today's Daily Breeze the different hats worn by Fernando Guerra, the Loyola Marymount professor and commentator on local politics who also has made $71,509 so...
On today's Times op-ed page, Cardinal Roger Mahony writes that "the church recognizes the right of our country to control its borders, and it does not condone undocumented migration...but the...
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.
