Tuesday Buzz, 6.20.06

"We certainly in my office understand what pressure is," Baca said. "My belief is that the city needs to have its voice heard on the matter, and the question will remain to what extent is this resolution binding…. We will look at it for all of our pluses and minuses and advise the City Council as to our position."

The recommendations will be made by a new panel of representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the Los Angeles County administrative office and a criminal justice planning firm. The panel's first meeting must take place no later than Monday.

"For a long time, I thought he was lucky," said singer Andy Williams, who is Perenchio's best friend. "But how could somebody sustain a lucky streak for so long? Finally, I realized that he wasn't lucky. He was just smart."

Even in Tribune's hometown of Chicago, where everybody has an opinion about what goes on inside the iconic Tribune Tower, FitzSimons is something of a mystery despite his role as head of a $6-billion media giant that owns the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Cubs and other properties. "He's gone unexamined here in Chicago for someone in that position," said Steve Rhodes, a former writer for Chicago magazine and the Tribune who now heads the Windy City online journal the Beachwood Reporter.

That is changing, as FitzSimons, who turns 56 on Monday, has found himself the target of dissident Tribune directors who have publicly criticized the performance of management — and FitzSimons by extension — in provocative and insulting terms....

FitzSimons declined to be interviewed for this article, but said through a spokesman that he would make his views public today in New York as a speaker at a Newspaper Assn. of America conference.

This is not to say she was indiscriminate with her largesse. In fact, in all realms of her life, Barbara had a refined sense of discrimination—you might call it exquisite good taste—that helped make the New York Review the influential journal it has been for the past 43 years. She could divine which writers had real potential and knew how to tease it out. She possessed a discerning sense of literary style and argument. Her feel for language was extraordinarily nuanced. Her interests also extended beyond the literary; she was politically engaged, and she expected others to be so with a similar passion. (In fact, she once sent away an applicant for an assistant job with a grim shake of her head, after the young woman confessed that politics bored her. To Barbara, this was an unpardonable sin, tantamount to admitting you were bored by the world.) Because she was so genial, and wore her talents and accomplishments so lightly, it was sometimes possible to forget what a formidable figure she was. But she always adhered firmly to her principles, whether political, ethical, grammatical, or aesthetic.