Archive by Date
April 30, 2007
It's retro month at LA Observed. First Sharon Tay returns, now Reggie the wayward alligator has apparently been spotted at Lake Machado in Harbor City for the first time since...
Not only did L.A. Times circulation take another hit today — down more than four percent — but Editor & Publisher named N. Christian Anderson III of the Orange County...
LA Observed reader Cecilia was at the Beverly Hilton last night and heard that Trader Vic's next door would serve its final mai-tai's today. "So we went over and...
Times staff writer Mark Arax just escalated — in a big way — his dispute with the paper's managing editor over a recent story about the Armenian genocide. He emailed...
The father with two kids who tried to stiff the Northridge Claim Jumper last Thursday night sure picked the wrong night at the wrong place to walk out on his...
Another Gran Marcha to support immigrants begins Tuesday morning at Broadway and Olympic, moves north on Broadway starting at 10 am, and heads to City Hall via 1st Street. Fewer...
The weekend was too busy to put up an Editor's Dozen, but here's a quick link to browse all of last week's News & Chatter posts and all of LA...
April 28, 2007
Couple of additions to the lineup of LA Observed contributors at this weekend's L.A. Times Festival of Books at UCLA. Veronique de Turenne has been added as moderator of the...
April 27, 2007
The Times has shown laudable sensitivity to the story of transsexual sports writer Mike Penner making the transformation to Christine Daniels, but not so much the publisher of the Times-owned...
The 12-screen Landmark opens in five weeks at Pico and Westwood, in the annex to Westside Pavilion. It will be the flagship of the Landmark theater chain, featuring indie fare,...
Tonight's show is the last, at least for now. "After five seasons and 154 shows from Yreka in the north to Baja in the south to the Eastern Sierras of...
Just before jurors returned a verdict yesterday in a breach-of-contract case involving the creators of the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace," lawyers for the network revealed that the jury foreman...
Sen. Dianne Feinstein's opposition on behalf of neighbors posed too great an obstacle and the FBI will look for another location to build its new L.A.-area headquarters. The feds had...
Mike Penner's column announcing his transition to Christine Daniels is already one of the most viewed LATimes.com stories of the past year, the paper says today in an interview with...
Not to say there's no news, it just won't be here. Morning Buzz returns Monday....
April 26, 2007
This week's Santa Barbara Independent jumps all over News-Mess owner Wendy McCaw and her people's team of lawyers (which now includes Marty Singer) for the weekend smear of ex-editor Jerry...
Once around the LA Observed blogs: Jenny Price writes at Native Intelligence that since the Virginia Tech tragedy, friends have been checking in with her a lot and asking if...
Snakeskin Shamesin, third in the series of Naomi Hirahara's novels set in Southern California that feature Japanese-American gardener Mas Arai, won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America...
Well, just in the monologue "The Tonight Show" emails out: Here's an interesting local story, a L.A. Times sportswriter, Mike Penner...a very good sports writer, has announced he's undergoing a...
Editor Jim O'Shea has emailed the L.A. Times staff a response to all the hubbub about Mark Arax and whether or not a story was killed because of concerns that...
Publicist and friend Warren Cowan made the announcement that Jack Valenti, the former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, died this afternoon. He had been in ill...
A few years ago Baseball Prospectus managing editor Christina Kahrl went through what Mike Penner wrote about this morning. She has been counseling the Times sports writer, who will be...
The May issue profiles Mario Lavandeira, who is the celebrity blogger known as Perez Hilton, asks some questions of Channel 2's Laura Diaz and visits with Wicked's Eden Espinoza. The...
Nah, but the LA Weekly's Daniel Hernandez adds good new details in the dispute we reported Tuesday between Times managing editor Doug Frantz and West magazine staff writer Mark Arax....
Plenty of news and notes today, just lurking beyond the jump....
Veteran L.A. Times sports writer Mike Penner writes in today's paper that he will return from vacation in a few weeks as Christine Daniels. He lays out his personal journey...
April 25, 2007
A local television legend of sorts, and LA Observed oldie but goodie, returned tonight to the Los Angeles airwaves — and now to the blogosphere. Sharon Tay co-anchored the "KTLA...
It's rare for Esa-Pekka Salonen to be mentioned and pictured here twice in a year, let alone twice in the span of a few days. Or to have two mentions...
David Halberstam was to be in Los Angeles tomorrow night for a featured conversation with Times columnist Tim Rutten at the Jewish Federation's annual legal dinner. In his place, federation...
City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has charged Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis with one count of misdemeanor sexual battery for allegedly touching an 18-year-old woman on the breast, buttocks and...
The Wall Street Journal and USA Today will report slight bumps up in circulation next week, but the Orange County Register will be down more than 5%, Editor & Publisher...
There's no point in asking Times newsroom staffers people to clean up their desks, Channel 2 style — clutter there is so far gone that fire inspectors have come through...
Hoping to lure in some new fans, the LA Opera will sell every seat in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for $20 at two performances next month. Tickets go on sale...
Books editor David Ulin is scheduled to discuss the changes in the Times Sunday Book Review, the situation at the paper and this weekend's LAT Festival of Books with host...
Here's a little news bite to get the day going....
April 24, 2007
The L.A. Times Sacramento bureau is looking to bring in a new body to help cover Gov. Schwarzenegger. Here's how the offer went out to the newsroom: From: Janet Clayton,...
A dispute that has been quietly bubbling in the Times newsroom went public today when the publisher of the California Courier demanded that LAT managing editor Doug Frantz be fired...
It's Adam Gorfain, a 41 year old senior producer for "Dateline NBC" at the NBC News studios in Burbank, according to sometime NBC ABC independent investigative producer Eric Longabardi on...
Kevin Modesti, a columnist at the Daily News, becomes the first sports editor of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group chain. This means he oversees the increasingly shared sports coverage of...
A spot of news to start the day, tucked away after the jump....
April 23, 2007
The author and journalist was involved in a three-car crash this morning near the Dumbarton Bridge in San Mateo County, according to AP stories out of Menlo Park and San...
Now that channels 2 and 9 reside in their new shared newsroom in Studio City, news director Nancy Bauer-Gonzales has removed the ban on eating and drinking at desks. But—staffers...
Howard Larman and his wife Roz started their folk music show in 1970. Folkscene may be the oldest program on Los Angeles radio. Howard passed away over the weekend. Roz...
I'm talking about today's Times news with guest host Jon Beaupre on KPCC's "Patt Morrison," after the NPR news at 2 pm. Update: Times Publisher David Hiller and USC Annenberg...
That was a little 3.1 earthquake at 12:30, centered just northwest of San Fernando. Here in Westwood, some in the same office did feel it and some (me included) didn't....
Times editor Jim O'Shea follows up the publisher's memo with a missive of his own, asking the newsroom to have faith and saying he understands anger over Tribune execs receiving...
As reported last week, the Times offers a buyout to most employees and will take 150. Long-term employees can receive up to a year's pay. An unstated number of positions,...
William Booth of the Washington Post phoned up the new Pulitzer Prize winner and offered to buy him a meal at the spot of his choosing. It's the fun read...
The race-track fixture handicapped most recently for the Long Beach Press-Telegram and other LA News Group papers. He had planned to retire yesterday, at the end of Santa Anita's season,...
First glance at the news is down below the fold, along with a look back at the weekend....
April 22, 2007
Erika Schickel and myself (along with Times columnist Al Martinez) were the guests on KABC 790 AM's show "Spotlight on the Community" this morning talking with hosts Nelkane Benton and...
Some review-worthy posts from the past week at LA Observed... Villaraigosa's school bill was dealt a near-fatal blow at the appeals court, leading to some cooler press handling for the...
Wendy McCaw's News-Press ran a front page story today alleging that 15,000 pornographic images, including child porn, were found last summer on the computer hard drive of the former editor...
Last week the staff of Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald put out the word that she would take a leave of absence to recuperate from an unstated form of cancer. Now AP...
April 20, 2007
A buyout offer to be announced Monday will try to cut 70 newsroom jobs, taking the editorial staff from 920 to around 850. Before Tribune took over the news staff...
Ernest James Wilson III will take over July 1 for Geoffrey Cowan as dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. He is the senior member of Corporation for...
New LAUSD Supt. Supt. David L. Brewer has discovered what most of us knew — that things in his district are seriously awry. He releases a scathing 115-page report...
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the L.A. Philharmonic were nearing the end of the third movement of the Lemminkäinen Suite by Sibelius this afternoon when Disney Hall erupted in wailing sirens and...
We'll see if this flies. Blogger and Podcaster, published in Maryland, aims to "reduce the learning curve" for new practitioners, writes founder and publisher Larry Genkin. The skew is toward...
Click below for a little news....
April 19, 2007
KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez airs one of the fire and bomb threats called in to Academia Semillas del Pueblo, promising the Spanish-language charter school that its "beaners" would be...
Inside the annual weekend getaway issue is a piece from low-achieving Jordan High School in Watts, where Jesse Katz spent five months with the academic decathlon team. Editor Kit Rachlis'...
Full professors at Harvard average $177,400 a year, those at Yale $157,600. Which full professors in California do you think make the most? Here's the top 10 from the newest...
As Daniel Hernandez puts it in today's LA Weekly, KPFK general manager Eva Georgia — gay, black, African immigrant, disliked by many at the station — has been accused of...
Click below for the whole roundup of news, neatly tucked away behind the fold....
April 18, 2007
Tony Tranfa, web editor and jazz critic of the Daily Breeze, died today after collapsing in a hallway at Torrance Memorial, where he was admitted last week. “Tony’s death is...
Author Neal Pollack, a confirmed Dodgers junkie, ventured out to the stadium's new family-friendly right field pavilion and endured nine innings of all-you-can-eat madness. His guide in today's Slate explains...
The Center for Responsive Politics broke out the by-state contributions to the '08 presidential candidates: Sen. Hillary Clinton leads the way in mining California for bucks so far. Here are...
Don LaFontaine, whose voice has been heard on movie trailers for decades, has gone public on a Geico commercial. That was reason enough for Radar Online to chat up the...
The Los Angeles Korean community has been closely following the news out of Virginia Tech, and Radio Korea here is reporting rumors that the father and mother of Cho Seung...
In the new W, former Variety scribe Gabriel Snyder explains the role of Hollywood political consultants and updates the roster of who works with whom. Noah Mamet, for instance, wrangled...
T. Jefferson Parker's L.A. Outlaws is moving to Dutton as part of a two-book deal, with publication next February. But here's my favorite L.A. angle from Publishers Lunch: Adena Halpern's...
Come on in for a little news....
April 17, 2007
Tom Mott is the LA Observed Insider who was first to speak up and claim two tickets to Wednesday evening's Complete Tristan and Isolde at Disney Hall. When these perks...
Curbed LA designates the off-putting, easily ignored mall known as Hollywood & Highland: It's not based purely on aesthetics, that we can all agree. There are other factors - the...
We posted a note when Dave Lesher opened a California office for the New America Foundation, so it's only right to observe that he's leaving. Lesher, the former editor of...
Following today's setback for the mayor at the appeals court, Michael Blood of the AP bureau here filed a piece pronouncing a new phase in the Antonio Villaraigosa media story....
Bunch of new talent is being unveiled at KCRW 89.9 FM and KCRW.com, some of them with station connections. Leaving are longtime KCRW figure Tricia Halloran, whose "Brave New World"...
A three-judge panel of the state's 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously kicked aside Mayor Villaraigosa's quest to rewrite democracy in Los Angeles and take power over the schools. They...
What I think was the last single-screen movie house to open in Westwood Village, the Mann National, will close at the end of this week. It's where The Exorcist opened...
Click as usual to get the Buzz....
April 16, 2007
Here it is the eleventh hour in New York and after 8 pm in Phoenix, and the Village Voice Media website has yet to acknowledge the Pulitzer won by the...
David Kravets, the AP reporter in San Francisco covering the state high court and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, becomes director of communications for the California Department of...
Degen Pener becomes editor-in-chief of Angeleno, while incumbent Alexandria Abramian-Mott remains with Modern Luxury Magazines as national home design editor. Pener has been features director of Santa Barbara Magazine and...
LA Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold won a Pulitzer Prize today in Criticism. It's the first Pulitzer ever for a food critic, according to the Weekly, and the paper's first....
Assemblyman Lloyd Levine's office helpfully sends along the news that the boss just finished the Boston Marathon. His time was 3:10:03, good for a pace of 7:15 per mile. Levine...
Mayor Villaraigosa named Olga Garay as general manager of the Department of Cultural Affairs. She was Program Director for the Arts for eight years at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation...
Jim Newton, newly named the LAT's editor of the editorial pages, received a boost over the weekend from former Times publisher Tom Johnson. He sent Newton a note that made...
Noon our time is Pulitzer hour in newsrooms around the country. Here, the Times unofficially expects a prize for last year's Altered Oceans series, but if the rumors are accurate...
April 15, 2007
The Tristan Project has returned to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The L.A. Philharmonic's Esa-Pekka Salonen, director Peter Sellars and video artist Bill Viola are again creating "a multi-discipline arts...
Twelve or so things to like about LA Observed from the past week: Times stays inside for the new opinion editor. Those McCourts sure know how to mess up Opening...
April 14, 2007
But Los Angeles loses. Chicago will be the U.S. bid city for the 2016 Olympic Games, the USOC announced in Washington. LAT, ChiTrib * David Davis: Where L.A.'s bid went...
April 13, 2007
Maria Bartiromo gets face time with Sam Zell in the new Business Week, but the interview was last Friday in advance of Zell's dinner that evening with David Geffen:...
Jim Newton, chief of the Times' City-County bureau, gets the post of editor of the editorial pages, reporting to Publisher David Hiller. He replaces the prematurely departed Andrés Martinez. Newton...
To juice up interest in Ray Bradbury's appearance this Sunday in Santa Clarita, this ad ran in The Signal. Dozens of mystified, angry calls flooded into the paper, the fire...
The LAT's Image section returns this weekend for its second stroll down the runway of public opinion. I'm told that Sunday's edition has a piece setting up the rivalry...
FineArtsLA.com is from freelance writer and self-described "arch-dilettante" Christian M. Chensvold and sets as its mission postings on "music, opera, ballet and museums in Greater Los Angeles." Items currently up...
Times reporter Anna Gorman goes first-person in today's Column One to detail her family's fight with cancer and her own surgery to remove her ovaries, uterus and fallopian tubes. Gorman...
Full plate of Friday news. After the jump....
This tree went down yesterday in Leimert Park. Photo is from a new Leimert Park community website by former Daily Breeze reporter Eddie North-Hager, who started the site after taking...
Channel 2 staffers are buzzing about their new entertainment reporter, Christina McLarty, being the girlfriend of Girls Gone Wild bad-boy Joe Francis. He's been in the news lately for his...
April 12, 2007
There has been at least one home heavily damaged and roof fires are reported on others along North Beverly Drive in the Franklin Canyon area above Beverly Hills, where a...
Remember last year when the plastic devices placed in Times newsboxes to promote Mission: Impossible III kept prompting frightened calls to bomb squads? Well, the U.S. Attorney's office here has...
Metromix, the younger and, ahem, edgier sibling re-make of Calendar Live coming in June from the Times and Tribune, has staffed up. Deborah Vankin, formerly of Variety and LA Weekly,...
CBS drops him effective immediately. “There has been much discussion of the effect language like this has on our young people, particularly young women of color trying to make their...
The Times has rolled out a new web section devoted to the Lana Clarkson death and Phil Spector trial — stories that ran in the paper, photos, miscellany. The occasion...
Back in 2003, the Daily Mail paid a financial settlement and retracted its report that producer Steve Bing had hired PI to the stars Anthony Pellicano to spy on and...
Lots and lots of news to start the day, after the jump....
April 11, 2007
A couple of LAO readers emailed to say they couldn't find today's premiere issue of The District Weekly anywhere around Long Beach. But apparently it came out, with strip club...
Kurt Vonnegut died tonight in Manhattan, several weeks after suffering brain injuries in a fall. His wife, photographer Jill Krementz, confirmed the news for the Times. Elaine Woo's obituary calls...
Taking a look around the site this afternoon... Phil Hersh of the Chicago Tribune emerges as the top reporter on the Olympics beat and is all over this weekend's media-free...
Live Nation is taking over the venerable Hollywood Palladium on Sunset Boulevard and plans to renovate the place for a 2008 reopening. Council President Eric Garcetti announced the deal this...
Celebrity hotelier Ian Schrager might be the most unpopular man in Montecito for turning the venerable seaside Miramar into a hole in the ground then fleeing town. Los Angeles power...
The latest innovations from LAT Innovation Editor Russ Stanton are out -- a bunch of job openings following on his memo of earlier this week. Here's our favorite new reporter...
Click to come on in for today's opening news....
April 10, 2007
Allied Model Trains, which opened in 1946 and calls itself "the largest train store ever built," has been sold by longtime owner Allen Drucker. A version of the store will...
John Stodder was one of the smart ones who got to Dodger Stadium early yesterday and was able to observe the mess with somewhat detached eye. He pulls from his...
Borzou Daragahi, the Times' former bureau chief in Baghdad, has left the war zone for a new posting in Beirut. He writes in his farewell piece about some of the...
Click below to get the news....
April 09, 2007
A blogger at Daily Kos who goes by the pseud of blklikeme has attracted 559 comments with a disturbing post about being shunned and feared as he took a Good...
The Dodgers lost to a suddenly good Rockies team, Jason Schmidt and Matt Kemp (prone after hitting the wall) both left hurt, and a limp throw home from shallow center...
Couple of minor organizational twists were introduced today at LATimes.com. On the foreign page, a gathering of notes and observations from correspondents mostly in Latin America is being called La...
The Daily News politics blog, mostly silent since March, has come back to life. Rick Orlov introduces himself from City Hall in today's Sausage Factory post. Excerpt: In my real...
"Original blogger" Army Archerd compares the recent "Entourage" premiere party in the dome at the Arclight to the theater's 1963 unveiling as the Cinerama Dome. The Cinerama's super-wide curved screen...
Ariel Hanrath-Clark died with his father, producer Bob Clark, in last week's head-on crash with an unlicensed, undocumented suspected drunk driver on Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades. The father...
It's Opening Day at Dodger Stadium, and instead of a stealth aircraft flyover a pair of F-16s and parachuting Navy SEALs will provide the obligatory military display. Jenny at Chicken...
April 08, 2007
Here are the top posts from the last week. If you want to scan the whole past week of News & Chatter, click here — or here for the entire...
April 06, 2007
Times columnist Steve Lopez, looking for an angle, went out to Malibu to check out the hard-to-reach public beach near Tribune buyer Sam Zell's estate. After Lopez knocked on the...
Friday buzz after the jump....
April 05, 2007
David Geffen told the Washington Post yesterday that "I continue to want to buy the Los Angeles Times," and a source close to the mogul says that "Geffen has spoken...
Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes had a lengthy conversation yesterday with KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour about his coverage of critic Edward Goldman's potential conflicts. In his latest post,...
First slice at the news after the jump....
April 04, 2007
Aside from what the Sam Zell deal does for the value of his Tribune stock, and his general Chicago loyalties, Times Publisher David Hiller talks up Zell as an owner....
Last month we posted on Southland Publishing's forthcoming debut of Los Angeles New City Monthly — you remember, the magazine that would "celebrate the intellectual and cultural 'renaissance' of L.A.'s...
President Bush has an evening fundraiser in Brentwood, there are accidents on both sides of the 405 near Wilshire, and the northbound Pasadena is backed up near I-5. Luckily, Bush...
Film director Bob Clark and his son Ariel were killed in the crash that kept Pacific Coast Highway closed through the Palisades during today's morning rush hours. Clark directed A...
LA Voice.org discovered that the abandoned pressroom at the Daily Breeze building in Torrance is full of marijuana plants. Relax — they're the fake variety brought in for the filming...
Waiting to hear just when (or if, considering appeals) he goes to federal prison in the Fleishman-Hillard case, Doug Dowie is writing up a storm. In addition to the screenplays...
Last week the New York Times ran a piece calling KCRW's Russian-accented art critic Edward Goldman highly influential and barely mentioned that in addition to teaching beginners how to collect...
The hometown Chicago Tribune got a long interview with the buyer of the L.A. Times, KTLA and everything else in the Tribune Company's portfolio (except the Cubs.) Mark Lacter gives...
A quick breeze through the local news, after the jump....
April 03, 2007
In this month's Tu Ciudad, Rep. Loretta Sanchez and Mrs. Kobe Bryant contribute their favorite spots in Orange County and, to stay in the theme, OC Weekly writer Gustavo Arellano...
Halle Berry seems pretty pleased that the studio paid up for her to receive a star this morning outside the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood and Highland. Via Defamer. Photo: AP...
It's not what you're thinking. Out in the Santa Clarita Valley, an online newspaper for the Stevenson Ranch end of things — newer, upscale, further west — ran a comment...
Tribune buyer Sam Zell is known as "the grave dancer," so OC Register travel editor-blogger Gary Warner thought he would mark yesterday's news by stopping in at the graves of...
New day begins after the jump......
April 02, 2007
LAPD chief William Bratton did the deed today and requested a second term. "It's been an honor and a privilege to serve as Los Angeles' chief of police," he said...
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York is upset with the L.A. Times for coverage of the priest abuse cases here. At issue is a story...
I'm not sure how persuasive this will be in the skittish Times newsroom, but Editor Jim O'Shea just emailed the staff his take on the transfer of Tribune to investor...
The New York Times has posted the first of a four-part video conversation between Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the paper's Calvin Sims, a former foreign correspondent now hosting online...
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics ran the numbers on victorious Tribune suitor Sam Zell and calls him a political contributor who gives generously to both Democrats and Republicans. "Double-giving...
The author and professor of creative writing at Cornell was born in East Los Angeles, graduated from Garfield High and Immaculate Heart College, and worked as a bottler at...
Jay Levin's forthcoming RealTalk LA (and RealTalkLA.com) will try to "reinvent the concept of a city magazine and create the next evolution of the local online community," the founder of...
Bit of new formatting in today's Buzz. Check it out after the jump......
The Chicago Tribune calls it an "epic corporate drama" that ends with the paper's parent company — owner of the Los Angeles Times and KTLA — being taken private by...
April 01, 2007
In a live story posted at 12:29 1:26 am Midwest time, the Chicago Tribune's website says the board of the parent Tribune company was busily negotiating a $13 billion deal...
Needing to escape Los Angeles for a few hours, Judy and I took the Amtrak Surfliner to San Diego and back on Saturday. During a break from walking the Gaslamp...
Good piece in the Sunday LAT that began as a post on Jill Leovy's Homicide Report blog: LAPD officers frequently assign the wrong name to Latino crime victims and arrestees....
Two teens who set Friday's Hollywood Hills fire were released to their parents and flown home to Illinois, but could be required to appear here in court later. LAT...
Hoping to reach out to affluent, influential and culturally with it Angelenos, the L.A. Philharmonic today flooded my Westside neighborhood with Hollywood Bowl promotional calendars wrapped around a complimentary Sunday...
