First thing Thursday, 11.17.05

♦ Yeah, curator Marion True shouldn't have taken that $400,000 loan from two wealthy art collectors right after the Getty acquired their collection.

Today's front pages

New York Times See/Read
Washington Post See/Read
LA Times See/Read
Daily News See/Read
Daily Breeze See/Read
Press-Telegram See/Read
Register See/Read
Star-News Read
Variety Read
Hwd Reporter Read
La Opini�n Read

♦ How Michael Ovitz built his art collection is, writes Nikki Finke in LA Weekly, "a tale of ambition, greed and ego not only on his part but also on the part of those who did business with him. In the process, Ovitz helped change the art world for the worse by bringing the same ruthless tactics to SoHo and 57th Street that he�d used to rule Hollywood."

♦ In letting councilman Jack Weiss off with a small fine for numerous campaign violations, the City Ethics Commission "has nearly completed its transition from the gem of local campaign-finance regulatory agencies to a panel of political appointees beholden to the elected officials who appointed them," says Rob Greene on the LA Weekly website.

♦ The Times says the cuts announced yesterday amount to 8% of the 1,032-person editorial staff.

♦ Doings in the Daily News newsroom are covered in a blog called The Paper Trail by business writer Brent Hopkins, the paper's union steward.

♦ One of the perennial light feature stories in Sacramento has fun with the odd calls the Department of Corrections mistakenly gets that aren't about prisons. (They are about corrections to the state phone book, etc.) In a similar vein, today's Corrections page at the L.A. Times has been accidentally replaced by a story about Tookie Williams, Death Row and the...Department of Corrections. Bad website robot. [Fixed by human hands.]

♦ Some bloggy skeptics think that Open Source Media will have to get itself a new name, since the name they adopted yesterday is already taken.

♦ Full house at Arianna Huffington's Brentwood home last night for a Gawker Inc.-Huffington Post-Yahoo convergence. Bevies of bloggers and political types in the house, plus some Hollywood figures (Ron Silver, Sean Daniel, George Schlatter) and Huffington Post-ers, as well as Old Media representation by L.A. Times AMEs Janet Clayton and Joel Sappell, columnist Meghan Daum, NPR's Kim Masters, Sarah Spitz of KCRW, Ann Bardach, Andrew Gumbel and other non-blogging journalists. [Added: Photos of bloggers Mark Lisanti, Mickey Kaus and Laurie Pike, and links to others, at Emmanuelle.net.]

♦ Jonah Goldberg's first regular column for the LAT op-ed page stands on the idea that FDR lied before Bush did, but he doesn't believe that Bush did.

♦ John Amato's Los Angeles-based "virtual online magazine" Crooks and Liars has climbed to number nine on the Technorati hit parade of most-popular blogs. L.A.'s own Boing Boing reigns as #1. Honorable mentions in the top ten: the writer at Dooce lived in L.A. when she was fired from a job for blogging, and Michelle Malkin used to work at the Daily News.

♦ Heidi Fleiss is leaving L.A. to start a $250-an-hour Nevada "stud farm" catering to women. No really, she is.

♦ I'm speaking about Wilshire Boulevard tonight at 7:30 pm at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Partner Eric Lynxwiler will show some photos from the book. We will be at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Saturday at 5 pm.