Media notes and a lady in gold

Former L.A. Times reporter Anne-Marie O'Connor's book, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, is out this month and she will be making appearances here over the next few weeks. It's the story of the ”Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” the Klimt painting looted by the Nazis in Austria, recovered in 2006 for a Cheviot Hills woman named Maria Altmann whose family had owned the painting, brought to Los Angeles and sold later that year for a record $135 million.

Louise Roug, another former L.A. Times reporter, is returning from Denmark to be foreign editor at Newsweek and the Daily Beast. We noted when she left the U.S. to host a television news show in Copenhagen.

And ex-LAT critic Paul Brownfield had a piece in last weekend's New York Times Magazine on the explosion of podcasts by comedians and the paradox that it’s "at once a minirenaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves — a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy."

Also on the media beat today:

• Editors at Patch denied they plan layoffs and disputed most of the rest of a morning letter to Jim Romenesko from a disgruntled staffer.
• The tech blog-turned-website GigaOm acquired paidContent, the formerly L.A.-based site started by Rafat Ali. Editors Ernie Sander and Staci D. Kramer post that they are thrilled.
• ReelzChannel has ordered 26 more episodes of "Hollywood Uncensored with Sam Rubin."
• Ken Doctor looks at the newsonomics of news in California, concluding "the massive changes we’re seeing in California journalism portend even faster journalistic change across the country." California Watch, MediaNews and KPCC are featured.
• Aaron Sorkin‘s upcoming HBO drama “The Newsroom,” starring Jane Fonda, will be set in the fictional Atlantis Cable News and will likely launch in June.
• Black Clock 15 from CalArts is promised to be "a movie issue like no other," with pieces such as Geoff Nicholson’s meeting of two film pioneers in “Buster Keaton: The Warhol Years.”
• How to be a dream PR intern.