Weekly archive
July 6 - July 12, 2008
Saturday, Jul. 12
Three newsworthy deaths today: Dr. Michael DeBakey, Tony Snow and Bobby Murcer. The Los Angeles Times website lede says of DeBakey, "preeminent cardiac surgeon saved millions with his breakthroughs." The...
Friday, Jul. 11
City Council president Eric Garcetti, who represents Hollywood, said provisions added to the project will help alleviate concerns that the 16-story residential project next door will affect Capitol Records' underground...
Tomorrow at noon on KPCC (89.3 FM), John Rabe and his Off-Ramp Players will read a scene from "Right of Way," the script for a noir movie that LA Observed...
Tokyo-born Rocky Aoki was 69 when he died last night in New York, Bloomberg reports. The Benihana version of Japanese teppanyaki cooking began in New York, but of course they...
Christopher Thomas Thompson, who turns 59 today, has been charged with two felony counts each of reckless driving causing injury, battery with serious bodily injury and the special allegation of...
NPR's Culver City-based show "Day to Day" is running a web series on what gas prices and changing interests are doing to the traditional car-based California culture. The producers have...
Today's email from California Editor David Lauter about the preparations for layoffs at the Los Angeles Times. (The number hasn't risen above 150, he says.) It looks like next week...
Los Angeles County CEO William Fujioka has abruptly ended his weekly Monday media briefings, saying he'll now be available by phone. But when the Times' Garrett Therolf called Fujioka to...
Former deputy mayor (to Hahn) Troy Edwards testified under immunity yesterday at the Leland Wong trial and detailed the gift of sexual favors linked to Wong at a Bonaventure Hotel...
Rafat Ali's Santa Monica-based paidContent.org, which has covered the business side of websites since 2002, will be acquired by Guardian Media Group in the U.K. for “north of $30 million.”...
That's how one staffer describes the mood around the Los Angeles Times offices, where editors were believed to be working last night on their final lists of staffers — 150...
Thursday, Jul. 10
Catching up on this: Monday's Los Angeles Daily Journal cited sources saying that Councilman Jack Weiss has raised $1.1 million for next year's open race for City Attorney. Weiss has...
Ex-Daily News editor (and future candidate?) Ron Kaye is encouraging readers of his politics blog to bring their trash to City Hall on July 14. Bastille Day — get it?...
When OJR suspended publication last month, the move ended a ten-year run in which the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications was a high-profile player in the emerging...
The subject is the Alexandria Hotel, the Rosslyn Lofts project and City Hall's support of an $8 million subsidy for alleged slumlord Ruben Islas. Tibby Rothman, in the LA Weekly,...
The reason Sam Zell and company get so much attention (and let's face it, derision) here is not that they want to force change on institutions like the Times and...
Frank McCourt, the Dodgers owner of new, met Peter O'Malley at yesterday's Coliseum unveiling of a plaque honoring Walter O'Malley, the owner who brought the Dodgers west from Brooklyn. O'Malley...
Why Villaraigosa held back data on trash fee When he raised the trash fee, Mayor Villaraigosa said "Every new dollar residents pay for trash pickup will be used to put...
Wednesday, Jul. 9
With Sam Zell and Randy Michaels in town and making everybody antsy, and speculation raging in the newsroom about the future of Publisher David Hiller, the cutting out of printed...
A special edition of Claude Brodesser-Akner's The Business that aired at 2:30 this afternoon (and will again at 7 p.m.) features a rare head-to-head conversation with the dueling presidents of...
In today's LAT, reviewer Leslie Brenner absolutely savages Gladstone's Malibu, the Pacific Coast Highway goldmine where former mayor Richard Riordan is the largest shareholder. The food is "abominable" and the...
Los Angeles-based Washington Post reporter William Booth filed a good piece last week about Moe, the chimpanzee missing near Devore, but I'm guessing he got burned by the copy desk....
Blogger David K. Israel at Mental Floss magazine counted the Pinkberry knockoffs within two miles of his home — 11 places to satisfy his sweet tooth for cold Korean-inspired dessert...
A New York Times style blog takes umbrage at a cover by Orange County's Coast magazine that sure borrows a lot from an earlier T Magazine cover in the NYT....
AFTRA members approve contract The three-year deal passes with a 62% vote of the membership, leaving SAG out there alone. "It's hard to not see this as a setback [for...
Tuesday, Jul. 8
After the turn into Act 3, the story of Mayor Russell Napolitano and the Wilshire subway suddenly begins to make sense. Even with the mayor on live television running from...
Ex-Dodger hothead Milton Bradley has calmed down (except for a little brush with a reporter), gotten over the injury bug and put together a heckuva season for the Texas Rangers....
Today's lede about hands-free cellphones and driving, under the byline of Jennifer Steinhauer, the New York Times bureau chief in Los Angeles, who should (and does) know better: LOS ANGELES...
Gene Maddaus reports in the Daily Breeze that ties to Supervisor Yvonne Burke led to the Peace & Joy battered women's shelter in Carson being allowed to operate despite filth,...
Seventeen officers and two sergeants face department charges resulting from the mishandling of the May Day protest in MacArthur Park in 2007. No details were given, except that Cmdr. Rick...
Word swept through the Los Angeles Times newsroom today that managers were directed to prepare lists ranking staffers by level of talent then turn in the lists by tonight, a...
Police and the fire department moved in today on an astonishing homeless encampment that was suspended above Figueroa Street on top of the ventilation shaft under the 1st Street overpass...
I'm told that the Los Angeles Daily Journal's Supreme Court reporter in Washington, Brent Kendall, has left to join Dow Jones Newswire. He was at the DJ for five years....
Sam Zell's in-house innovator Lee Abrams has memoed again, long and rambling and ungrammatical as usual. Now that the cost-cutting Los Angeles Times is apparently moving towards folding the stand-alone...
Antonio in D.C. for Obama Mayor Villaraigosa introduces the candidate at the annual convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens. LAT, DN Also: Hollywood money solid for Obama....
Monday, Jul. 7
Shelly Leachman left the Daily Breeze last Thursday, and with it her career in newspapers (including a stint at the Santa Barbara News-Press in the Wendy McCaw meltdown years.) She's...
Melissa Grego, editor of HollywoodReporter.com, jumps to Broadcasting & Cable as executive editor. Grego joined THR last year after serving a stint as managing editor at TV Week. Memo follows...
Investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for reporting on the deaths at King-Drew Medical Center, are leaving the Los Angeles Times for...
The July issue is a relaunch under Emmis ownership by new editor Martin Smith. Editor's note here. The issue's best of OC media section proclaims the Register's Frank Mickadeit as...
Invisible South Central Since the South Central Los Angeles name was dropped, mostly in favor of labels like "over there," the community it once defined along Central Avenue has become...
Surprise, a bit of good news about the Los Angeles Times. It appears that, just ahead of the layoff reaper, one of the paper's most graceful and reportedly highly paid...
Boxer Mando Ramos, who died Sunday at age 59, fought 27 of his 49 matches in the Olympic Auditorium and also got into the ring at the Coliseum and the...
Sunday, Jul. 6
LA Observed columnist Bill Boyarsky recently completed a five-year term on the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. He was appointed after writing Controller Laura Chick a letter suggesting that the...
