Afternoon snacks (* updated)

Cover

LA Observed likes a good magazine cover. The New Yorker's February 27 "Watch Your Back Mountain" front today won the ASME award for the year's best news cover. The overall Cover of the Year was the New Yorker's drawing of the Oval Office being submerged post-Katrina. Runners up were Rolling Stone's 1,000th issue in 3-D and The Economist for depicting North Korea's leader as "Rocket Man." Premiere was a finalist in the celebrity cover category for its comedy issue with Steve Carrell on the cover.
NFL owners were told the stadium costs of putting a team in Los Angeles would now top $1 billion, and their ardor may be cooling.
LAT columnist Tim Rutten writes Romenesko to pick a factual bone with Kurt Andersen's analysis of the Times, and a philosophical one: "Free advice offered from afar and in ignorance is worth about what you pay for it." Here's what the fuss is about.
Scuttlebutt at KTLA is that general manager Vinnie Malcolm has decided to do without the Spanish translation services provided for 20 years by Analia Sarno Riggle, called on the station website "the first true expert in the field of 'news simulcasting.'" Not noted before: Channel 5 reporter Eric Spillman is blogging, and pretty much daily.
The union at the LA Weekly now has a blog, joining the copy desk. Though when the union blog asked members to share their thoughts on whether "quality of life at the Weekly is being cramped by excessive penny-pinching," no one offered an opinion.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein will devote her luncheon speech tomorrow before Town Hall Los Angeles at the Biltmore to a plan for attacking global warming.
The LAT loses another: business writer Charles Duhigg is jumping to the New York Times to cover corporate finance, financial services and Wall Street malfeasance.

Updated