Archive by Date
April 29, 2006
Mayor Villaraigosa drew a lot of attention for speaking at the last big immigration march in Los Angeles. He plans to skip Monday's Great American Boycott and marches—he'll be in...
April 28, 2006
Posting will be light (if that) this weekend due to time commitments at the Festival of Books thrown at UCLA by the Los Angeles Times. One of my roles is...
♦ L.A. Alternative covers the internal split over Monday's two immigration rallies. ♦ Daily News managing editor Melissa Lalum gave birth yesterday to a baby boy, Kelly Daniel Quinn. ♦...
Editors at the Los Angeles Times have stripped Michael Hiltzik of his Golden State column in the Business section and suspended him as punishment for posting anonymous arguments on his...
Police expect more than a half-million demonstrators on the streets in Los Angeles Monday during the national boycott being organized by immigrant, labor and progressive groups. Organizers themselves expect many...
Antonio Villaraigosa's dapperness and his politics are in the news, as are Rocky Delgadillo's ambition, Michaela Pereira's sensitivity, Vanity Fair's accuracy and Fleishman-Hillard's billing practices. More when you turn the...
April 27, 2006
♦ Vanity Fair's Pellicano writer John Connolly has been notified by the U.S. Attorney of a threat against his life, Deadline Hollywood reports. Separately, Pellicano's ex-wife accuses Connolly of using...
Of all the shadowy international intrigues surrounding the case of Stefan Eriksson and the purloined Ferrari Enzo he destroyed on Pacific Coast Highway, the private para-transit company that calls itself...
No hug for Villaraigosa's school plan, social engineering at Hollywood and Vine, ten percent raise for cops, Fred Muir on the stand and journalists plan to meet tonight in Spanish....
April 26, 2006
Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group gets the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times. In a complicated arrangement, Hearst buys the Monterey Herald (and the St. Paul Pioneer Press), and...
From Boing Boing comes word that the Tactical Ice Cream Unit will make an appearance in Los Angeles on Friday. What's that, you ask? Combining a number of successful activist...
Tim McGarry blogs about whiling away a pleasant lunch hour amidst the fountains in the Maguire Gardens, the shady refuge outside the Central Library that shares space with the patio...
Nikki Finke [and lots of others] got advance leaks of the upcoming Vanity Fair story on the Anthony Pellicano case. She compiles a series of links to highlights. Among them:...
This was posted recently at a Yahoo! group for freelancers: LA Weekly has started a new outdoors/adventure travel advertorial section. It's evolved into a weekly three or four page color...
Best-selling mystery author Michael Connelly has pulled together a collection of articles from his days as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times and in Florida. Crime Beat: A...
An op-ed piece in Sunday's Daily Breeze chided the city of Hermosa Beach for fighting a drilling project by McPherson Oil Co. The Aesthetic thinks that the Breeze omitted a...
Talk about a career. Ernest Borgnine's first film credit came in 1951 as Hu Chang in China Corsair. He has portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, Angelo Dundee, Vince Lombardi, Marty Piletti...
British retail giant Tesco plans to invade California next year, probably locating its first U.S. store in Santa Monica, says Dan Glaister in today's Guardian. Local Brits are pleased, even...
Rocky goes negative, the NFL seems poised to decide on Los Angeles, dropping the ball in Sacramento, yet another twist in the Ferrari Enzo saga, a corrupt local pol goes...
April 25, 2006
Wednesday's Daily Journal will report that the Justice Department and the FBI may launch investigations into who gave the New York Times memos on government interviews in the Pellicano case...
Monday's post on Eric Stone's critique of Dodger Stadium's prices, long lines and hot dogs—and his suggestion for tearing it down and building a new Ebbets Field with trolley car...
Would you believe 200 luxury boxes and 24,000 fewer seats for most events, but with 15,000 of them designated as club seating? Those are some of the details of...
The May cover of Los Angeles pushes 52 Dream Weekends, but the talker story of the month is Jesse Katz's piece on the pets we kill and Ed Boks, newly...
You know the story going around today about threats against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa over his immigration position? Jazmín Ortega had it April 14 as the lede in La Opinión, quoting...
David Jackson is leaving the KCAL-9 news after tomorrow, says Ron Fineman's On the Record, citing sources: "One source says they are told that this was Jackson's decision, exercising an...
The mayor plans to make some news on the NFL front—and throw a kiss to "The Bold and the Beautiful"—all in the same day. Click on the Morning Buzz to...
April 24, 2006
Author Eric Stone, just back from a book tour in China, took in his first game of the season at Dodger Stadium. He splurged on four loge seats behind home...
Officially the Frank Gehry design scheme for the downtown Grand Avenue Project won't be released until 11:30 this morning. But Times reporter Cara Mia DiMassa and critic Christopher Hawthorne got...
Unhappy U.S. prosecutors, very happy (and affluent) L.A. firefighters and the Hiltzik story goes national—plus items on Villaraigosa, Dov Charney, Reggie Bush, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and much more. Click on the...
In case you missed them, some posts from the past week on LA Observed: Hiltzik unmasked and the Times reacts Times outsources to India and launches new ad campaign Pellicano...
April 23, 2006
When Gay Talese reported his famous 1966 Esquire story "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," his Beverly Hills hotel and restaurant tabs became legendary. Things have changed some. This week he's...
Yahoo! Sports reports that the family of USC Trojans running back Reggie Bush abruptly packed up and moved out of a big home in Spring Valley, Calif. when its reporter...
April 22, 2006
Former LAPD chief Ed Davis died tonight in San Luis Obispo after suffering a bout of pneumonia. He took over the department in 1969 when Tom Reddin stepped down to...
Sunday's New York Times has a piece about the origin of the friendship between supermarket czar Ron Burkle and former President Bill Clinton. dating it to the aftermath of the...
April 21, 2006
Editor Charles Crumpley has started reading highlights of the coming week's Los Angeles Business Journal. In the issue dated April 24 are stories on, among other things, William Morris making...
♦ Michael Hiltzik's previous gaffe involving invasion of colleagues' email privacy when he was stationed in the Times' Moscow bureau is now making the rounds of conservative bloggers delighted by...
The fifth issue of Black Clock, the literary journal edited by Steve Erickson and published by California Institute of the Arts, focuses on Los Angeles fiction reaching from "the Hollywood...
April 20, 2006
Media reaction to the Hiltzik blog disclosure, a city budget with money for more cops, some awards, some obits and General Zinni is in town. Much more after the jump......
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's quest to become the attorney general of California just isn't picking up much momentum. The Field Poll out today shows former governor Jerry Brown with a...
Spotted today at a gas station in Beverly Hills. It's for full service and high octane. There's no brand or location given in the AP photo caption. (Via blogging.la) Photo:...
This notice is posted at the top of Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog on the Los Angeles Times website: The Times has suspended Michael Hiltzik’s Golden State blog on latimes.com....
Bob Kholos was a KMPC and Radio News West radio reporter in Los Angeles who became the first press secretary for newly elected mayor Tom Bradley in 1973. At a...
Outsourcing — A memo going around the L.A. Times says the paper plans to outsource graphics work to India for a two-month trial, starting with classified ads in the...
Exhilarated after an AA meeting, Daniel Barth celebrated two years of sobriety by jumping off the Manhattan Beach pier, intending to swim to shore. He didn't make it. Runner up:...
Look behind just about any big story in Los Angeles and crisis PR guy Michael Sitrick is usually there, quietly working the media on behalf of, say, Cardinal Roger Mahony...
Liberal L.A. Times columnist-blogger Michael Hiltzik and conservative prosecutor-blogger Patterico have been butting heads and online personas ever since the former joined the blogosphere last October. Even earlier, perhaps, if...
Budget day for the mayor, bad news in the LAT for Cardinal Mahony, the LA Weekly profiles half of Los Angeles and Dean Singleton closes in on three Norcal newspapers....
OK, bear with me. Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle has been in the news a lot lately for 1) His divorce, 2) His interest in buying the new McClatchy newspapers,...
April 19, 2006
These are the two stories above the fold on the front page of today's Los Angeles Loyolan, the student newspaper at Loyola Marymount. You know, the nice sedate Catholic school...
♦ Longtime L.A. radio reporter and anchor Hettie Lynne Hurtes is joining KPCC as mid-day anchor. Her film credits include roles in Terminator and Throw Momma from the Train. ♦...
The photo shows longtime Los Angeles journalist Frank Swertlow, on the case for People outside the Tom Cruise home recently—as reported at Gawker. The New York gossip site explains: "Sent...
I pull together a lot of the coverage of the mayor's schools plan—it's after the jump, along with students living in the USC library, Chief Bratton and the street homeless,...
April 18, 2006
Mayor Villaraigosa came up with some surprises in the school takeover details tucked into his State of the City rally speech this evening. He proposed a school board with diminished...
A woman who lives in the Country Club Park area of Mid-City has come down with the first human case of bubonic plague in Los Angeles County since 1984. Health...
Deb Nelson, who has led the resurgence in investigative reporting by the Washington Bureau of the Los Angeles Times, is leaving for a job in academia at the University of...
Los Angeles Kings CEO Tim Lieweke meets the media at 1 pm at the Toyota Health Center in El Segundo to, ahem, "announce major changes to the Kings hockey operations...
One hundred years ago this morning, California's most destructive earthquake—and worst natural disaster—devastated San Francisco. The 7.9 magnitude quake on the San Andreas fault ruptured the ground for three hundred...
What would the Morning Buzz be without items on Villaraigosa and Pellicano—not together though...Also mentioned below are Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, Charles Champlin, Luc Robitaille, Barbara Demick, Michael Hiltzik, Evan Maxwell,...
April 17, 2006
Speaking of mispronouncing City Hall names, I listened tonight to the audio stream of LAPD chief Bill Bratton taking calls on the "Ask the Chief" segment on this afternoon's Patt...
♦ West L.A. Online suggests a trade: a new FBI building in Westwood in exchange for federal support to build the Wilshire subway. ♦ Mayor Villaraigosa has really been working the angles...
With every passing day it becomes less common to hear the mayor's name mangled as Veela-ga-rosa or Veeya-gree-osa. By the time he runs for president, everybody should have the pronunciation...
Prosecutors threw the book at Swedish bad-boy Stefan Eriksson today, alleging he was alone behind the wheel—and legally drunk—when he crashed a stolen Enzo Ferrari at 162 miles an hour...
Die Hard director John McTiernan, the top Hollywood name to be charged in the Pellicano wiretapping case, appeared in court today on the charge of lying to the government and...
Perhaps there was something to the John Carroll effect. In the first year that the Pulitzer-board favorite is not editor of the Los Angeles Times, the paper is shut out...
The U.S. Supreme Court this morning refused to hear Cardinal Roger M. Mahony's request to keep archdiocese personnel files confidential, so he must give prosecutors the files of priests Michael...
Both the Sunday New York Times and the current LA Weekly devote column inches to understanding the phenomenon that is (or at least was, until recently) Amanda Scheer-Demme. They might...
For Times of London correspondent Chris Ayres, the term "management of Los Angeles International Airport" evokes a picture of William H. Macy pushing pencils in a cubicle. The airport's image...
It's Pulitzer day in newsrooms, UTLA day on the school reform front, and rehearse for the big speech day in the mayor's office. Today's Morning Buzz also touches MediaNews Group,...
Selected items from the past week on LA Observed... A Caitlin Flanagan two-fer Channel 2 bans fragrance and VNRs RJ Smith on L.A. and music Channel 5 and the ethics...
April 16, 2006
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hasn't had a lot to say about immigration lately. It wasn't high on his agenda until 500,000 or more people marched through downtown. He did a media...
April 14, 2006
The Dodgers today got word of their worst injury yet this year. Reliever Yhency Brazoban needs elbow reconstruction (the Tommy John procedure) and will miss the rest of this season....
Los Angeles' ordinance deeming it illegal for anyone to "sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or public way"—essentially making it a crime to be homeless—was ruled...
Arthur Winston is the MTA employee who received many accolades when he retired March 23 after missing just one day of work in 72 years, dating back to the Pacific...
Black Dahlia expert Larry Harnisch has been blogging the errors he finds as he reads through Donald H. Wolfe's new book The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and...
The New York Times reports a pretty good break in the Pellicano story...rare LAO mention of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes...more fame for the 82-year-old ticketed for crossing on the...
The New Yorker's Caitlin Flanagan and her new book also get the treatment from Ella Taylor in this week's LA Weekly. Even women who can’t stand what Flanagan has to...
April 13, 2006
♦ Everyone following the Dodgers knows that reserve Cody Ross is primed to get the axe any hour now. So today he gets a start and slams a grand-slam homer—followed...
A light serving today since I'm driving back to L.A. from upstate, but you should turn the page anyway for some Devin Brown news, some media tidbits and a clutch...
April 12, 2006
Dual get-tough memos to the staff from honcho-in-chief Nancy Bauer Gonzales hit desks today at CBS-2 and KCAL-9. The first responds to this week's criticism over the station's use of...
Residential trash pickup in Los Angeles has been free (meaning taxpayer-supported) pretty much forever, but as of today the officially sanctioned term for that is "subsidized." Mayor Villaraigosa proposed to...
Caitlin Flanagan perhaps "owes her success largely to a misogynistic media that loves a catfight...[but she] has so masterfully created a persona that it virtually guarantees literary celebrity," says the...
Antonio plans to impose a trash fee as the build-up to The Big Speech continues...Monique Moret names names in the Fleishman-Hillard trial: recognizable names...plus racism in the LAFD, black market...
April 11, 2006
RJ Smith wrote about rock music for the Village Voice and Spin before landing at the LA Weekly and, now, at Los Angeles magazine—where he is a senior editor and...
Tribune publishing chief Scott Smith sent out a reminder today that the company ethics code "applies to all Tribune editorial personnel—print, broadcast and interactive." They got it at the Times,...
Mayor Villaraigosa will unveil his master strategy for taking control of the Los Angeles Unified School District in a speech next Tuesday, while the teachers union plans to beat him...
Immigration marches...Ed Boks blogs his displeasure with CityBeat...Disney tries something new on the Web...KPCC goes all the way with Patt...plus profiling Indie 103's Joe Escalante, Lucky Luc sets down his...
Human resources honchos at the Daily News don't have a grasp on how newsrooms work. They memoed the staff that a new time card would keep track of exactly when...
April 10, 2006
Reacting to the scandal about extortion, horse trading and freebies at Page Six, former Variety columist Army Archerd—whose marketing slogan is "Hollywood's first blogger"—blogs a tale out of his past....
April 09, 2006
I'm indisposed Monday in some meetings and checking out colleges with the junior member of the LAO team. Here are some selections from the past week here on LA Observed,...
April 08, 2006
The Swedish millionaire in the Ferrari Enzo that crashed at high speed on Pacific Coast Highway...who claimed a mysterious German named Dietrich ran into the Malibu hills...who claimed to be...
Retired Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey makes his living giving speeches about honor and integrity. In real life, it turns out he is a chiseler who stiffs the help, walks...
Happy days are over for the last A&W Root Beer stand in Southern California that still offers car-hop service. It has been at 1267 W. Holt Boulevard in Ontario since...
April 07, 2006
Light posting this weekend, but first... ♦ Michael Sonnenschein exits as co-editor of FishbowlLA. He bids farewell on the blog, and Claude Brodesser gives marching orders for the new regime....
Lots of City Hall tongues clucking about the news (published in the Daily Breeze) that Stacey Jones, the #2 exec at the Port of Los Angeles, is leaving after 25...
A reader emails that the Donald Trump sign hanging from the Convention Center downtown to catch the eye of drivers on the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways is the most...
David Peters, 39, and Delilah Clarino, 41, both of Lancaster, were arrested after a pipe bomb was found under the front seat of their car during a traffic stop. That...
Channel 2's website does a little feature on a Saturday morning pickup softball game in West L.A. that has been around for thirty years. An architect, photographer and some Hollywood...
From the student newspaper at victorious MIT, via Susan Kitchens at 2020 Hindsight....
The credit tag at the end of the LAT story on the Mammoth Mountain tragedy includes one Jeffrey M. Johnson. Who's that? Well he's the publisher of the paper. He...
The good guy in Robert S. Levinson's new mystery, Where the Lies Begin, is an elected member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Nicknamed Duke, he used to...
If it's not the laws trying to publicize his assets, it's a gossip journalist trying to blackmail him. The New York Post says that a freelancer on its Page Six...
Worst news yet for the Dodgers, but at least they're not the Kings...There's going to be a Hahn-era reunion in court...L.A. loves the Klimts...Rep. Millender-MacDonald finally denies being sick...Cory Doctorow...
April 06, 2006
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has begun deploying a pilotless drone called SkySeer for rescue operations and tracking "persons of interest." The craft was developed by Chang Industries, according to...
♦ Authorities released surveillance tape of suspects in the killing of Deputy Maria Rosa. ♦ Opening statements in Dowie-Stodder trial. ♦ Three ski patrol members at Mammoth Mountain died when...
No, really—a rodent, possibly a rat or a mouse, tried to crawl up the leg of a passenger on the American Airlines redeye from LAX to New York City last...
Downtown's largest property owner gets his name in the media again—this time coming into the sights of LA Weekly investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson for razing a new, possibly toxic purchase...
It's official now that Kim Murphy is moving to the London bureau of the Los Angeles Times, replacing the newly departed John Daniszewski. Memo follows:...
Three Los Angeles TV stations are fingered in a Center for Media and Democracy report out today critical of news operations that package video releases from sources and PR agencies...
Left unsaid in today's LAT story on the mystery illness of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald is that her son was in federal court in Pasadena yesterday appealing his conviction on corruption...
According to the BBC's David Willis, Claude the security guard at the gate of The Prospect Studios in Hollywood was nice to the right casting director enough times for it...
Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Evan Maxwell left daily journalism two decades ago to fashion a successful career as a romance novelist with his wife Ann Maxwell. Now living...
Selective news judgment on Derek Lowe...mysterious illness of a local congresswoman...the mayor and the Chinese vice premier...plus yet another Hollywood media blog, an L.A. blog award, a bloggy romance and...
A jury in Orange County ruled that City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo improperly retaliated against a deputy in his office and ordered the city to pay $1.5 million to Lynn Magnandonovan....
From the editors of zines The Big Takeover, Dumb Angel Gazette, Roctober, Scram and Ugly Things: Dear Amoeba, We the undersigned, the editors of five of the most long-lived and...
April 05, 2006
We may never know if it was a missile, a flare or something else that the pilot of American Airlines flight 612 saw come up from the sea after takeoff...
NewsFactor Magazine has some pretty narrow (or is that snooty?) requirements for the editor job it posted on Mediabistro. You have to live in or near Woodland Hills, but don't...
Poking around the KNBC website I came across a story and videos about the coming launch of News Raw, "a new concept in news programming" that will let viewers watch...
The Times' website was choking on today's stories when I put together the Morning Buzz. Here's what I would have picked up had the site been working: ♦ Dodgers pitcher...
Some Pellicano news, the start of the Dowie-Stodder trial, a new blogger on the City Council and of course so much more—including a farewell in the Daily News newsroom, a...
For some Americans upset over illegal immigration it really is about respect for the law. And for some it's really about brown people (or a byline that suggests ethnicity.) Daily...
April 04, 2006
There are now 178 city-recognized communities in Los Angeles—at least thirty-six of them in the Valley, one more if you count Cahuenga Pass. Community is a loose term here though,...
♦ David Poland of Movie City News takes 1,400 words to explain why his column The Hot Button is going down to three days a week. It's all about the...
Those red-light cameras at sixteen Los Angeles intersections that were switched off because the evidence they provide was shaky are going to be turned back on—and another sixteen locations will...
For months the leadership of City Hall's Engineers and Architects Association has been chasing Mayor Villaraigosa around the city—literally. They show up to disrupt his events and media appearances. Today,...
Joseph Wambaugh was (I think) the original LAPD detective to turn novelist. He's certainly the biggest. His books set in and around the department—beginning in 1970 with The New...
If you are heading into the Civic Center this morning, plan on encountering traffic for the funeral of murdered Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Maria Cecilia Rosa. To accommodate law...
The Bruins settle for No. 2...wireless at LAX if you can afford it...pat on the back for Brad Grey...a doctorate for Villaraigosa...John Stodder addresses his blog audience...plus Cheryl Tiegs, Donna...
April 03, 2006
Derek Lowe started the Dodgers opener today and kinda bombed—he gave up eight runs in five innings. Either before or after the game, he also probably got word that revelations...
♦ Deputy City Controller Ruben Gonzalez is leaving Laura Chick's staff after four years to be a vice president at Englander and Associates, the lobbying firm headed by Harvey Englander. Gonzalez...
Word on the street is that Seth Lubove is leaving the Los Angeles bureau of Forbes (after a lengthy stint there) to take over as L.A. bureau chief for Bloomberg...
Garrison Frost at The Aesthetic thinks that, contrary to popular lore, we are pretty good behind the wheel when the pavement is wet. As we know, when something is repeated...
USC journalism students fanned out across Los Angeles and Orange Counties and asked 1,100 people if the Angels' decision to drop Anaheim from the name mattered. For most, it doesn't....
OK, so it's like this. It's Opening Day and if it doesn't rain too hard I'll be on assignment most of the afternoon in the Elysian Park bureau. Most of...
If you're just getting back to work after some time away, here's a little of what you missed... L.A. Times edict: shorter stories, please Student protests spill onto freeways and...
April 02, 2006
♦ TV Week here in Los Angeles reports based on sources that Katie Couric's move to CBS News is completed in principle and that an announcement that she is leaving NBC's...
April 01, 2006
The Bruins mauled LSU 59-45 in Indianapolis and will take on Florida in the final of the NCAA basketball tournament on Monday. Forward Luc Richard Mbah a Moute tied his...
