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Washington Post columnist and Slate contributor Richard Cohen makes a stab at some Grazergate humor. Didn't work for me, but your mileage might vary. Excerpt of "One Man's Desperate Attempt...
LA Observed archive
for March 2007
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Thank you to everyone who emailed while I was off. It was deeply moving and helpful to my family to receive such good thoughts from so many. Now here's today's...
The News & Chatter side of LA Observed plans to stand down for a day or so to mark the passing of my father. Robert Roderick lived to 89 and...
Come on inside for a first look at the day......
Yeah, the Times really got its money's worth out of that innovation. "We have concluded we will not be moving forward with the program," the paper's official statement says. Gee,...
Student journalists at Occidental College dug through old literary magazines to find two poems that Sen. Barack Obama published in 1982. "What better than the poetry of a 19-year-old college...
An L.A. Times press release announces several reductions in the value of what the paper give its dwindling readership — oops, I mean "editorial changes designed to meet the evolving...
This afternoon at 2 pm Patt Morrison will have on the German photographer behind You-Are-Here.com, the best website of Los Angeles architectural photos. He blogs about his recent trip to...
Tim Swanson, who has been the west coast bureau chief of Premiere and a writer for Variety, will blog about "the worlds of film, music, television, and the digital industry"...
The Times has quietly eliminated some of the typographic cacophony that erupted on the front page in October. Gone are the skinny, sans-serif headlines, the stacked decks of secondary headlines...
Lots of news to begin the week, sliced and diced after the jump....
In the new issue out now, Joe Domanick examines the case against Phil Spector while Strawberry Saroyan sizes up the career of fired book publisher Judith Regan. There are also...
I received a whole bunch of thoughtful email last week on the Grazergate episode. Submissions are over at We Get Email from, among others, a former editorial writer at the...
Last week's most noteworthy posts, subjectively speaking. Well, there was that business with the Times and the editor who gave a page to the movie producer whose publicist he dated...
In Andrés Martinez's email to LA Observed after he quit Thursday as Times editorial page honcho, he implied that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was on the list of...
Allison Silver, now a producer on "The Charlie Rose Show," edited the Sunday Opinion section in the L.A. Times for ten years before moving over in 2000 to be an...
We told you last week that radio personality April Winchell had blown Bill O'Reilly's cover as a man of the people by exposing his rant about croissants that were not...
Tim Cavanaugh, the web editor who joined the Times Opinion staff recently from Reason magazine, reacted to the resignation of his boss, Andrés Martinez, by posting a personal message on...
Times media columnist Tim Rutten was fingered by Andrés Martinez (in Thursday's email to LA Observed) as one of the LAT staffers supposedly blocking innovation at the paper and purposely...
Petersen was a giant figure in Southern California car culture and created a large magazine and book empire, Petersen Publishing. He grew up around his dad's garage and in 1947,...
Times Editor Jim O'Shea sent a missive around the newsroom this evening replying to Andrés Martinez's attacks emailed to LA Observed and posted earlier today. In his retort, O'Shea...
Mel Gibson cursed a professor at Cal State Northridge last night after a screening of Apocalypto,, which the professor had termed racist. ""He told her to 'F--- off lady,...
Travel editor Gary Warner of the Orange County Register bought this souvenir T-shirt at Holman Stadium, where the Dodgers play their spring training games in Vero Beach, Florida. Note that...
Abbreviated edition today, after the jump....
(* Update after jump: New email from Martinez reacting to Times editor Jim O'Shea.) After my post last night on his exit blog from the Times, Andrés Martinez asked me...
Kelly Mullens, the crisis PR executive whose love life has suddenly become newsworthy, is known for her recent work on behalf of homophobic "Grey's Anatomy" actor Isaiah Washington. Previously, her...
Native Intelligence contributor David Rensin adds his voice to those saying goodbye to a valued friend in Cathy Seipp, who died Wednesday: I met Cathy, along with Emmanuelle Richard, through...
Lost in the earlier flurry of posts about the resignation of Andrés Martinez were his verbal attack on the Times newsroom and veiled bitterness at Publisher David Hiller's plans to...
The former New York Post gossip reporter alleges that Beverly Hills gazillionaire Ron Burkle committed libel, emotional distress, interference in business relationship, injurious falsehood, abuse of process and civil conspiracy....
Executive Editor Matt Coker isn't moving north to Long Beach — he's going another 400 miles further. His email to what remains of the OC Weekly staff follows: From: Matt...
Brian Grazer's thoughts on the big issues won't be in Sunday's Los Angeles Times Current section, if there even is a Current stuffed deep into papers this weekend. But here...
I was locked in a meeting when the morning's dramas went down, but here's the bottom line. Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller, under heavy pressure from the news staff,...
CBS 2 news director Nancy Bauer Gonzales is well-known to LA Observed readers as the stickliest control freak to run a Los Angeles newsroom. Her memos banning scents and critiquing...
Bill Boyarsky played a prominent role in cleaning up the L.A. Times' ethical mess after the Staples Center scandal in 1999, serving as the conduit for ex-publisher Otis Chandler to...
We've got foie gras, rattlesnakes and a bunch of media and politics notes today. Come on in......
Bob Woodward is the Washington Post editor who was not on the 4 o'clock news yesterday on ABC 7. Bob Woodruff is the former ABC News co-anchor, severely injured by...
Times publisher David Hiller says in the morning paper that he might kill this Sunday's Current section rather than run an editor's note about how Hollywood producer Brian Grazer was...
The Hollywood Christmas Parade is no more. Last year's 75th edition of the parade was the final one, organizers announced today. "This is a very difficult thing for us to...
There will be a public funeral for Cathy Seipp at 10 am on Friday at Mt. Sinai Hollywood Hills on Forest Lawn Drive. Denise Hamilton at Native Intelligence: "It’s hard...
Sunday's Current section in the Los Angeles Times will carry an editor's note disclosing some details of a romantic relationship between Andrés Martinez, the paper's Editor of the Editorial Pages,...
Cathy Seipp's public battle with lung cancer ended at 2:05 this afternoon. She was surrounded by family members and friends when she died at Cedars-Sinai. The Times' online obituary quotes...
Reader Lorna Herf and her husband — the ones who walked away from paying cash for a BMW because the dealer demanded a thumbprint — are taking a spin in...
President Bush gave Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a vote of confidence last night, but why let that ruin a good story? This morning's Daily Journal speculates on possible replacements for...
Is Los Angeles headed for racial conflict? That and more inside....
Technically, I guess it's the booboo of the week because it was in last Thursday's LA Weekly issue. But I just noticed: The article “Nasty Battle for Classroom Control” [March...
Los Angeles New City Monthly, from the company behind CityBeat, will "celebrate the intellectual and cultural 'renaissance' of L.A.'s Eastside, from Hollywood through Silver Lake and Los Feliz and into...
The Communist Party USA has donated its archives to New York University. "Decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow,...
I finally got around to Deborah Solomon's Q-and-A with Ron Burkle in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. He talks about Hillary, briefly glances off David Geffen and the L.A. Times,...
L.A.'s knockoff attempt at a "fashion week" appears to be losing its online sizzle. LA.com's blog is covering the shows and hoopla, but not the LA Weekly's Style Council, which...
Come on in...just click below....
LA Observed's man with the video camera, Jacob Soboroff, greeted the A380 Airbus this morning at LAX. Check it out at Native Intelligence: He's got interviews with the French pilot...
Michael Newman is the deputy editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times who starred in a minor media dustup this month over his observation, from the vantage point of...
You (and I) weren't crazy: the Times did launch a new enviro-blog last Tuesday and suspend it on Thursday. It will return in early April, though, deputy innovation editor Aaron...
Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index has become a go-to daily blog digest of editorial cartoons. Today, though, he commiserates about the incredible shrinking (except for the new Image section) Los...
Journalist and blogger Cathy Seipp has been bravely and publicly battling lung cancer for many years. (She was not a smoker.) Her daughter Maia Lazar, a student at UC San...
This is one of the Airbus A380's that took off in Europe this morning and are scheduled to land in the U.S. about 9:30 am. As we mentioned over the...
Start the new week with a jolt of news and observation. Click to enter......
Blogger Lorna Brown was all set to buy a new car at South Bay BMW. She and the sales team agreed on price, trade-in, everything. But when she put down...
Here are twelvish of the smartest, scoop-iest or most insidery posts from the past week here at LA Observed. Click here if you want the entire week of News &...
Next week John Humble, whose website I stumbled upon in 2005, receives a pretty nice honor for a living Los Angeles photographer: a show of his work at the Getty....
First cut on Saturday afternoon...plus Sunday updates at the bottom. Richard Alarcon resigned from the Assembly in time to allow the special election to fill his vacancy to be held...
Our Morning Buzz post on Tuesday reported the launch of a new L.A. Times blog, Carbon Shift, to cover "energy-related news: climate change, energy security, public health, and business [and]...
Now that talkjock Marc Germain has left KABC 790 for the left side of the radio politics spectrum (and the right side of the AM dial at KTLK 1150), he...
There's continued talk at the L.A. Times of looming cost-cutting and a senior newsroom shift in the works, but I guess there is no hiring freeze. The LAT has snapped...
Mayor Villaraigosa is expected by many to eventually endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president, but for now he is saying nice things about several of the Democrats and being...
Last year's L.A. Times publisher, Jeffrey Johnson, has a taken an executive post where he will oversee media interests for Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. Burkle, through Yucaipa, joined with Eli...
Mosey in for a look by clicking below......
Tonight's Los Angeles Political Roast raised $575,000 for the American Diabetes Association, but the 1,000 or so people who packed into a Century Plaza ballroom found a curious centerpiece at...
Judea and Ruth Pearl received word Wednesday night that the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has confessed to killing their son, Wall Street Journal reporter...
The L.A. Times has announced that Current, the paper's Sunday (for now) commentary and ideas section, will have a guest editor every quarter to bring a little outside intellectual...
More La Cucaracha-related troubles at the L.A. Times feature section: 'La Cucaracha': In some copies of today's Comics Plus, the "Blondie" comic strip was printed twice, mistakenly replacing "La Cucaracha,"...
We keep it hidden so the page doesn't look all ugly. Click to come on in....
Yes, newspapers still care about Pulitzer prizes. Prompted by yesterday's news that the Times has two Pulitzer finalists in criticism who nominated themselves, a whisper campaign has begun in the...
Word out of Orange County is that newsroom staffers at the Register have signed a letter protesting the posting of anonymous comments on the paper's website that libel, level racial...
In this week's The Z Files, posted to the LA Weekly website more than a day early, David Zahniser reports on a recall move against 5th District councilman Jack Weiss...
Busy day inside. Come on in......
Science writer Robert Lee Hotz is leaving the Times for the Wall Street Journal to write the Science Journal column. An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement...
The National Labor Relations Board plans to take action against Wendy McCaw's Santa Barbara News-Press for illegally firing seven staffers who backed the newsroom union drive, and also will refer...
KFI News' Eric Leonard reports on his blog that at least two California Highway Patrol officers assigned to the Newhall station were placed off-duty during an internal investigation of allegations...
Channel 7 morning news anchor Phillip Palmer goes under the knife tomorrow at St. Vincent's to donate a kidney to a friend, former KCAL news editor Dale Davis. Palmer talks...
All three finalists in the cricitism category of the Pulitzer prizes are from Los Angeles, Joe Strupp reports at Editor & Publisher. The trio includes two Times critics who nominated...
Coverage in the Orange County Register of April Branum giving birth — she weighs 420 pounds and didn't realize she was pregnant — became the paper's most viewed web story...
Joseph Russin joins KTLA News as executive editor of planning. "Russin's responsibilities will include overseeing news coverage on-air and on the web, planning feature stories and supervising the work of...
From the L.A. Times: An article in Sunday's California section profiling members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said that decorations on the walls of Supervisor Mike Antonovich's...
It's all after the fold....
Now we know why all those OC Weekly resignations have been coming so fast. Several of the departed are joining former Weekly editor Will Swaim in a new Long Beach...
Edgar Baitzel died Sunday of cancer. He joined LA Opera in 2001 and became Chief Operating Officer in February 2006. Placido Domingo, the opera company's general director, says in a...
Claudia McMahon joins the staff of Councilman Dennis Zine today as communications deputy. "She comes to us with a wealth of media experience including several years as a senior producer...
The new fashion-centric Image section will appear monthly in the Times starting next Sunday then switch to weekly in September. The section will be headed by deputy features editor Michalene...
Barbara Hansen's TableConversation.com picks up where her ethnic food columns in the Times food section left off.
Click below for the full Buzz, of course, but don't miss weekend posts on a new Doug Dowie profile, the death of Richard Jeni, Ruby the Elephant's liberation and why...
Here's a quick look at the best of last week's LA Observed entries... Nancy Bauer Gonzales means it this time, dammit: no perfume, cologne or even aromatic residue of shaving...
Mayor Villaraigosa's main photo op for Monday will be to announce that the only African and sole female elephant at the Los Angeles Zoo is being retired to the Performance...
Standup comedian Richard Jeni was found gravely injured from a gunshot wound Saturday morning inside his West Hollywood apartment. He died soon after at the hospital. His girlfriend told police...
Sacramento Bee reporter Aurelio Rojas visits with Doug Dowie (his former boss at UPI) in today's paper and says the story of the ex-editor and Fleishman-Hillard power broker "has parallels...
Jim Beardsley, a local historian who is the archivist at Marymount High School, stopped by the old Marineland site on Palos Verdes Peninsula and found the demolition and clearing...
Last year's winners of the Los Angeles Marathon and other top runners boycotted this month's race because they didn't receive their winnings for almost a year, the Daily News' Billy...
Geez, it's been nothing but memos today. One more: the LAT Business section shuffles editors and brings back Anne Reifenberg, who had been running West magazine since the exit of...
As we hinted earlier, the columnist rotation changes. Out are Erin Aubry Kaplan (as reported previously), Max Boot and Jonathan Chait. Meghan Daum escapes the Saturday ghetto for Mondays. Also,...
Channels 2 and 9 news director Nancy Bauer Gonzales has gone on the warpath before against perfume and cologne in the office (as well as against messy desks.) But with...
Interim editor Steve Lowery has just become the latest OC Weekly staffer to depart in the wake of Village Voice Media's takeover. His email to staff: From: Steve Lowery Date:...
Look whose arms are being twisted to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times: employees. Head of circulations Jack Klunder, who returned to the LAT after a stint at the MediaNews...
Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing was on "The Colbert Report" this week in his hat as Editor of Make magazine. Mark and the host fired marshmallows at each other and exchanged...
Denise Hamilton ponders the sighting of catfish in the Los Angeles River at Native Intelligence, Friday morning headlines at LA Biz Observed, and We Get Email about book sections, T.J....
Click for the whole thing......
Inspectors poking around to find out why a big piece of plaster fell off the Theme Building at LAX discovered pervasive rust damage. Encounter, the restaurant that occupies the landmark,...
Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal, writes in the new issue that he decided to stop his moaning about America's reliance on foreign oil and do something about it....
Every year Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher reports the supposedly secret list of finalists submitted by Pulitzer Prize judges. One year I beat Joe into print and felt pretty...
An LA Observed reader asks: "Why are there seven jobs for ABC 7 listed on JournalismJobs.com?" Dunno, but it's true and they are all for freelancers or part-time work. The...
Now we know the answer to the question: what if they gave an election and (almost) nobody came? Rest of the Morning Buzz is inside......
Lalo Alcaraz feels pretty good about having "La Cucaracha" restored to the L.A. Times. He's sending around this riff on Dewey Beats Truman....
OC Weekly staffers learned about their new music editor from The Stranger in Seattle. Luke Y. Thompson announced he's headed to the OC as well. The Hollywood Reporter's blogger...
I'm going to guess that the pressure to fold the Times' Sunday Book Review into a cheaper, thinner Saturday tabloid comes from the Chicagoans in temporary residence on Spring Street....
Bon Appétit senior editor Heather John began dreaming about her post-L.A. Marathon meal long before she entered (and completed) Sunday's race. When her first choice didn't work out, she settled...
Assemblyman Richard Alarcon wins a seat on the City Council without a runoff, pulling 54.6% to Monica Rodriguez's 27.9%. (She was the one endorsed by all the newspapers.) Two precincts...
Latest L.A. city election results are here. In early results, Richard Alarcon was winning his race to rejoin the City Council and Mayor Villaraigosa was getting a split decision on...
Are we entering an era of cross-newspaper snark? Yesterday it was Daily News blogger Mariel Garza making fun of an L.A. Times editor who finds Los Angeles ugly and who...
Back in November we noted that the Times' then-new publisher David Hiller replied to a disappointed reader's email with a personal note. That's still his style, apparently. Hiller today answered...
That was fast: the Lalo Alcaraz comic strip that was killed yesterday will be back tomorrow by popular demand. Flip side: the dog cat gets it. A blurb on the...
Kit Seelye is giving up the media beat to cover politics for the upgrading New York Times website. Gawker has the newsroom memo: It is a new role not just...
$25 million from BP will finance the museum's new entrance off Wilshire, says the LAT....
If Jeffrey Trachtenberg's Wall Street Journal report is accurate, that would mean the Times decided to face the critical music and launch the scaled-back Book Review before the big LAT...
Actress Dania Ramirez holds up the clothes for the spring fashion issue, which focuses on local designers Eduardo Lucero and Emiliano Moreno. Also in the magazine: seeing City Council president...
Would you believe it's election day again? Los Angeles and some surrounding cities will vote. Go ahead, try it for a change — in L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa has relaxed parking...
New email to LA Observed from a Reagan White House staffer, an emeritus professor and others covering the loss of La Cucaracha, the incredible shrinking L.A. Times and the difference...
Tavis Smiley scores an interview tonight on PBS with Bruce Gordon, who resigned Sunday after just nineteen months as head of the NAACP. "A 64 person board under any scenario...
A ruling on Friday by a committee of the Library of Congress means that KCRW.com and other websites that stream music could have to pay royalties each time a song...
Michael Newman, the Times' deputy opinion editor from out of town, thinks so after running yesterday's marathon. He particularly seems to not much like Boyle Heights, Koreatown or the sections...
April issue is the last one in print, says Ad Age. The magazine brand will continue online....
Cynthia Littleton was the recently named (well, last March) editor of The Hollywood Reporter and Anne Thompson was deputy film editor. They join Variety as deputy editor for news development...
Today's Wall Street Journal advances tomorrow's Beverly Hills municipal election with a front-page story that focuses on the Iranian face of the city through Jimmy Delshad, a councilman who is...
One person was more surprised than most by the Times' announcement today that several comic strips would no longer appear daily. He is Lalo Alcaraz, whose strip "La Cucaracha" got...
The San Francisco Chronicle has a unique understanding of how readers here might react to the LAT folding its Book Review in with Current. The Chronicle merged its Sunday review...
Ton of media notes today, and a lot of other stuff. Click below to go on in....
If layoffs or buyouts hit the Los Angeles Times newsroom later this month, as many on the staff predict, you can bet there will be a lot of bitter references...
David Beckham damaged a ligament in his right knee playing today in Madrid, and European media were full of reports that the injury is serious enough to keep him out...
Times columnist Tim Rutten rehashes 'Frontline' in his Saturday column and finds it "mysterious and troubling" that his bosses, editor Jim O'Shea and publisher David Hiller, weren't quoted more...
David Abel, publisher of The Planning Report and Metro Investment Report, now has a colloquium named after him. "Rethinking Governance in the Age of MySpace.com" will be held Thursday night...
Essayist William Kittredge will pick up the Robert Kirsch Award on April 27 when the winners in the following Los Angeles Times Book Prize categories will be announced. Finalists were...
Men, that's who. Only 36 percent of the broadcast viewers on ABC were male, tying the show’s all-time lowest popularity among men, Alex Ben Block reports at Hollywood Today. Block...
Quentin Tarantino's two months in residence at the New Beverly Cinema has inspired Dennis Cozzalio, the blogger behind the under-appreciated Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. He has dug...
With this year's new L.A. Marathon route, a lot of people are going to head out Sunday and run into street closures. The map and timetable is more complex than...
Last Buzz of the week. Click to get the skinny....
The LA Weekly's David Zahniser asks how it is that Assemblyman Richard Alarcon spent more than $415,000 running for election when he didn't have an opponent. Zahniser's answer: "For starters,...
Jill Leovy asks the question in her Homicide Report blog at LATimes.com: "Are Black-vs.-Brown Racial Tensions Driving Homicide in L.A.?" Her answer is no. Take the four most violent Los...
The dimensions of departing airports chief Lydia Kennard's deal to keep a hand in the pot at LAX are becoming clear. Nice deal, if you can get it. The Board...
Mark Sarvas, L.A.'s most recognized lit-blogger, has a post up at The Elegant Variation that he's been hoping to write for a long time. He sold his first novel, and...
Adolfo V. Nodal was general manager of the city's Cultural Affairs Department from 1988 until the Hahn Administration took over City Hall in 2001. (He left in January 2001, during...
It's not quite O.J. Simpson-in-a-white Bronco, but it's still a premium-grade L.A. police chase tale. During yesterday's press conference to remember the 1997 North Hollywood police shootout, the cameras —...
Marc Germain, who recently departed his talk radio gig as Mr. KABC, begins Monday as the afternoon drive-time talk jock on a newly revamped AM 1150 — which drops its...
Mark Frauenfelder, a former colleague of mine at the Industry Standard, who talks about the rise to Internet stardom of BoingBoing in this month's Los Angeles magazine: 1. Be a...
There's no Morning Buzz today due to the press of other time commitments, but just look at what's fresh on the site right now. Good stuff: In advance of today's...
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
