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New L.A. councilman Bill Rosendahl from the Westside is interviewed by Howard Fine in this week's L.A. Business Journal. Rosendahl says that he has created an "Ambassadors Club" to tap...
LA Observed archive
for July 2005
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Defamer's Mark Lisanti is "the newest and hottest foot soldier on the front lines of the celebrity takeover of modern culture," Rachel Abramowitz writes in Sunday's LAT. "He's the witty...
Getting an early start on the weekend. It is summer, you know—and I've already posted ten times today. As new shorts are added, they will be appended to the bottom....
Richard Llewellyn Jr., chief of staff to Councilman Eric Garcetti, is moving over to City Hall East and upstairs as Chief Deputy City Attorney, Rocky Delgadillo announced today. He previously...
Talk radio host and conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt offers some unsolicited tips to Times publisher Jeffrey Johnson about how to attract new readers on the right. Excerpt: OK, Kinsley's on...
Downtown blogger Eric Richardson doesn't much care for the editorial "we" style used by the folks who write and edit LAist and the other Gothamist websites. So he created an...
The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke gave a low score to Michael Kinsley's tenure at the LAT, and it turns out Kinsley is no fan of hers either. He writes in...
Neighbors describe Joseph Radisich as a helpful Mr. Nice Guy and love that he lives upstairs. Problem is, as David Zahniser reports in today's Daily Breeze, those neighbors are in...
Anchor-reporter Carolyn Hughes has been taken off Dodger coverage at Fox Sports West during an investigation of her relationship with pitcher Derek Lowe, the pay site Ron Fineman's On the...
Nothing subtle about the item in this morning's Page Six about model-turned-actress Janice Dickinson being disruptive at the Equinox gym in West Hollywood. Supposedly, someone at the gym up and...
Lawyers for the Times and DA Steve Cooley argued that the Board of Supervisors violated the Brown Act—the state's open meeting law—by deciding behind closed doors to shut the trauma...
Police fear that missing 21-year-old model Iryna Singerman met with foul play. The clues? Her 57-year-old lover, Brian Cullen, was spotted putting on gloves and tossing bags full of bloody...
Council President Alex Padilla announced Thursday that, just like all the rumors say, he is running for the state Senate seat being vacated in the Valley by Richard Alarcon. Still...
The claim by anony-blog Mayor Sam's Sister City that a Villaraigosa staffer (or two) would be fired for leaking to reporters is untrue, says Robin Kramer, the mayor's chief of...
Albert T. Robles, the former political boss in the city of South Gate, goes down on thirty counts of soliciting kickbacks, depriving the electorate of his honest services, bribery and...
The last Robinsons-May stores in Southern California will close (or be "rebranded" as Macy's) after Christmas and the name will disappear. Robinsons and The May Company were on the Los...
Michael Silverblatt, the host of KCRW's weekly Bookworm, has been devoting the program to a ten-part series he calls "Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing." In a piece in...
The NPR program produced in Culver City has been on the air two years today. Jeff Rogers is the show's third executive producer in that time, but the hosts are...
* Newer shorties at the end... • Big cover story on "self-described Jewish hustler" Dov Charney and his views of sex with underlings in the new Jewish Journal. The boss of...
County health officials issued a salmonella alert Wednesday for the Il Fornaio on Beverly Drive, one block off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Three diners became ill after eating contaminated...
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa takes the gavel today for his first meeting as chair of the MTA. It's his luck that the rotating chairmanship belongs this year to whoever is mayor...
The LAPD shooting of 13-year-old driver Devin Brown at the end of a high-speed chase in February is back in the news. Chief Bratton said yesterday that by re-creating the...
LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke takes a look back at Michael Kinsley's months in the top job at the L.A. Times editorial and opinion pages, and it's safe to say...
L.A. Times Editor-designee Dean Baquet gives Tom Scocca of the New York Observer some of his thoughts about the paper, the city and competing for hires with the New York...
In response to mounting losses, TV Guide is going to get harder to hold—and run fewer TV listings. Variety reports that Gemstar-TV Guide will spend $110 million to convert the...
Public Affairs has picked up Bigger Than Life, a collection by L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan. The book is due for publication in Fall 2006, says Publishers Lunch. Also:...
Mayor Villaraigosa names his Board of Harbor Commissioners at 10 a.m. at the Cruise Ship Promenade in the port. The Times' Deborah Schoch and Richard Fausset, and David Zahniser in...
L.A. Observed is one of the Los Angeles-based blogs named in Forbes.com's Best of the Web. The other locals are The Elegant Variation for literary blogs, Metroblogging in the city...
Shouldn't it really be spelled Spamelot? Anyway, the Monty Python-inspired Broadway hit won't be coming to Los Angeles. The producers struck a deal to house the touring version of the...
An L.A. judge ruled that the historic Ambassador Hotel can now be razed by the Los Angeles Unified School District. The Los Angeles Conservancy and other groups had sued to...
That was fast. Michael Kinsley, who just took over on June 14, 2004, will soon relinquish his spot as editor in charge of the L.A. Times editorial and opinion pages....
Scoop for Copley's David Zahniser: he reports in the Daily Breeze that Mayor Villaraigosa will name anti-LAX activist Valeria Velasco, attorney Alan Rothenberg and UCLA professor Fernando Torres-Gil to the...
MarketWatch columnist Jon Friedman wishes Dean Baquet luck in his future as Editor of the L.A. Times—and says he'll need it. I want to be happy for Dean Baquet, the...
* Updated with additions at the bottom. Howard Fine says on the front of the L.A. Business Journal (free) that "Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa plans an ambitious economic development agenda reminiscent...
• Mayor Villaraigosa plans to announce his appointments to the airport commission Monday morning. They will be introduced at a photo op at Lincoln and Sepulveda—good for visuals, not so much...
It will start up in the next few months and likely focus on local politics, an exec of the L.A. Newspaper Group tells James Nash in the L.A. Business Journal...
For five years some residents of Laurel Drive in Altadena have complained to the Sheriff's Department about LAPD Officer Irsie Henry, the Pasadena Weekly's André Coleman reports. They say Henry...
* Newest additions at the bottom... • Now that's a book party venue. Simon & Schuster threw Sunday's launch reception for Thomas Greanias' Raising Atlantis on the front lawn of the...
Columnist Dan Neil observes in his column in Sunday's LAT Magazine that "Either Tom Cruise or Scientology is crazy. Which one is it?" To find out, he drags his wife...
The City Council is taking up its new committee structure today, including the return of Intergovernmental Relations as a separate panel. If all goes smoothly Council President Alex Padilla is...
Soon-to-depart L.A. Times Editor John Carroll contends in the Columbia Journalism Review that the paper's circulation is not dropping because of anything to do with how or what it reports...
Caryn Coleman at artblogging.LA pulls together what has already happened up on the hill this year and says more is coming....
This week's light posting has been due to me being out and around on assignment. It's likely to continue today. Late shorties will be tacked on to the tail end....
News of LAT media critic David Shaw's illness prompted the usually snarky Gawker to interrupt regular blogramming: Forgive us a moment of non-smartass, non-Manhattanite comment, but we wanted to stop...
The New York Times story on the LAT editor change assumes that a troubling period lies ahead—and makes it clear that departing boss John Carroll has been spilling to his...
I've been sitting on something out of respect for a former colleague's privacy. Late this spring, longtime L.A. Times media and wine critic David Shaw was diagnosed with a brain...
Luke Ford says his blog has been disabled temporarily by what his hosting service is calling a distributed denial of service attack....
John Carroll tells Editor & Publisher that the realities of budget cuts influenced his decision to give up the editoriship of the Times. He's been contemplating the move for a...
Former Chicago Tribune writer John Cook, now a contributor to Radar magazine, blogs that John Carroll's departure from the LAT follows soon after he implied to the New York Times...
* Updated with more details and links John S. Carroll, who announced his retirement at a newsroom gathering this morning, took over the L.A. Times in 2000. Most reviews have...
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's political committees have paid him $166,859 the last three years for renting space in the Main Street Plaza he owns in Santa Monica. The San Francisco Chronicle...
The Blogometer, the new-ish daily roundup of the political blogosphere from the folks at The Hotline, puts its "blogger spotlight" on the LA Weekly's and The Nation's Marc Cooper. When...
Rumors are rampant at the L.A. Times that a big announcement involving the future of the paper is coming today. I didn't have time to report out what if anything...
The median price of a single family home in the San Fernando Valley hit $578,500 in June, the Daily News says. Despite the high prices, more homes sold in the...
Former Mayor Jim Hahn will try to make it rain as managing director for Chadwick, Saylor & Co., the Brentwood real estate and investment firm run by Coliseum Commission president...
Former LAT Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman has not yet relocated to New York, where he'll run the office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson, the literary agency...
I didn't catch any of the TV coverage, and the papers all report that everybody had a great time at yesterday's Real Madrid-Galaxy match in Carson. (Even T.J. Simers seemed...
City Controller Laura Chick released an audit today that found "serious accounting issues" at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. When Jim Hahn was mayor and the two political figures...
From Editor & Publisher: When a Man Dies in a Sex Act with a Horse -- What's a Reporter to Do? You know you want to read it....
The author of Inside Daisy Clover, The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life and a biography of Natalie Wood died Sunday at age 80. His death was announced by "The...
Summer is a time for guest bloggers, and at Kevin Drum's Political Animal (written in SoCal but affiliated with Washington Monthly), L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is taking a whirl...
I guess Mark Lacter of the L.A. Business Journal didn't like the way the LAT publicly demanded a correction yesterday to the LABJ's story on the Times' new RSS service....
Howard Stern said on the air Monday that his Los Angeles replacement on FM 97.1 will be comic Adam Carolla, but the people at Infinity Broadcasting, who would have to...
Los Angeles County will pay $40,000 to settle a lawsuit over DA Steve Cooley's over-exuberant search of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise offices back in 2002. The deal announced Monday includes a...
• The Daily News lost Sports Editor Michael Anastasi to the Salt Lake Tribune not too long ago and now is losing another his successor. Doug Jacobs is leaving to be...
More than 8,500 futbol fans paid $30 just to watch the famous Spanish club work out yesterday at Home Depot Center in Carson. Real Madrid is more than a hundred...
The Hollywood manager and the blogger have been going at it since at least 2002, when Ford profiled Wald on his website. Ford then posted the transcripts of Wald's angry...
• American Media CEO David Pecker confirms in the New York Times that part of the controversial magazine deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger was that the tabloids would lay off when he...
Los Angeles Times NewsPoint, tentatively due to launch next month, will give readers news collected RSS-style from a variety of print and web sources, possibly even the New York Times,...
Burbank councilwoman Stacy Jo Murphy's arrest on suspicion of gun and cocaine violations in connection with the Vineland Boyz gang prompted woman-in-the-news stories in the Daily News and Times. Both...
But not good enough to bear repeating. For a few hours on Saturday, L.A. Observed was rolled back to April 26 by a server issue in Wisconsin or somewhere. Warm...
Gov. Schwarzenegger says he'll give up the millions he arranged for just days before taking office. His statement: Statement by Governor SchwarzeneggerRegarding American Media Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today made the...
Late entries are tacked on to the end... • Wonkette Ana Marie Cox comes to town Tuesday to chat at 7 p.m. with Mickey Kaus at the Central Library. It's part...
No surprise, but word out of City Hall is that Larry Frank, staff director at the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education and a certified Friend of Antonio from...
The L.A. Times' blog on the Supreme Court vacancy has drawn posts from law professors Eugene Volokh of UCLA, Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke, Orin S. Kerr of GW and Douglas...
Looks like labor leader Julie Butcher's car was torched in her front driveway in Highland Park. The head of the Service Employees International Union local at City Hall found her...
Gov. Schwarzenegger's lucrative deal with the fitness magazines makes the front page of Friday's New York Times. Andrew Pollack goes with the $5 million figure, not the $8 million the...
Bobbi Murray does the honors for CityBeat. Ludlow's ascension to executive secretary of the County Federation of Labor is due to be voted on next week, adding some punctuation to...
Reader David Novak noticed that the Du-pars at Farmers Market has been closed a long time—not the sixty days promised last summer when the chain was sold. He feared that...
Joe Edmiston, the only executive director in the 25-year history of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, might be the most powerful unelected official in California, Lewis MacAdams writes in the...
Tomorrow's Times runs a story by media reporter James Rainey on the paper's new ethics guidelines (the ones we reported Wednesday.) The story focuses mainly on how the new rules...
Former Times reporter Michael Krikorian goes deep in today's LA Weekly with two pieces on the bloody breakdown of a gang peace treaty in Watts: "President Bush keeps saying America...
Geez, you try to skate by for a few hours and stuff starts to pile up in the in-box... • Former Burbank mayor and current city councilwoman Stacey Jo Murphy was...
Mayor Villaraigosa today named the police commissioners who will get to clean up the mess from the killing of Jose Raul Peña and his nineteen-month-old daughter, now identified by the...
Won't be posting anything in the morning on Thursday......
Times Editor John Carroll distributed new ethics guidelines for the paper last night. They spell out when Times reporters may use unnamed sources (and the pitfalls), restate that staffers may...
Today's L.A. Times fronts two staff stories about the London bombings. See below....
The comedian performed here at the Laugh Factory on Saturday night and was found dead the next morning at a friend's place. He was 35. Soto moved to Los Angeles...
LA Unified Supt. Roy Romer's Friends of L.A. Schools fund raised contributions mostly from construction firms, textbook publishers and other school contractors, the Daily News reports. Romer insists there is...
"Past Sunset" will air from 7 to 9 p.m. on a pilot basis weeknights from July 25 through August 5. David Cruz of NBC4 will be the host. Here's what...
Dave Bullock is posting images and text from a 1906 driving guide to Los Angeles over at LAVoice.org. One of the first pages to be uploaded features the "new" Alexandria...
Both today and yesterday, an email correspondent has found the LAT's lack of a front page story on the London terrorist bombings off-key. He notes the continuing front-page coverage in...
L.A. Times Editor John Carroll is directing the reporting staff to avoid identifying confidential sources in their written notes and emails on the company computers. The problem is that those...
• Police on Monday revised the facts in that fatal weekend shootout in South L.A. First, it was in Watts. The name of the dead father was changed to Raul Peña....
Actually it came in Monday afternoon, while I was otherwise occupied. It's an exit email from Edward Headington, leaving as communications director for State Sen. Gil Cedillo to resume his...
If you're coming to L.A. this summer, you probably don't want to stay at the new Hollywood Roosevelt....
I'm late to catch on that there is a Los Angeles-based Institute for Figuring, started by author, science writer and PBS host Margaret Wertheim and her sister Christine Wertheim, an...
An LAPD officer was wounded and a gun-wielding father and his toddler daughter died yesterday evening in a shootout with police at 104th Street and Avalon Boulevard. The father apparently...
USA Today does the apparently obligatory feature story to accompany today's launch of its sudoku puzzle—and even spells it wrong in the URL. In the piece, the LAT's Sherry Stern...
Fox News crank Bill O'Reilly apparently is upset now with LAT rock critic Robert Hilburn. According to the conservative website Independent Sources, on his show last Friday O'Reilly bashed Hilburn...
Summer weekends when there is no fog at the beach are no time to be blogging. But here are some items that fought their way out of the pile. • Shots...
Getting hit with surprise audio when I click on web link is always a turnoff for me. It seems amateurish in an AOL kind of way, and disrespects visitors who...
The Observer has a new website design, new blogs and a new plan. Starting in August, it'll cost you a buck to read each week's stories online. Or you can...
As we told you a few weeks back, the Times' Sunday Opinion section is being reinvented as a section called Current. It launches in this Sunday's paper with lede pieces...
About calling 911, hospital ERs and extreme pain....
Antonio Villaraigosa was up early and out on the streets Thursday to put on the right face in the aftermath of the London terrorist bombs. He appeared with Chief Bratton...
The Best of Alternative L.A. roundup in the L.A. Alternative Press decrees that the "best alternative to weapons of mass destruction" is a Pink’s double bacon Polish burger: It hits...
The Dodgers lost another game today and another player to injury. This time it's not a sore hamstring or three, a hurt finger, a blown elbow or even chondromalacia—and it's...
An investment research firm says General Motors' corporate decision to pull its ads from the Times is hurting the paper, but Times spokeswoman Martha Goldstein says "essentially all local dealers...
I updated some behind the scenes stuff like the About page and the Advertisers Are Really Cool People page, so I ran the numbers for the first half of 2005....
In response to the London bombings, the LAPD is on modified tactical alert and the operations command center has been activated. It's a precaution and not due to a specific...
Steve Harvey's Only in L.A. column in today's Times points to a new website for rants, discussions and tips about traffic. The forums at The I Hate LA Traffic Homepage...
The New York Times reporter who looked into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name by a Bush administration official—and who didn't publish the story—would not reveal her sources...
Eric Rose, Senior VP at Weber Shandwick PR, is leaving at the end of the week for a newly created position as Director of Communications for the Western Group for...
Rod Bernsen, the ex-LAPD cop who reported for FOX 11 News until last year, is handling fill-in talk host duties on KFI (640 AM). He sits in for John Ziegler...
Sheriff Lee Baca has launched LACountyMurders.com, a website to publicize homicide stats and spread information about suspects and victims. There is an edge of scare tactic about it. The site's...
The only screenwriter to receive an honorary Oscar died on Saturday at age 89. The news didn't get out until today. The Writers Guild website's obituary calls Lehman "one of...
Just to follow-up from this morning's item, which did get a good bit of traffic and a Gawker link, the Newspaper Guild in the New York Times newsroom has gotten...
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announces his appointees to the MTA board and a deputy mayor for transportation tomorrow at the Patsaouras Plaza near Union Station. First he'll ride the Gold Line...
Editor Mark Lacter's back-page columns have been missing from the L.A. Business Journal for awhile, but this week he returns with a front-page chide (under his photo) directed at the...
Civil rights attorney Thomas Saenz is joining the Villaraigosa administration as the mayor's chief ethics officer and legal advisor. The L.A. Business Journal says Saenz has been vice president of...
Any late-comers will go at the bottom, as usual. • Gustavo Arellano rates the new crop of Latino-oriented glossies in the OC Weekly. He gives Bello the edge over Tu Ciudad,...
His landlord sold Tony Tocco's Lawndale house for condos, and now Tocco has to find a home for his unusual menagerie. He's got the usual dog, cat, snake and crows...
Journalists don't like to take tests, be told what to do or chat with PR folks on the phone. On two of those counts, reporters at the other Times aren't...
The Times' Alan Abrahamson, in Singapore covering the politics of choosing a site for the 2012 Olympics, observes that the chief operating officer in Los Angeles for Anschutz Entertainment (Staples...
For the journos out there, the key contacts in the mayor's press office are Press Secretary Joe Ramallo, who came from Villaraigosa's city council staff, and Janelle Erickson, most recently...
I won't be posting much unless something big breaks (such as a senior Times person deciding the future lies in New York...), but as usual any fresh shorts will be...
Grandpa Villaraigosa strolled to City Hall between Corina and his granddaughter, with a few thousand of his closest friends right behind. As a couple of people pointed out on the...
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to return longtime enviromental activist Mary Nicols to the DWP board (she was there under Tom Bradley) and appoint John Mack to the police commission,...
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.
