Weekly archive
November 27 - December 3, 2005
Friday, Dec. 2
I just taped a segment with host Conan Nolan to air Sunday at 9 am. Political analysts Arnold Steinberg and Darry Sragow are on first to discuss Gov. Schwarzenegger's hiring...
Todd Purdum, the former Los Angeles bureau chief for the New York Times who also has covered the White House, will depart the paper's Washington bureau at the end of...
The Daily News feature staff has started a blog called Red Carpet. It apparently began a test run last month with Fred Shuster posting from the American Music Awards. In...
Longtime LAT writer Al Martinez uses today's column to report that he survived the buyout and layoff putsch, and to commiserate with those who lost jobs at the Times and...
Around the LA Observed offices, we prefer our pigskin roasted or barbecued. A hotbed of football fever we aren't, but we've ignored the gathering tension across the city (and the...
Rapper Kanye West will perform outdoors at Santa Monica High School on Monday afternoon, the result of students casting a million votes in a Power 106 contest. They get to...
Thursday, Dec. 1
Couple more things came in via email after this morning's post: ⇒ MoveOn.org has—believe it or not—adopted the L.A. Times buyouts and cutbacks as a lefty political cause, complete with...
Tonight's "Life & Times" at 6:30 pm on KCET features an interview with Joe Coulombe and his wife, Alice, the creators of Trader Joe's. They opened the first store in...
Perhaps taking a cue from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Controller Laura Chick has offered to oversee an audit of school district administrative operations. "As the independently elected Controller for the...
Scott Martelle has the cover piece in the Weekend Calendar section on local blogs: "In an odd synchronicity, as the pervasiveness of the Internet and mass media homogenizes mass culture,...
Robert Greene in the LA Weekly observed the welcome ritual for L.A.'s newest city council members and says they fit in like familiar veterans—and for good reason. On their first...
I received several reports that computer system troubles plagued the Times yesterday. A big chunk of the IT staff was laid off last week. Also, Orange County staffers are complaining...
At 1:30 Mayor Villaraigosa will announce a deal to scale back the old LAX expansion plan (and settle the lawsuits) at a command audience of pols: two Congress members, two...
Wednesday, Nov. 30
Today's Hollywood Reporter is out with the who-makes-what piece of the trade's annual Women in Entertainment issue. Julia Roberts stands atop the actress salary Top 10, able to command a...
Today's most-emailed L.A. Times story is the off-lede talker about the U.S. military covertly paying Iraqi newspapers to run propaganda written by American troops. Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi report:...
I don't know for certain that L.A. Observed's scrutiny played any part, so let's just applaud the Times for making the right call. Mark Kurtich, the senior VP of operations,...
Jon Wiener, the KPFK host and Nation contributing editor, posts an email that left-side historian Mike Davis sent to Susan Brenneman, the deputy op-ed editor at the Times, rejecting an...
In another move to save a few bucks, the Times is once again closing the ornate main entrance to its historic building—shutting off public access to the Globe Lobby and...
Sacramento columnist George Skelton opted out of the L.A. Times buyout at the last minute. But a more prominent name put himself on the list: longtime Pop Music Editor/Critic Robert...
In the classroom and panel discussions I've been having lately about blogging, someone always asks whether blogs can be believed. I usually give a spiel on knowing who to trust...
Charles Crumpley, Money Editor at the New Orleans Times Picayune since 2002, starts Jan. 1 as editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, the staff has been told. LAO reported...
Last night's sold-out show at Staples Center was a homecoming for Paul McCartney, whose current U.S. tour ends tonight. He and Heather Mills own a big mansion in Pasadena, and...
Tuesday, Nov. 29
L.A. County health director Thomas Garthwaite resigned today in a closed session of the Board of Supervisors. He has accepted a position as chief medical officer of Catholic Health East,...
Before he edited the L.A. Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman was deputy editor of the paper's op-ed page and Opinion section (and before that was a researcher for Robert Scheer.)...
Mayor Villaraigosa didn't announce any public events for today, but he was plenty busy. He spoke at the joint swearing-in of new City Council members Herb Wesson and Jose Huizar....
LA Observed has been down much of today due to a "bandwith issue" at the server end. In short, a rush of visitors this morning pushed us unexpectedly over the...
Hollywood will add jobs this year and next, but the overall picture is still cloudy says a report to be released today by the L.A. Economic Development Corp. Advancers in...
Monday, Nov. 28
Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former L.A. Times columnist and reporter Robert Scheer have been pals a long time—at least since Scheer interviewed the "boy mayor" of Cleveland for...
LA Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich told the staff this morning that the Justice Department gave the okay for New Times to acquire Village Voice Media, and with it her paper...
Author and former state Sen. Tom Hayden had a strong letter in Sunday's Calendar section praising the Times for tough coverage of the Getty. But, he writes, much more scrutiny...
Nearly a dozen posts made their way onto the blog during the so-called holiday break, including the first (exclusive) list of which familiar names look to be leaving the L.A....
Sunday, Nov. 27
Wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Snead and Joel Stratte-McClure used to jointly byline their celebrity gossip dispatches for the Daily News and the other LANG papers. Then Snead started dispatching her side...
Like all big newspapers, the Washington Post is stumbling toward an uncertain future, online and off. One of its online experiments is a blog page called Post Remix, where readers...
⇒ The Paul Williams-designed Holmby Hills home adjacent to Harvard-Westlake (formerly lived in by Bruce McNall and Ronald O. Perelman) will be saved and moved to Pasadena, the NYT says....
