Morning Buzz: Monday 2.23.09

• Cost-cutting moves unveiled in the Daily News today include no more editorial, Op-Ed or business pages on Mondays, and the comics and TV grid moved into the front news section. Note to readers
  Also: Down to one entertainment writer
• LAPD chief WIlliam Bratton's "political activity on behalf of his boss, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, is unbecoming" and "his endorsement of [Jack] Weiss for city attorney is worse." LAT editorial
• A California Highway Patrol officer in Compton fatally shot her husband, saying he had abused her. Daily Breeze
• City Councilman Dennis Zine asked for a 10 percent cut to his $149,159-a-year salary and may ask the 14 other council members to do the same. Orlov column/Daily News
• One outgrowth of California’s budget agreement "may have set the table for something the state does often and well: force a national re-examination of a public policy issue, in this case ridding state capitals of partisan gridlock," says New York Times bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer. NYT
• One in five Los Angeles County residents — nearly 2.2 million people, and rising — currently receive public assistance payments or benefits. LAT
• Japanese and Korean residents of Little Tokyo are slowly learning to live side by side. LAT
• The city of Los Angeles is thinking of using the Palmdale land it acquired for an airport through eminent domain to install solar energy panels under Measure B. LAT
• Supporters of the L.A. Times' unionized pressmen plan an 11 a.m. protest outside the paper's Downtown offices over layoffs and what they call unfair labor practices.
• The city of Rancho Palos Verdes sure has some onerous laws concerning catering trucks and, perhaps by extension, the Latino workers who patronize them. Daily Breeze
• Steve Lopez's Sunday column: "Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't find a way to get porn and hunger into the same column. But when you fish for a living, you never know what you might catch." LAT
• Robyn Dixon of the Los Angeles Times won the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Batten Medal for her stories spotlighting the cruelties, hopes and fears of the people of Zimbabwe. ASNE
• L.A. Times.com executive editor explains the redesign of L.A. Now and her hopes for the paper's new mapping project. Readers' Representative Journal
• After trying out several potential new comics, the Times has replaced "For Better or for Worse" and "Sally Forth" with "Stone Soup" by Jan Eliot and "Home and Away" by Steve Sicula. LAT
• Mozza chef Mario Batali got some attention for using the f-word while speaking to the crowd at a Florida dinner for the king and queen of Spain, once while introducing chef Jose Andres of The Bazaar. AP

Mark Lacter's business headlines | Native Intelligence