Archive: Blogosphere

Entries in this category going back awhile
 

LAist goes dark

laist-logo.jpg Owner kills all the Gothamist and DNAInfo sites after union vote.

LA Weekly loses film critic Amy Nicholson too

amynicholson2013.jpg They are hiring. LAist is also looking for an editor-in-chief, and another former LA blogger-in-chief is in the news.

California's secret water blogger is a she

calif-aqueduct-stay-out.jpg The writer of On the Public Record.com sat down with Peter H. King of the LA Times after seven years of anonymity.

Scientists who help write the movies

ant-man-wsj.jpg The Wall Street Journal features Clifford V. Johnson, the USC theoretical physicist who is also a blogger and an adviser on plausible plot twists.

RV encampment on Tujunga Avenue in North Hollywood

rv-nh-12.jpg The blogger at Here in Van Nuys visited with some of the homeless parked in 15 vans, campers and RVs at North Hollywood Park.

Michael Higby, LA blogger, was 50

The lead blogger for many years at Mayor Sam's Sister City died Wednesday after a visit to the dentist.

Original Wonkette blogger wants you to know she's a Christian

ana-marie-cox-typepad.jpg Ana Marie Cox is still writing about politics and in her latest piece talks about her faith and being a liberal Christian.

Andrew Sullivan to shut down The Dish

sully-cartoon-in-dc.png The other shoe has dropped in political blogger Andrew Sullivan's recent decision to stop blogging.

Andrew Sullivan to give up blogging (and get a life)

sully-cartoon-in-dc.png One of the last of the original politics bloggers wants out before he burns out. He also hopes to write a book.

Volokh Conspiracy bloggers sign up with the Washington Post

eugene-volokh-ucla-mag.jpg UCLA Law professor Eugene Volokh — he graduated from college at age 15 — takes his popular center-right law, culture and politics blog to the Post, which loses Ezra Klein.

Dodgers hire blogger Jon Weisman

jon-weisman-paley-ctr.jpg Weisman and the team announced he is leaving Variety (where he is a senior editor covering television) to become the Dodgers director of digital and print content. Dodger Thoughts will suspend publication.

Blogdowntown is folding into the KPCC mainstream

Thumbnail image for bdownown-print-feb32011.jpg Less than two years after Eric Richardson allowed his site to be swallowed up, Blogdowntown will cease publishing. The archives will remain online.

Fishbowl LA going dark after all these years

fbla-icon.png Mediabistro is calling it a hiatus but says that "within the next few weeks, all existing FishbowlLA content will be folded into the FishbowlNY archives." Current editor Richard Horgan will move over to FishbowlNY "to cover the Hollywood trades, awards season and a broad range of national media stories."

15-year-old girl told by TSA at LAX to 'cover yourself'

daughter-outfit-boingboing.jpg The daughter of BoingBoing editor Mark Frauenfelder was going through security with a school group at LAX on Sunday when a male TSA officer hissed at her, "You're only 15, COVER YOURSELF!" Not cool.

Fire is a river that runs uphill

camarillo-fire-alcorn-reuters.jpg Since it looks as if the SoCal fire season is going to be long and mean, scientist-blogger Grace Peng offers a primer on the physics of flames and wind here. Plus: Reuters photographer Jonathan Alcorn on an eerie night at the Camarillo Springs fire.

Photographer pays homage to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Madonna in Hand-jimson.jpg February was Madonna month at East of West LA, the blog of photographer Kevin McCollister. "Because both the devotion to and the prevalence of the Virgin of Guadalupe seems to be under-appreciated in this town," he writes.

Blog comments embraced as art, sort of

comments-screenshot-eastsider.jpg Jesus Sanchez, the creator and editor of the blog The Eastsider LA, will hold a public reading — by actors — of selected comments from his blog next Saturday at Taix. It's a performance and a meetup and a fundraiser.

Blogger Patterico on being SWAT-ed over politics

Patrick Frey and his wife, both veteran prosecutors in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, are victims of one of the more despicable political dirty tricks practiced in America these days. Over his blogging.

Gawker's new West Coast editor announces he's black

cord-gawker.jpg Cord Jefferson, who started Monday as the West Coast editor for the Gawker gossip and blog empire, penned an opening greeting post that says he's "the first California staffer since Seth Abramovitch left in January. I'm also the first staffer (on record) to watch hardcore pornography in Fred Willard's favorite Hollywood peep show." Oh, and he's black.

Revisiting the Eames home after 57 years

schoener-eames-house.jpg No blogger has written this before, I suspect. Allon Schoener, the New York author transplanted to Boyle Heights who posts as The Reluctant Angeleno, recently visited the iconic home of Charles and Ray Eames in Pacific Palisades for the first time in a long time. "I had been there often between 1951 and 1955," he says. Let him explain.

'You were lucky, Hershiser'

si-hershiser.jpg Josh Suchon, the former post-game broadcaster for the Dodgers, is now blogging with a friend in Northern California. He tells a nice story on himself that along the way sheds some light on the relationships between fans, reporters and sports figures.
Ann Ravel, the chairwoman of the state's Fair Political Practices Commission, is giving up for now on trying to force bloggers to disclose payments they receive from political campaigns. She's moving instead to seek voluntary disclosure by bloggers for the November election, but isn't holding her breath. "I don't think there's going to be a large amount of voluntary disclosure," she says.

The City Maven signs up with KPCC's website

The-Maven.jpg I missed this note on Alice Walton's site this morning. The City Hall reporter who launched The City Maven in 2010 as a newly minted master's degree holder will now blog on the KPCC website. Read more

EastsiderLA servers are catching their breath

Blogger-in-chief Jesus Sanchez tells me the host is moving him to a new box. It should all be cleared up within hours, fingers crossed.

Suzanne Rico discovers Skid Row

san+julian+rico.jpg Suzanne Rico, the former morning co-anchor on Channel 2 who hit the road after losing her job two years ago, is back living in the Los Angeles area and blogging....

There's a new Wonkette in town

rebecca-wonkette.jpg Rebecca Schoenkopf, the former editor of the CityBeat weekly in Los Angeles and a longtime blogger as Commie Girl (as well as other journalistic pursuits) is the new editor of Wonkette

'Political Oscars' for California

sutter+brown+nbcla.jpg Politics commentator Sherry Bebitch Jeffe has awarded her "first annual" political Oscars on NBC LA's Prop Zero blog. Gov. Jerry Brown wins best performance by a Democrat.

LAT finally quotes Greg Packer, on Whitney Houston's funeral *

greag-packer-gizmodo.jpg Los Angeles Times watcher Patrick Frey, who blogs as Patterico, has been waiting years for America's most-quoted so-called "man on the street" to finally break into the pages of his favorite (not) newspaper.

Dodger Thoughts blog goes indie

jon+weisman+mug.jpg Jon Weisman's "outlet for dealing psychologically with the Los Angeles Dodgers and baseball" has left ESPN for life on its own.

Why Boing Boing will go dark on January 18

access-denied-flickr.jpg Pioneering and wildly popular Los Angeles-based blog Boing Boing will take down all content temporarily on Wednesday, Jan. 18 to protest the proposed Protect IP Act and Stop Online Piracy Act pending in Congress.

Times 'terminates' blogging pressman Ed Padgett

ed-padgett.jpg He can't write yet about the reason, but it came as a surprise, Padgett says.

Text links disguised as a rant about L.A.?

times-square-chairs-jg.jpg The item on the Huffington Post site about New York City doesn't feel right.

Xeni Jardin writes about her breast cancer

xeni-cancer.jpg Anyone who has spent much time around new media and blogs in the past ten years, especially in Los Angeles, has read or heard Xeni Jardin.

Blogger draws front page of L.A. Times every day

lat-front-page-drawn.jpg Today, like every other day this year, artist Erik Shveima will interpret what he sees on the front page of the Los Angeles Times and post his drawing on his blog.

Jonathan Gold's essential restaurants, now on spreadsheet

Food blogger and list-maker Sarah Gim went to bed the other night with several years' worth of Jonathan Gold's essential restaurants lists from the LA Weekly.

PJ Media's Roger L. Simon helped Perry

Simon did unpaid work for Texas Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign for awhile. Plus: Tina Dupuy on Occupy.

City Maven marks one year

MavBODY_HIGHres-93x300.jpg The news site has been a welcome addition from day one, reporting on City Hall moves and politics without rants, hidden agendas or anonymous comments.

Political media note: Pilar Marrero

pilar-marrero-pic.jpg La Opinión political columnist Pilar Marrero has reactivated her blog with a post about Latino immigrants as a sleeping giant in U.S. politics.

Somebody will write a book on baseball's greatest day ever

The headline is a line from Buster Olney, the former New York Times baseball writer who's now a go-to baseball guy at ESPN — and who in a fashion foresaw last night's historic turns in the sport.

Blogdowntown becomes part of KPCC

As of Monday, the Downtown blog will be under the banner of KPCC, the NPR station in Pasadena.

Sherman-Berman is now a blog

ShermanANDBerman.jpg The Jewish Journal intends to keep a close eye on the divisive local race.

Andrew Malcolm's GOP blog leaving L.A. Times

After years using the paper's website to push Republican talking points, Malcolm will take his blog to Investors Business Daily.

NYC food blogger Adam Roberts is L.A. bound

adam-roberts-kitchen.jpg Adam Roberts began blogging about food in 2004, grew it into a part-time gig with The Food Network, and now calls himself a full-time food writer.

Another big month for LATimes.com

The latest monthly memo from online managing editor Jimmy Orr says that the L.A. Times website is now the second most-read newspaper site in the country.

30 mosques in 30 days in 30 states, California included

30-mosques-30-days.jpg 30 Mosques in 30 States is the blog of Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq’s Ramadan-month road trip across the United States from Alaska to New York.

Five-year anniversary for Here in (the) Malibu

malibu-pier-vdt.jpg Veronique de Turenne celebrates five years of blogging with a pictorial tour of her favorite posts.

Catching up: Books and authors

bryson-mccollister.jpg East of West L.A., Linda Ronstadt signs to write her memoirs, and finalists for the Southern California Book Awards.

More local media transitions

In addition to the newsroom turmoil at the Los Angeles Times, a couple of other transitions to note today. Tina Dupuy is leaving Fishbowl LA — voluntarily! — after three...

Angeleno weekend in Cooperstown

Rich and Bert.jpg Bert Blyleven, Pat Gillick and blogger Rich Lederer will stand up at the baseball Hall of Fame in upstate New York.

Amid new talk of layoffs, blogs are hot at the Times

A sudden flurry of high-level meetings and grim faces this week at the Los Angeles Times has people in the newsroom on edge again. But stats are up at LATimes.com.

Breslin offers young male journos a chance this time

susannahbreslin_136.jpg Last month, blogger Susannah Breslin offered $100 to the young female journalist who came up with the best guest post for Breslin's Forbes blog, Pink Slipped.

Peggy Kaus, late-blooming politics blogger was 88

She was the mother of political writer and former U.S. Senate candidate Mickey Kaus and the widow of the late California Supreme Court Justice Otto Kaus.

Curbed, Eater sites knocked off line by the FBI *

Curbed LA, Eater LA and the sites they share ownership with are off the air because the FBI raided their server host in Virginia — looking for info on someone unrelated to Curbed — and grabbed their machines too.

L.A. Times eliminates another blog

Next to go from the L.A. Times blogroll is apparently The Daily Mirror, copy editor Larry Harnisch's look back at stories and photos out of the Times archives.

LA Weekly names its web awards

BestoftheWeb_01.jpg Hey, we're on the LA Weekly's list this year.

An alternative diet plate

ruth-bourdain-plate.gif The anonymous blogger at Ruth Bourdain has customized the government's new dietary plate to his/her own foodie taste.

Times eliminates outdoors blog

Outposts will drop from the L.A. Times blogroll due to "committee" decision, blogger Kelly Burgess says in her final post.

Chief Justice not pleased with comment on her looks

cantil-sakauye-nbc4.jpg California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye spoke out today in Beverly Hills on the remark that Assembly Majority Leader Charles Calderon made at a recent hearing on his bill to strip her of some powers to oversee the courts

Big move at 'Here in Malibu'

veronique-home-vacant.jpg Veronique de Turenne breaks some personal news today on her blog.

L.A. journalist turned Cincy blogger

state-route-013.jpg Gordon Smith, the former Los Angeles bureau chief for Copley News Service, resigned last year as chief spokesman for the local ACLU to movie with his wife to a farm...

LA Crone: New blog on aging gracefully in L.A.

lacrone-thumb.jpg Adrienne Crew came to me a while ago and said she wanted to do a personal blog on growing older in Los Angeles. The topic is one that a lot of people quietly think about, but it doesn't get a lot attention in the blogosphere.

LAT blog switches to Facebook comments

L.A. Now commenters now have to sign in via Facebook. It's part of the battle to contain comment trolls and racists and raise discourse to at least the fourth-grade level....

Curbed editor leaves for Daily News

Dakota Smith took over as Curbed LA editor in 2007 and guided the site to must-read status with a lot of original reporting.

Fiona Apple at the Fred Harvey coffee shop

After yesterday's posts on the Fred Harvey cafe at Union Station, blogger Scott Lowe stumbled across a Fiona Apple video shot there.

Patch wants you to blog for them

All the AOL Patch local news sites across the country have put out the call for bloggers to post on their community's site.

MTA begins transit blog in Spanish

Metro's blog The Source has become in 18 months one of the MTA's main ways of exciting the base of L.A. transit enthusiasts and responding to rail critics. Now the...

Big month for L.A. Times website

LATimes.com broke its own new records for page views (195.2 million) and unique visitors (33 million) in March.

Blogging for Forbes: it's all about ratings *

susannahbreslin_136.jpg Bloggers for Forbes aren't rewarded financially for improving their writing, breaking some hard-to-get news or making an especially salient or persuasive argument — on anything about putting out a quality product. They are rewarded strictly for attracting unique visitors.

Loyola Marymount observes the lay of the L.A. land

layoftheland-e1301379988555.jpg I took part this afternoon in the third annual LAy Of The LAnd Writer’s Conference put on by Loyola Marymount University’s Creative Writing Program and Graduate English Department.

Street signs of Los Angeles

newsign-ma.jpg Excellent run through the variety and history of Los Angeles street signs at the blog Militant Angeleno.

Blog's call gets gang tag taken off billboard

clean-billboard.jpg When CBS Outdoor didn't respond, an LAPD officer asked The Eastsider LA to get involved.

Al Jazeera English gets an L.A. radio outlet

KPFK will start airing AJE on weekdays at 3 p.m., plus Truthdig Radio and Brad Friedman on Wednesdays.

Lakers blogger in Japan reports he's OK

The blogger behind the site called With Malice — "the half-crazed ramblings of a Laker fanatic in Japan" — has posted his reactions to news coverage and the local reality of the quake and tsunami.

Hail Dooce, still queen of the mommy bloggers

dooce-nyt.jpg Heather Armstrong has traveled a lot of blog miles since she was fired from her Los Angeles start-up job in 2002 for keeping a personal online diary called a weblog.

Will HuffPost start to pay its bloggers? Will they care?

The Huffington Post counts something more than 6,000 volunteer blog writers who contribute for various reasons: to join in the conversation, to get a clipping, to push their pet cause, maybe even to claim an affiliation they use to gain access to events or impress a date.

Kaus joins The Daily Caller

Venice-based Kausfiles blogger and former U.S. Senate candidate Mickey Kaus has a new web home.

A neighborhood blogger signs off

90042-logo-crop.jpg Waltarrrrr at 90042 has blogged about Highland Park for four and a half years, becoming essential reading in Northeast Los Angeles.

Food blogger writes about burglary that stole her appetite

barbara-hansen-mess.jpg Police told Barbara Hansen that the burglars who ransacked her place were pros, but the destruction seems needlessly vicious.

Blogger meets Blyleven

Rich and Bert.jpg Thirty minutes before Bert Blyleven's Hall of Fame election became public, he called L.A. blogger Rich Lederer with the news. The two later met in Florida.

TV critics begin their winter marathon *

This is the time of year when television reporters and critics descend on Los Angeles to receive the same canned pitching on shows.

Blogger's reward: Blyleven elected to Hall of Fame *

rich-lederer-fox.png Ex-Angel pitcher Bert Blyleven was elected today to the baseball Hall of Fame, and he has Los Angeles blogger Rich Lederer to thank for it.

Goldstein and Rainey team up on a bigger Picture *

LAT film columnist and Big Picture blogger Patrick Goldstein announced last night that he will be expanding his portfolio and adding James Rainey as a co-blogger.

Local law blogs get recognized

thr-grab.jpg The editors of the American Bar Association's ABA Journal have put up their annual list of top 100 legal blogs, including several SoCal gems.

Hibberd to blog about TV for Entertainment Weekly

James Hibberd has been television editor at the Hollywood Reporter. He gets a gracious send-off in a memo to the staff this evening from editorial director Janice Min.

The Entryway closes shop in MacArthur Park

The creators of the somewhat controversial reporting project The Entryway have posted their exit messages.

Journalists with guns

hugh-garvey-gun.jpg This is the second in a very random and occasional series, the first having featured KCAL TV reporter Suzanne Marques at the shooting range. In heels.

Zach Behrens moves on from LAist *

Zach Behrens, the editor of LAist for going on three years, is moving to KCET to help the newly independent station get deeper into blogging.

Heading to L.A. Archives Bazaar at USC

I'm on a panel at 3 p.m. called Blogging L.A.

Wooden, Kemp and Jon Weisman

jon-weisman-young.jpg ESPN's Dodger Thoughts blogger, Jon Weisman, ties together his adoration of John Wooden, his mixed feelings on the play of Matt Kemp since becoming Rihanna's boyfriend and some self-reflection on his life into a readable closer on the Dodgers season.

Coming and going at IndieWire

Anne Thompson becomes editor-at-large, Todd McCarthy ankles for the Hollywood Reporter.

Mickey Kaus takes his blog to Newsweek

The former U.S. Senate candidate finds a new home for Kausfiles, which left Slate during his campaign for U.S. Senate.

From law school to the McCourt trial

joshua-fisher-nyt.jpg Joshua Fisher, the 24-year-old University of Minnesota Law School student who started DodgerDivorce.com, is back in town covering McCourt v. McCourt, which resumed today with Jamie on the stand.

Tech blog Lalawag shuts down

Founder Sean Percival, now VP of Marketing at MySpace, says there's just not enough time in the day to keep it going.

This time his retirement will stick, D.J. Waldie says

Author and thoughtful Los Angeles observer D.J. Waldie is leaving his longtime day job with the city of Lakewood, his home town, at the end of the month.

Our 5,000 Twitter follower is...

Over the weekend Kara Seward became the 5,000 follower of LA Observed on Twitter. Her food blog is Front of the House, and she tweets as @frontofthehouse. Thanks for the...

New film and politics blog from Kelly Candaele

clooney-the-american.jpg Writer, filmmaker and Los Angeles political figure Kelly Candaele has launched Politics and Films to write about feature films and documentaries from a political perspective.

'Marketplace' editor off to Stanford

paddy-hirsch.jpg Paddy Hirsch, senior editor in Los Angeles for American Public Radio's "Marketplace" program, is heading to Stanford on a John S. Knight fellowship.

2 random minutes at Brooklyn & Soto

Blogger El Chavo at LA Eastside has started a series of short videos just showing an ordinary two minutes at an ordinary corner in Los Angeles. And it works.

A vote for bike sharing in L.A.

london-bikes.jpg Clifford V. Johnson, the blogging and bike-commuting USC professor, speaks up for bicycle sharing after seeing it in London.

Beverly Blvd. cheapskate cheats meter of 30 minutes

parking-meter-towel.jpg Food writer Barbara Hansen watched last night as a guy pulled into a parking spot on a trendy block of Beverly Boulevard, wrapped a shirt around the parking meter and strolled away with two women. She got a photo.

One singer's view of Rihanna

ashleigh-haney.jpg L.A. musician Ashleigh Haney, who I've mentioned here a couple of times, is back on tour as a backup singer for Rihanna, living the strange life of world traveler and stage-view witness to a pop culture phenomenon. She blogs about it.

Gawker: Arianna is Gotham bound *

Arianna Huffington is moving to New York City, Gawker says based on unidentified sources.

Back to L.A. from Copenhagen

commutingcopenhagen.jpg Steve Caplan moved his family to Copenhagen last year to work, explore and blog. Now they are returning. His thoughts.

But what does he really feel about HuffPost?

In a very long post explaining why he is leaving Scienceblogs in the wake of the network selling a sponsored blog to Pepsi, Bora Zivkovic considers the blogosphere options for science writers and immediately rejects the Huffington Post.

LAT hires its #2 Republican blogger for bigger role *

Jimmy_Twitter_bigger.jpg Well, you can't say the Los Angeles Times isn't fully embracing its odd and increasingly controversial strategy of going partisan Republican — and only Republican — in its national politics blogging.

KPCC adds an immigration blogger

KPCC has hired a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune to author a blog later this summer on immigration and "emerging communities."

L.A. blogs get some kudos from Time

boingboinglogo.jpg Time magazine's online team rated a bunch of blogs again this year, and for the Los Angeles-based blogosphere the results are mixed.

Pressroom blogger reinstated at L.A. Times

Ed Padgett posted on his blog a bit ago: "I return to the Los Angeles Times at 4:00 p.m. this afternoon and will meet with management tomorrow to discuss or clarify what content can be published online."

That will teach a reporter to live-blog a tennis match

Xan Brooks began blogging for The Guardian from Wimbledon at 10:45 a.m. His last post of the day went up at 9:25 p.m., showing definite signs of distress: Last thoughts...

Layoffs at the library: one blogger's story

While the politicians and unions haggle over whether the next round of city worker layoffs will actually happen, at the Los Angeles Public Library they already are happening.

Abby visited by Child Protective Services before she sailed

abby-sunderland-pete-thomas.jpg A representative, presumably from Ventura County, met with Abby Sunderland at home for two hours before she sailed from Marina del Rey on her attempt to circle the world. More from blogger Pete Thomas, who sailed with Sunderland.

Why does the LAT employ an anti-Obama blogger anyway?

andrewmalcolm-lat.jpg In case you were wondering why the Los Angeles Times is the only big newspaper that pays a full-time staffer to blog partisan attacks on Obama and the Democrats — and not exactly sophisticated attacks — you're not alone.

New to my blog world: Newstalgia

chicano-moratorium.jpg Newstalgia is a sister blog of the politics site Crooks and Liars, putting up audio links from current news events, distant events and popular culture with a Los Angeles bias.

French consul in L.A. is a blogger

hopper-martinon.jpg If you're French, he'll watch the World Cup with you. And he remembers Dennis Hopper.

When Gary Coleman went to Crossroads

alg_gary_coleman_headshot.jpg Writer and blogger Richard Rushfield posted a nice reflection on Gary Coleman pegged to their time together at the Crossroads School, the upscale and academically creative Santa Monica private school....

Couple of L.A. baseball blogs to note

newhans-blog.jpg Ross and David Newhan have found a blog niche they should have all to themselves.

Metblogs announces a reprieve

Plans to shut down Metblogs L.A. and the rest of the network are now on hold.

Metblogs planning to shut down May 31 *

Metblogs, the global network of local blogs that began here as blogging.la, is closing down due to lack of financial support. Farewell message from Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo.

Nikki Finke looking for 'Tilda' payday from HBO

HBO is trying to make a deal with "litigious showbiz blogger Nikki Finke" to be a consultant on its new show "Tilda," which is pretty clearly based on Finke.

Add one California politics blog

California's three largest NBC stations — KNBC here in Los Angeles plus the outlets in San Diego and the Bay Area — are going in together on a new blog launching today called Prop Zero. Reporters, anchors and others will contribute, including Conan Nolan at Channel 4.

Correction o' the day, f-word edition

California Democratic Party chairman John Burton didn't exactly say "f--- you" to the reporter from Calbuzz.

Tyler Green moves Modern Art Notes

MAN-note.jpg Arts journalist Tyler Green is moving his blog, a must-read for scoops on the Los Angeles museum scene, from its long-time home at ArtsJournal to Art Info.com.

LA Weekly gets a little staff help

Jonathan Gold, fresh off his James Beard Foundation win, will be splitting some of the food writing duties at the LA Weekly with a second staff critic. Plus a new news blogger. Read the memo.

Todd McCarthy joins IndieWire

todd-mccarthy-mug.jpg Less than two months after losing his longtime gig as chief film critic at Variety, Todd McCarthy has signed on with IndieWire to do film commentary on a blog they are calling Todd McCarthy's Deep Focus.

Script for 'Tilda' should be called 'Nikki'

Matthew Belloni of The Hollywood Reporter finally got to read the script for a potential HBO series about a "no-holds-barred show biz blogger." His main question going in was answered: it's definitely based on Nikki Finke.

Waiting for Zooey Deschanel

m_waiting.jpg Amusing piece at LA Eastside by guest blogger Matt Lucas on waiting at that Angelus Plaza bench for Zooey Deschanel to appear, as she did in "(500) Days of Summer."

Food and journalism

On Saturday morning, the Culinary Historians of Southern California are hosting a discussion on "the heyday of the Los Angeles Times Food section." Former Food section stalwarts Betsy Balsley, Donna Deane, Rose Dosti and Barbara Hansen will be on the panel at the Central Library in Downtown.

Getty launches a blog on itself

leo_politi_juanita.jpg The Getty adds its entry to the growing list of blogs by and about art institutions (here is LACMA's Unframed, for example.) It's called The Iris: Views from the Getty,...

Kaus refines act, now wants to beat Boxer

Probably not really, but political blogger Mickey Kaus's previous statements that he didn't intend to actually win against Sen. Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary have been used by the party to deny him a speaking spot at the upcoming state convention.

California Watch hiring again

The investigative reporting venture based up north is looking to add another enterprise reporter and a new position for them, public engagement manager.

Now everyone will want a house in the deal

Variety columnist Brian Lowry must have been amused by Nikki Finke's claim that the new owners of The Hollywood Reporter included a $1 million home in Malibu as part of an offer to get her to come on as editor in chief (with a salary of $450,000.) From Lowry's BLTv blog.

How Republicans reach out to bloggers

In case you doubt the importance that both political parties put on activating and exploiting bloggers, here's an example. It's an email LA Observed just received from the Director of Online Media Outreach at the House Republican Conference.

Why the rain is likely done and June gloom happens

ecliptic.gif We can probably close the books on this year's local rain season, JPL meteorologist Bill Patzert says in an email exchange picked up by Emily Green, the ace water blogger at Chance of Rain.com.

Kausfiles goes indie

mickeykaus-new.jpg Mickey Kaus posts that Slate was quite prepared to let him keep blogging about politics as a candidate for U.S. Senate, perhaps in the form of a Diary of a Longshot. But he made the decision to step off the site for now, "though I reserve the right to come crawling back."

Adrienne's social diary

Adrienne Crew has posted her latest Angeleno Social Diary, listing some upcoming events of interest. Find it at Native Intelligence. In addition, an event on my calendar: Frank Gehry will...

Reporter in exile in Thailand

thai-woman copy.jpg Todd Ruiz, the former politics reporter at the Pasadena Star-News and hand at other newspapers hereabouts, has landed in Bangkok. He's blogging about the political turmoil there and calls his blog Reporter in Exile.

Kaus gets the launch any candidate would love

Thumbnail image for mickey-kaus-wpedia.jpg Only one California political hopeful got featured in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, answering Deborah Solomon's questions. That would be Mickey Kaus, who talks about why he's running against Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Suburbanites make the transition to life Downtown

abelardodlpjr1.jpg After a lifetime in outlying parts of town, Abelardo de la Peña Jr., the editor of LatinoLA.com, and his family are trying Downtown. He's blogging about the transition.

The timelessness of Little League in the Valley

encinoll-sherman-flickr.jpg Saturday was opening day at the Encino Little League baseball diamonds, located at Hayvenhurst and Magnolia since 1954. John Scheibe, the author of "On the Road With Jim Murray: Baseball and the Summer of '79" and an editor in Sports at the L.A. Times, played there as a boy and returned for the annual ritual.

Blogger endings and beginnings

The newest LA Observed contributor, Bob Timmermann, has blogged about American and Japanese baseball, "The Prisoner," and every president of the United States.

The Hot Blog turns 5,000

bigelow-video-dp30.png David Poland's Hollywood blog debuted Sept. 5, 2004 and with this entry today has reached 5,000 posts — with more than 140,000 amassed comments. In post number 4,999, he observes and elaborates that Hollywood killed Corey Haim.

Food blogger thinks positive

Rob Eshman got soooo much strong reaction to last week's list of nine things wrong with L.A. food culture that he tries again this week with an up-beatier Nine Ways to Make LA the “Ultimate Food City."

Kaus comes clean, a little

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus posted at Kausfiles that news of his run against Sen. Barbara Boxer got out sooner than he hoped and explains a little of what it's all about.

Kaus clarifies his candidate status

mickey-kaus-wpedia.jpg Mickey Kaus, the Slate blogger who delights in needling his fellow Democrats, liberals and the L.A. Times — and even sometimes a Republican — confirms via email that he's looking...

Paul Serchia, blogger with AIDS was 52

I posted about Serchia in January, when I was introduced to his blog Thinking Positive, where he wrote with humor and insight about his life as a cancer and AIDS patient.

L.A. women blogging from Chile *

aneya-and-lauren.jpg Lauren Williams and Aneya Fernando moved from Los Angeles to Santiago last month and have been blogging about the quake and its aftermath.

Gabriel Snyder 'canned' as editor of Gawker

gabriel-snyder.jpg Gawker this afternoon posted two internal memos about itself: one that the site has acquired Cityfile to be its main New York media channel, and the other that Gawker editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder is out.

Memories of a woman named Nita in Echo Park

nita-story,jpg.jpg The Eastsider LA posts about a little mystery in Echo Park and a call for some information about the woman who may have been known as Nita.

Budget session goes too late for new late news section

Blog coverage was the best way to find out what went on.

ESPN/LA hires have domino effect in local market

When ESPN staffed up its local operation in Los Angeles, it hired several staffers from the Daily News and Los Angeles Times. The result has been some promotions and hiring at those papers.

Dodger Thoughts on the move again

The Dodgers blog by Variety TV writer-editor Jon Weisman that moved into the Los Angeles Times stable a year ago is going to ESPN.

Lament of the ant fighters

I'm hearing from people around L.A. about epic indoor invasions of ants. Driven inside by the rain, I suspect — but please feel welcome to educate me with better theories.

Goody's, a San Gabriel culinary landmark, moves on

goodys-sign.jpg Goody's is leaving San Gabriel for El Monte.

Re-dreaming Downtown circa 1939

civic_center_plan.jpg D.J. Waldie has turned up a planner's sketched-out concept of a reenvisioned Downtown Los Angeles that centered in 1939 or '40 on the newly built Union Station, the recently opened Olvera Street tourist trap and an imaginary cityscape that reminds Waldie of Italy under Mussolini.

Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs in the NYT

charles-johnson-cnn.jpg Today's New York Times Magazine takes its crack at deciphering for the rest of us the bitter divorce between the ideological fanatics of the Little Green Footballs blog and its creator, Angeleno musician Charles Johnson.

Times, Capitol Weekly team on politics blog

California Politics carries the title line "the Los Angeles Times on politics and government in the Golden State," but in practice most of the items (at least today) are written by Anthony York, editor of the independent Capitol Weekly.

Banned in Afghanistan

LA Observed and the Drudge Report are blocked on military computers over there.

Mr. Fish unhooked at LA Weekly

FoxyLady-300x257.jpg Dwayne Booth, for nearly six years the Mr. Fish cartoonist for the LA Weekly, has been discontinued.

She's not buying the Lily et Cie attitude

sugarpoptart.jpg No gushing journalism worship for celebrity dresser Rita Watnick and her Beverly Hills store from the New York Times' Cintra Wilson.

Thinking Positive, a cancer and AIDS blog

Blogger Paul Serchia doesn't pull any punches about his diseases, but he's readable and often funny

Anne Thompson analyzes Finke moves

Hollywood columnist-blogger Anne Thompson says that hiring Mike Fleming away from Variety is a smart move for Deadline|Hollywood, if he can co-exist with Nikki Finke.

Caruso talking up the mayor thing

rickcarusocrop.jpg This was the week that developer Rick Caruso got the next mayoral race — whether in 2013 or sooner — pretty much underway.

A New Year's baby

darleenebaby.jpg Longtime L.A. blogger (and Channel 2 web journalist) Darleene Powells gave birth New Year's Day to Michael Christian Powells. Not without some drama, it turns out. Darleene is due to...

Round of applause

randyjohnsonretires.jpg Randy Johnson retires from baseball, and Bert Blyleven makes it in at least one Hall of Fame vote.

New outdoors blog by a journalist *

petethomasblog.jpg Pete Thomas had one of those newspaper reporting jobs that many lust after. Now he blogs.

Patterico reviews the Times' year

It's the blog's seventh annual compilation of "bias, omissions, and distortions" at the paper they call the Dog Trainer.

Big winds explained

jetstream_pac_init_01.jpg Scientist-blogger Grace Peng sent along this map of a jet stream slamming into Southern California, offering it as an explainer of what happened around the area today. Click it to...

Rushfield leaving Gawker?

Richard Rushfield, hired away from the L.A. Times just last July to be west coast editor for Gawker, is leaving for an entertainment start-up, says Dylan Stableford at The Wrap....

Lu Parker blogs about dogs

Channel 5 reporter (and Villaraigosa main squeeze) Lu Parker just tweeted that she has a new blog post up. It's a Christmas gift suggestion, and like much of her online...

Sam Rubin v. Perez Hilton

  Oh boy, did Sam Rubin go off on Perez Hilton on the KTLA Morning News this morning — to cheers and atta-boys from his fellow Channel 5sters. It seems...

Blogging the hospital

Television writer Earl Pomerantz has been blogging about his time in the hospital leading up to, and after, open heart surgery. If nothing else, he seems in a good enough...

Food blogger bake sale, for good cause

eatmyblogcupcake.jpg Three dozen local food bloggers are pooling their talents Saturday to raise money for the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. The menu has cookies, pies, cupcakes, scones, tarts — even butterscotch...

Charles Johnson explains his evolution

charlesjohnson.jpg The blogger behind Little Green Footballs talks to Neon Tommy about his explosive post, Why I Parted Ways With The Right, that announced he was fed up with the hyperpartisan...

Farmers Market vs. the homeless

Donna Myrow, the founder of the teen-written paper LA Youth, was having lunch with book agent Charlotte Gusay when security guards at Farmers Market ordered her not to give her...

OK, here's the HuffPost release

The Los Angeles page is up. Here's a snip from the release out of New York, where the Huffinton Post's paid staff of editors and aggregators is based: The Huffington...

HuffPost starts rolling out L.A. content

The debut Los Angeles page isn't officially up yet, but if you poke around at the Huffington Post you can find new posts by UCLA Chancellor Gene Block saying that...

AOL bloggers get their orders

A leaked email from an editor at AOL reveals how the service wants its blogger-journalists to get the job done. One way is to focus to an extreme on using...

Little Green Footballs breaks with right

It has admittedly been a long time since I looked at Charles Johnson's blog Little Green Footballs, and I don't find myself picking up all that much from Pajamas Media,...

The view from Copenhagen

commutingcopenhagen.jpg Los Angeles native Steve Caplan sold his house in the Valley hills to move to Copenhagen, where his wife is from, to work on the coming United Nations Climate Change...

Local journo leaves the business

There could be a rush of these leaving the business items in the next couple of weeks when the L.A. Times drops its next, much-rumored layoff bomb. This one, though,...

It's a new day at Curbed LA

curbedredo.jpg Curbed LA introduced a bold new look today, bringing the site more in line with others in the company's spreading empire, with more obvious links to the sister sites. We've...

Real estate blog dies at LAT

The latest Los Angeles Times blog to fade away is L.A. Land, which never seemed to quite recover its mojo from last year's departure of originator Peter Viles. When real...

Gold Line culinary tour

The blogger known as the 99-Cent Chef rode the new Gold Line extension to East Los Angeles for Sunday's opening. Squash blossom quesadillas at Taqueria Las Cabañas were the gustatory...

Big day on the LAT blogs

Memo from Tony Pierce, blog editor of the L.A. Times, about a traffic rush over the weekend that gave the paper's national politics blog its biggest day yet — and...

Alkon gets some ink

amyalkonpsychtoday.jpg Local advice columnist Amy Alkon's new book "I See Rude People: One woman's battle to beat some manners into impolite society” comes out this month and she showed up in...

HuffPo's pitch to L.A. bloggers

If you receive an email with the subject line "An Invitation from The Huffington Post Los Angeles," you are one of the legions being offered the chance to blog for...

LA Weekly takes a blogger

Dennis Romero, who has been a staff writer at the late Tu Ciudad magazine, the late CityBeat and the Los Angeles Times, has recently been anchoring the LA Weekly's news...

Yaroslavsky as web news pioneer

zevblog.jpg That innovative new website for Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky that we told you about in May has gone live. It features a blog by Yaroslavsky and stories about county news and...

HuffPost urges its bloggers to think L.A.

The memo to bloggers from senior editor Willow Bay confirms what LA Observed previously reported about a December launch for the Huffington Post's Los Angeles vertical and the role of...

Metropolitan Home, RIP

methomecover.jpg The December issue of Metropolitan Home will be the last one, Hachette Filipacchi Media announced today, saying that resources will be focused on its Elle Décor title. Met Home editor...

LAT kills its Vegas blog *

I never understood why the Los Angeles Times made A Movable Buffet, by Las Vegas writer Richard Abowitz, one of its first blogs four years ago. But it did, and...

Gavin Newsom drops out of race *

He cites his family, but pundits are circling around bad poll numbers and faltering fundraising. "It is with great regret I announce today that I am withdrawing from the race...

LA Weekly seeks blog manager

The job posting for a news blog manager at the LA Weekly calls for someone "who can break news, crack skulls as quickly as funny bones and develop a blog...

New blogger has advice for next chief

Former City Councilman Jack Weiss is the latest blogger finding a home on the Jewish Journal website. (There are 25 others.) His first (I think) post recalls when Gene Bartow...

Gawker catches Finke editing, again

Some bloggers, this one included, will make minor unannounced fixes shortly after a post goes up. Hollywood blog-meistress Nikki Finke takes it to a whole new level, as Gawker's John...

More journos hire out as bloggers

The first is more of a website than a blog, by ex-Los Angeles Daily Journal editor Martin Berg. He's editing Where's Our Money? for Harvey Rosenfield's Consumer Education Foundation, billed...

NYT switches up on Carpetbagger blog

David Carr retires his tuxedo after four seasons. The new New York Times blogger on the red carpet beat is Melena Ryzik. (She tweets here, by the way.) The paper...

Exit at LA Weekly *

Steve Mikulan, the staff writer who has been the main writer on the LA Weekly's blog LA Daily, parted ways with the paper this afternoon. A newsroom source said Mikulan...

Dodgers and Angels win

lorettapile.jpg The Dodgers' win over the Cardinals was especially thrilling — with two out in the 9th inning, the Cardinals up 2-1 and no one on base for the Dodgers, a...

Picking on Finke

With the chatter about Nikki Finke on high due to this week's profile in The New Yorker, Gawker's Richard Rushfield is offering $1,000 for "a recent photograph of the scourge...

Eater LA redesigns

eatermap.jpg Curbed's food sites unveiled a chain-wide redesign and a national food blog, with an offer to pay other food blogs $25 to shut down and send traffic Eater's way. The...

Couple of new local blogs

inventinglacover.jpg There are two new blogs by L.A. journalists that I've started following. L.A. Explored is by journalist and fellow Angel City Press author Amy Dawes, who posts, "I live in...

Kings hire their top blogger *

Sports teams everywhere are trying to figure out a way around the declining volume and quality of the free media they have long enjoyed. The Los Angeles Kings are adapting...

Another media hockey blog

talkingducksbanner.jpg Steve Hymon isn't the only recent media type who has taken up blogging about ice hockey. Talking Ducks: A Ladies Hockey Salon is by Orange Coast Magazine managing editor Rose...

Puck boy

Steve Hymon, the former transportation and City Hall reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has a blog devoted to his crusade — as a 43-year-old novice — to learn to...

More Time Warner Cable out(r)age

Dodgers' post-game show host Ken Levine lets the city's least favorite cable provider have it with both blog barrels after a late-night phone exchange with the, so to speak, help...

Visiting blogger objects to LAT ads

Murray Fromson, the longtime CBS News correspondent who holds emeritus professor status at USC Annenberg, has good things to say about the Los Angeles Times these days. He just doesn't...

D.J. Waldie retires (Is that even legal?)

Brace yourselves for a shock -- D.J. Waldie, whose lyrical writings about his hometown have earned him awards, honors and the title 'the bard of Lakewood', is stepping down from...

Desk-clearing items

Thanks to United I have some extra time to kill at LAX. And also later at SFO. Some stuff I didn't get to yesterday: Style Section L.A. is a new...

Ken Levine doesn't like Denver

Dodgers post-game broadcaster Ken Levine didn't enjoy this last road trip to Denver, it would appear. From his blog: Stayed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel downtown (or, as they call it...

Blogger turns tables on paper

Fishbowl LA's Tina Dupuy takes to YouTube to demand $75 she feels owed by the Tampa Tribune, which ran a funny piece she sent in....

Rosie, R.I.P.

rosie.jpg Sad news at Chicken Corner. Rosie, who decorates the blog's banner, has gone to the big farm in the country at age fourteenish. "Rosie's dog friends included Oscar the Dog...

Gastrokid cookbook

gastrokidbook.jpg Hugh Garvey, features editor at Bon Appetit magazine here and a food blogger, has a new cookbook out called "Gastrokid Cookbook: Feeding a Foodie Family in a Fast-Food World." Self-explanatory...

Parting ways with Crux L.A.

Journalist Donnell Alexander has been talking recently about he and his fiance being the "founding curators" of an upcoming Los Angeles culture website called Crux L.A. Well, that honeymoon is...

Nikki Finke has another payday coming

Sharon Waxman at The Wrap says that Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke stands to pocket $80,000 out of a class-action lawsuit against E-Trade for being tape recorded without her permission. Waxman...

Up close with Loteria Chicana

loteriachicana.jpg KCET's website has discovered the time-tested method for getting more attention from L.A. bloggers: profile them. Up this week is Cindy Mosqueda, writer of the venerable Loteria Chicana, which dates...

Rushfield signs off 'Idol Tracker'

The LAT's Richard Rushfield has posted his final entry on the Idol Tracker blog where he's been spending most of his time the past couple of years. He's headed to...

Bruins blogger exits Daily News

Sportswriter Brian Dohn's Inside UCLA was one of the, if not the, highest traffic blogs in the Daily News stable. He announced there that he's moving to New Jersey. Fall...

Robert Hilburn goes online

hilburnlennon.jpg The L.A. Times' emeritus pop music editor has a memoir of his decades covering the business — "Corn Flakes with John Lennon And Other Tales from a Rock 'n' Roll...

Anne Thompson moves blog

The film writer's affiliation with Variety has finally played its last note. She posts there that as of Sunday night, her Thompson on Hollywood brand will be housed at IndieWIRE....

HuffPost looks for L.A. editor

The Huffington Post is moving ahead with its long-talked-about local pages for Los Angeles. The site has "yet to set a launch date but is actively looking for the right...

Gawker grabs from LAT *

Gawker just put out the word that the site's new West Coast editor will be Richard Rushfield, currently at LATimes.com. The note from Gawker's editor in chief is below (and,...

Best of LA, the blog

fromeditor_0809.jpg Los Angeles Magazine is out with its annual Best of LA issue, and #16 among its 101 favorite things is "Blog by an ex-LAT staffer." By that they mean Craig...

Chicken Corner returns

Jenny Burman is back and blogging at Chicken Corner after a bit of hiatus. She explains. Watch for her blog to expand beyond the borders of Echo Park....

Pulitzer winner coming to L.A.

Alexandra Berzon, the Las Vegas Sun reporter whose four-part series on the high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip won the Public Service medal in this...

Nikki Finke as Hollywood's 'feared blogger'

David Carr came through town a week or so ago and lands on the New York Times' front page tomorrow with a piece on Nikki Finke. Her deal to sell...

Columnist takes leave of absence

Tina Daunt, who writes the Cause Celebre political column for the L.A. Times' Calendar section, posted on her blog that she's taking time off to care for her ailing father....

Eater LA apologizes

Eater LA, through a post signed by Curbed creator Lockhart Steele, says its post earlier this week leveling blind charges at downtown wine bar The Must "didn't rise to our...

Eater LA assailed over blind post *

The food blog owned by the Curbed chain ran a litany of damaging, specific accusations against Downtown wine bar The Must attributed to an unidentified "tipster." The owners, talking to...

Historical street trees

lassenolives.jpg The City of Los Angeles loves to designate historic-cultural monuments, from pallets stacked in an eccentric guy's backyard in Van Nuys (since thrown away) to actual significant buildings. Even street...

More doubt on Nikki Finke's millions

Sharon Waxman's report that Nikki Finke inked a $14 million deal to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily has yet to be confirmed by anyone on the record, and Finke declines comment...

Spotted around town: Jackson tributes

jacksonalcorn.jpg Photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn chronicles the scene on Hayvenhurst Avenue in Encino: And the photo blog East of West L.A. catches a marquee in Downtown:...

New politics blog *

Well, let's call it partly politics and partly law enforcement, with some union advocacy for seasoning. It's the new blog of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which posts today...

Weekly seeking Finke replacement

The LA Weekly's parent company congratulated Nikki Finke on being acquired (for $14 million apparently) and blogs that it wants to find another online Hollywood reporter. "We've had a great...

Nikki Finke's site acquired *

Deadline Hollywood Daily was bought by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC), which operates Mail.com, HollywoodLife.com, MovieLine.com and OnCars.com. From the company's announcement on her site: MMC also begins a long-term partnership...

L.A. is trendy in Paris

The French department store Le Bon Marche is featuring items that subtly suggest Los Angeles, but I guess you have to be there. Laurie Pike at The Chic Leak blog...

Afternoon news and notes

The L.A. Times was forced to run a correction because Michael Douglas forgot that he hosted a 1991 event honoring his father, Kirk Douglas. The anonymous blogger known as...

LAPD cops play soccer too hard

When I played in a roller hockey league in the Valley, there was a team of deputy sheriffs that always started fights and played out of control — worst in...

Nice L.A. custom search

You can now search the websites of Los Angeles County and all of the cities in the county simultaneously, using this custom Google search by Matthew Barrett of the MTA's...

Beware of Gridskipper, says blogger

Former Gridskipper contributor Katherine Spiers, who has a new food blog, alleges that the dates on Gridskipper posts for travelers to Los Angeles are bogus. Lots of people think I...

Chatting with Trutanich

trutanichfox.jpg At last Friday's LA Observed rooftop party at the Formosa in Hollywood, city attorney-elect Carmen Trutanich stuck around for some fairly extended conversations with revelers. Celeste Fremon reports on hers,...

Hurts so good

Over at Run On, Sara Catania wraps up her career as a marathon runner for charity. I ran longer and faster than I ever have in my life and I...

Sara plans to run

Sara Catania demanded a cortisone shot this morning — from a reluctant doctor — and will drag her bum knee to the starting line of Monday's Los Angeles Marathon. Will...

Morning Buzz: Wednesday 5.20.09

Election aftermath LAT, NYT, WSJ, Bee, CalBuzz Arguably the end of an era in California politics – the Schwarzenegger era. Anthony York/Capitol Weekly Carmen Trutanich's victory margin over Jack...

Morning Buzz: Monday 5.18.09

Former Speaker Willie Brown says Sacramento is in "total panic" believing the tax props will lose on Tuesday's ballot, and he blames years of bad decisions by the governor...

Keeping drive-in culture alive

drag_me_to_hell.jpg Dennis Cozzalio, the cinemaphile and baseball obsessive who blogs at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, is sponsoring a group outing to the Mission Tiki Drive-in in Montclair. (The...

Register starts blog about itself

The Orange County Register's communications manager is hosting a new blog to tell the rest of the story [aka the good news] about the paper and newspapers in general. Very...

Media tweet o' the day

There were any number of candidates off the Manny Ramirez situation. Just to change the subject, here are a pair of Twitter sends from Lawrence Hurley, U.S. Supreme Court reporter...

An idea for food blogger ethics

Brooke Burton, who recently moved from Pizzeria Mozza to Suzanne Goin's new Tavern in Brentwood and blogs at Foodwoolf, and Leah Greenstein (SpicySaltySweet.com) have proposed a code of ethics for...

An L.A. blog that aims high

SoCal Minds is a new blog that bills itself as presenting "Intriguing research, ideas, activity, people -- tracked from universities, cultural-intellectual institutions in Southern California." Recent posts have come out...

People of the Weekly

The current LA Weekly is the annual L.A. People issue. "Portraits of the waitresses and starlets ... the tech wizards and rock stars ... the activists, gang survivors, political warriors...

Some LAT blogs get almost no traffic

If the blogs at the Los Angeles Times website are all about the ratings, the big winner is Elizabeth Snead's The Dish Rag. Her blog packed with items on celebrity...

Blogger's close call on freeway

Susan Kitchens was in the fast lane on the 605 last night when a driver sped by in the adjacent carpool lane — going the wrong way! She writes: I...

New Hollywood blogger at LAT

Joe Flint will take the lead on Company Town, the L.A. Times' entry in the blog space where the NYT has The Carpetbagger. Flint has a long resume and does...

It takes a village to make music in Iraq

timothyweston1.jpg After U.S. Army infantryman Timothy Weston requested advice on learning the violin while on deployment in Iraq, the online community at Violinist.com took over. Soon Weston had a violin, bow,...

Madeline Alice Spohr, 17 months

A memorial service is scheduled Tuesday for the baby of Heather and Mike Spohr, who live in Brentwood. Maddie, as she is known to many across the blogosphere, was born...

Morning Buzz: Wednesday 4.8.09

Wally Knox is stepping down from the city's DWP board to take the newly created position of deputy executive director of external relations at the Port of Los Angeles....

LA Weekly's food blog

It's called Squid Ink and it features posts by Gourmet contributor Margy Rochlin, Los Angeles food blogger Jessica Ritz and the Weekly's own Jonathan Gold making recurring appearances with his...

Pajamas Media drops ad biz

Right-of-center blogs that used Pajamas Media as their advertising service are back on their own. The L.A-based PJM is dropping its blog ads network and will focus on PJTV, its...

Blog leads to story, then to help

wrigleyfieldcard.jpg Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth wrote last month on his blog about the old Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles and about the Wrigley Little League that plays now...

Tech advice for transitioning journalists

Former L.A. Times systems guy and news editor Brett Levy is offering free webinars for journalists to get up to speed on their tech and New Media skills. The first...

Director calls Nikki Finke the problem with journalism

Writer-director and ex-journalist Rod Lurie uses a second bad experience with Nikki Finke's reporting to go off on a rant about the dangers of bloggers posting inaccurate stories, usually without...

Liz visits and blogs about it

lizarnold.jpg Liz Arnold moved to New York to freelance for magazines on interiors and homes after working here at Western Interiors & Design. At her relatively new blog Homebodies, she posts...

Hollywood scene: wine bottle vs. watermelon

I hadn't checked in with studio tradesperson Peggy Archer's blog in awhile. Today at Totally Unauthorized, she reports pseudonymously from a shooting set. One of our pivotal scenes yesterday involved...

Michael Sommer, ex-journalist was 73

Sommer died in a trauma helicopter en route to UCLA after being hit by a car in an Agoura Hills parking lot last week. His mother Ann, 98, also suffered...

Busted: parking in the yellow

The folks at Discarted take umbrage that a Los Angeles parking officer camped out in a loading zone during her lunch break in East Hollywood....

Remembering a cop who was killed

Channel 4's Jennifer Bjorklund went to high school in the Bay Area with one of the four Oakland police officers killed in that shootout with a parolee. I'm told her...

Afternoon news and notes

Chief Bratton endorses another candidate — this time in New York City. L.A. Now KPFK suspends "anti-Semitic hatefest" show "La Causa" for six weeks; its followers blame the Jews....

What would you pay for Nikki Finke?

Not Finke the reporter, but her website Deadline Hollywood Daily — though they are really one and the same. The Wrap's Sharon Waxman tries to figure out what the site...

Morning Buzz: Monday 3.16.09

The Getty plans to slash its operating budget nearly 25% for the coming fiscal year, "an emergency response to investment losses that have totaled $1.5 billion since July and...

What the Defamer guys are doing

Movieline is relaunching as a web portal "covering all things Hollywood" with former Defamer bloggers Seth Abramovitch, S.T. VanAirsdale, and Kyle Buchanan on board. The press release says to await...

Hernandez blogs his own post-Oscar layoff

Greg Hernandez, laid off by the Daily News earlier today after finishing his Oscars coverage, blogged about it tonight at Out in Hollywood. He said the site will live on...

Correction o' the day

Fox News shouter John Gibson did not compare Attorney General Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum, and thus the Huffington Post regrets the error. Live by...

Cover the Oscars, get laid off

Daily News entertainment writer Greg Hernandez worked long hours posting a whole bunch of blog items on the Oscars yesterday and today — and now posts on Facebook that he...

Defamer merges into Gawker

There will still be a Defamer brand and Hollywood posts, but they will run as a section of Gawker's main site. Owner Nick Denton explains it's part of Gawker's transition...

Traffic rising at newspaper websites

The most-visited newspaper websites — errantly labeled the "top sites" by the Nieman Journalism Lab — all posted big gains in readership in 2008. While the absolute numbers from Nielsen...

Add one Dodgers blog

Ken Gurnick, the Dodgers beat writer for MLB.com, is now sharing his insights on a blog for the network. "Covering all things Dodgers since Steve Sax was a rookie," reads...

Giving candidates their due

Patt Morrison on KPCC is giving the challengers to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa maybe a bit more than some are due — ten minutes for each on the air. Today at...

Changes in Dodgers land

Jon Weisman, keeper of my favorite Dodgers blog and blogging community, is leaving the indie ranks and moving Dodger Thoughts to LATimes.com. He starts there immediately and will be replacing...

Latino bloggers of L.A.

Some of them got together at Philippe's and Adolfo Guzman-Lopez of KPCC dropped in wearing his KCET blogger hat. A discussion ensued over where's the Eastside?, and in this group...

Reflecting on these tough times

Blogger and sometime writer about town Will Campbell has a post up at Metblogs reflecting on his experiences as a suicide hotline counselor, inspired partly by his bike commute past...

New layoffs at Variety

Columnist-blogger Anne Thompson is among the layoffs to hit the trade today. "Today I got slashed from the ranks of Variety staffers along with some 30 people, most of whom...

Bargain Babe spins off after all

When Daily News reporter-blogger Julia Scott announced her Bargain Babe shopping blog, it sounded as if she would also keep writing her self-described less-edgy, less-personal blog for the paper. Nope....

Eating cheaply around LAX

Billy Vasquez, the 99 Cent Chef, has put together a blog and video guide to "dining and drinking establishments within the shadows of the arriving and departing giant silver birds"...

Food blogger moves on

Lesley Balla, late of Eater LA, is not the new LA Weekly food blogger. She starts Jan. 26 as Los Angeles editor for Tasting Table LA, a new daily email...

Lowry takes a blog

Variety columnist Brian Lowry is now blogging about television at the trade's new BLTv — "Good TV; reasonable prices." He posts that the current TV critics tour feels more pointless...

Timberg adds 'blogger' to resume *

Scott Timberg, who has started freelancing for the New York Times and others since being laid off last year by the L.A. Times Calendar section, has fired up a blog....

No photo this time *

Kevin McCollister has been sharing his gorgeous photographs of Los Angeles for a few years in elegantly wordless blog entries at the Jimson Weed Gazette. Tuesday's post, however, was all...

LA Weekly on the web: up and down

An internal memo seems to indicate the LA Weekly is falling into the mode of obsessing about page views over content. We learn that music is by far the site's...

On a long list, Zell is the grinchiest

Readers of Los Angeles Metblogs have spoken. They voted Sam Zell as the 2008 Grinch of the Year. Quips the blog's David Markland: "Congratulations, Sam! Ebenezer Scrooge and William Mulholland...

Breitbart goes Big Hollywood

The latest web venture from Drudge Report West Coast man Andrew Breitbart goes live Tuesday. Big Hollywood, he says, "is not a 'celebrity' gabfest or a gossip outpost - it...

Boi from Troy, R.I.P.

One of the old-time Los Angeles bloggers, Boi from Troy, has typed his final entry. There, anyway. In more than five years since this blog started, more than 3.5 million...

An L.A. walkabout

Channel 2 (and 9) photographer Bryan Frank had Friday afternoon off and spent it taking pictures on foot in Hollywood and Downtown. Hot dogs at Skooby's and a beer at...

New Madoff blog: Swindler's List

The Jewish Journal, breaking new stuff on the local side of the Bernard Madoff story, is blogging developments at Swindler's List....

TV writer takes a break from blogging

Jane Espenson has been part of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Battlestar Galactica," most notably, and also has written episodes of "Angel," "Gilmore Girls," "Ellen," "The O.C.," "Star Trek: Deep...

Zcalo reboots online

Zcalo Public Square, the non-profit lecture series that "creates intellectual community across the nation by presenting smart ideas in an open, non-partisan, multi-ethnic space," has upgraded on the web in...

Backstage at the Grammy nominations

The life of a local television news cameraman involves a lot of hurry up and wait. Case in point: this afternoon's (yawn) Grammy nominations concert, as Channel 2's Bryan Frank...

Changes coming to LATimes.com

Design improvements to Business, Sports, National and World, plus more databases and aggregation of (free) content from around the web, and the return of The Homicide Report, says Executive Editor...

Blogs folding at L.A. Times

Steve Hymon's Bottleneck blog is the latest Times staff blog to be folded into L.A. Now, which the paper is trying to deepen and finally build up in hopes that...

Best women bloggers of 2008

Susannah Breslin, the former Reverse Cowgirl turned Invisible Cowgirl (and back to Reverse Cowgirl) who we hadn't heard from much lately, does the honors and anoints BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin first....

A suggestion for The Homicide Report

Writing at LA Eastside, Browne Molyneux calls on La Opinin and the Sentinel to launch their own community-based versions of the homicide blog that has been put on hiatus by...

Mariachi goes to Harvard

Members of Mariachi Vritas de Harvard believe they are "the first and only 100% undergraduate student Mariachi in the East Coast." Here they are (bigger) with Mexican president Felipe Caldern....

When cars really were king in L.A.

Pat Saperstein at Eating L.A. has some fun digging through the newly released Life magazine photo archive on Google for some prime Los Angeles images. She hit a trove of...

Signing off at Ventura Star

The Ventura County Star copy desk had a blog, until Patricia Marroquin was laid off. The former L.A. Times copy editor posts her farewell: Two years ago on Nov. 30,...

Sign of the (L.A.) Times: Homicide Report

The depleted Los Angeles Times has suspended publication of the Homicide Report, which at this time last year was one of the breakout hits among the paper's blogs. Its success...

This, that, and another thing

Oops -- the NY Times' travel section on Sunday will have a piece about visiting Santa Barbara, our own Mark Lacter points out. One week from tomorrow: the Great Los...

Day after election big for LAT.com

The LATimes.com website set a traffic record for itself on Election Day, then broke it the day after. The site also set a new monthly high in October, when the...

Real estate blogger leaves Times

First the Los Angeles Times lays off its real estate editor and reporter, and now blogger Peter Viles posts that he is moving on to a corporate job. L.A. Land...

Covering his own wedding

Variety managing editor and politics writer Ted Johnson blogged about his marriage to Stewart Scott, presided over by West Hollywood City Councilman John Duran, in the context of Proposition 8....

Recession strikes the symphony

Laurie Niles of Violinist.com said the letter hit her like a punch in the stomach. "Due to the recent extraordinary conditions in the financial markets, the Pasadena Symphony has been...

LACMA blogging now too

Arts blogger Tyler Green calls Unframed, the staff blog at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, his "new daily obsession." They are not limiting posts to happenings at LACMA,...

Some new L.A. blogs

PBS Channel 28 has soft-launched KCET Local with original web stories, video, reader comments, calendar items and blogs by author D.J. Waldie, KPCC reporter Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, former LAT columnist Erin...

Times blogger calls Palin a "rally monkey"

Former sportscaster Lisa Guerrero has been given an outlet on The Fabulous Forum, the sports blog at LATimes.com. In this morning's post, she says it may be time for the...

Gawker in turmoil again

Gawker Media creator Nick Denton sent an email announcing the layoff of 19 editorial employees (out of 133) and eliminating the traffic bonuses that whipped so many of his bloggers...

Wining and dining the bloggers

How important are bloggers to promoting the success of Downtown developments? Pretty important, based on this invitation by AEG for the Ritz-Carlton condos to be built as part of L.A....

Harvey Weinstein owes Nikki Finke $1 million

According to Nikki, producer Harvey Weinstein told Page Six he'll give $1 million to charity if she can produce an email that Scott Rudin wrote about Weinstein's "alleged callous treatment...

When L.A. was Smogtown

"Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles" will be published Thursday by The Overlook Press/Penguin U.S.A. The book, by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, looks like it...

Another new LAT staff blog

The staff-written Fabulous Forum hopes to deliver "the who, what, where, when, why and why not of L.A. sports." That makes 43 blogs listed on the Los Angeles...

Warren column moves to HuffPost

Recently departed Chicago Tribune managing editor Jim Warren will move his On Magazines column to a blog at the Huffington Post. From the release: "I have been an obsessive reader...

'SoCal Connected' debuts tonight

KCET's replacement for the late, lamented "Life and Times" premieres on Channel 28 at 8 pm. Val Zavala is the anchor of SoCal Connected, as she was on L&T. The...

Times adds a culture blog *

The Los Angeles Times went public today with Culture Monster, its new blog by the Calendar section's critics and arts writers that goes by the slogan "all the arts, all...

Steve Harvey gets a blog

If you've missed Steve Harvey since the Times dropped his long-running "Only in L.A." column, he has moved offshore to a new Blogspot blog....

Joel Stein gets naughty again

Remember last year when Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein was billed as a guest instructor on oral sex at Babeland, then dropped out after we and others wrote about...

Downtown blog goes non-profit

Exciting and fairly big news in the world of Los Angeles blogs. Eric Richardson announced today that his blogdowntown has been accepted into an incubator program at Community Partners and...

Sarah Palin has science on her side

Here's the most interesting blog post I read all day. Political scientists at UCLA who asked students to rate the faces of hundreds of American candidates found that Alaska Gov....

Andrea Wilson-Smith found

The 14-year-old South Los Angeles girl who vanished Tuesday night turned up this morning at 3 am in Pasadena. Police think maybe she ran away, but her mother tells LAist's...

LAist's editor makes the calls

A couple of weeks back I was on a blogging panel with LAist editor Zach Behrens and came to appreciate that he makes more phone calls than most bloggers, often...

Blogger's sad anniversary

Downtown blogger Celia (5th and Spring) marks the third anniversary of the passing of her sister Laura Esguerra. Laura's illness and death touched many in the L.A. blogosphere....

Denver as last gasp of the old media

Bill Boyarsky, posting dispatches from the Democratic gathering at Truthdig.com, concluded that this convention marked a welcome end to big media dominance of political reporting. This from a media veteran...

Politics blog at La Opinin

La Opinin columnist Pilar Marrero relaunched her politics blog in Spanish for the Democratic convention, and it sounds like she will keep it going on the La Opinin site and...

Say it ain't so, Joe

They've got Joe Torre blogging about his new life in L.A., and posing for silly pictures to hold up web spots for State Farm Insurance. Sample: So I just moved...

Ex-Calpundit moves to Mother Jones

Orange County-based Kevin Drum moved his Calpundit blog persona over to Washington Monthly as Political Animal and began getting paid for his politics blogging four years ago. Now he's been...

End of the runway for L.A. Fashion Week?

Laurie Pike posts at the Los Angeles Magazine blog ChicLeak that involved sources believe the Fashion Week partnership between IMG and Culver Citys Smashbox Studios will go away after October's...

Weekend blog discoveries

Los Angeles photographer Charlie Grosso has been working on an exhibit she calls Wok the Dog, an examination of "the commerce of meat," shot at markets around the world where...

Last interview with Isaac Hayes

Photographer and music journalist Rena Kosnett thinks she got one of, if not the, final interview with the singer, songwriter, musician and former "South Park" voice who died Sunday. Hayes,...

Politics wins again at LATimes.com

Top of the Ticket finished atop the blog rankings at the L.A. Times again this past month, with the celebrity driven stuff just behind. Peter Viles' L.A. Land continues to...

Local kudos

Bill Boyarsky, LA Observed's occasional politics columnist, is a finalist in nonfiction for the 2008 book award from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It's for "Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh...

Ex-Times reporter blogs what he learned

William Lobdell launched his new Orange County-centric blog with a list of the 42 things he knows after a career at the Los Angeles Times. Excerpts: 8 - The idea...

What they care about at LATimes.com

Is this a metaphor about internal tension at the L.A. Times over future priorities — or maybe an indicator that the reading public is split? Here's an email that the...

Quake as it happened

Larry Mantle was twelve minutes into a segment with the blogger behind "Stuff White People Like" when this morning's earthquake hit. He rolled with the flow then switched into anchor...

L.A. blogger meets the CIA

Aura Bogado, who blogs at To the Curb, was in Chicago for the Unity journalism conference. Newspapers and other media outlets send recruiting teams to make contacts with potential hires...

Times bloggers told not to mention Edwards story *

Mickey Kaus has the email from Los Angeles Times blog editor Tony Pierce telling the paper's bloggers not to go there on the John Edwards-tryst-in-Beverly Hills story: Subject: john edwards...

Best comic store in the world?

Many fans seem to think of Secret Headquarters in Silver Lake as their favorite comic book store. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoingTV is one of them. Also for the channel, BoingBoing's...

An Arthurian exit

Arthur Magazine's Jay Babcock told Jenny Burman yesterday more about his move to Brooklyn and also talks in the LAT's Soundboard blog about leaving Los Angeles. Babcock has shut down...

8 things about L.A. and the Internet

Web developer-designer Jonathan Grubb moved here from San Francisco eight months ago to work in Hollywood and has some observations about our relationship with the web. Here's a sample, minus...

Reporter 'simply lost hope' in LAT

Environment writer Marla Cone, a former president board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, sent an email to the members explaining her exit from the Los Angeles Times. Example:...

LAT bonds further with Catholics

Michelle Quinn, one of the Los Angeles Times staff writers who blogs about technology, used this photo of Pope Benedict to illustrate a post about Apple apologizing to customers of...

MetroRiderLA goes on hiatus

The blogger behind MetroRiderLA says the competition from professional transportation blogs and the need to make money — plus plain old blog burnout — nudged him to call a time...

Ruckus over LAT & Tony Snow

At the L.A. Times' Top of the Ticket blog, many of the reader comments posted about former Bush spokesman Tony Snow's death have been tasteless — to say the least....

Ron Kaye's revolution

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?...

Milton Bradley an all-star — and blogger

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....

Orange Coast names a 'best columnist' *

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...

'Left, Right & Center' goes bloggy

KCRW's popular Friday afternoon politics gabfest has added a blog. If you want to argue about Bob, Arianna, Matt and Tony or discuss things with Left, Right & Center producer...

BoingBoing explains Violet Blue purge (sort of)

BoingBoing.net, the highly read blog semi-based in Los Angeles, has shed a little light on why it deleted posts about sex writer Violet Blue. But not much light. The public...

Ken Reich's daughter posts *

Kathy Reich, who is familiar to many on the California politics scene, posts at Take Back the Times: I am deeply saddened to write that my father, Ken Reich, died...

Ken Reich, retired Times reporter, dies *

Word at the Los Angeles Times is that retired reporter Ken Reich, 70, died in his sleep. He was found this morning. Friend and former Tom Bradley deputy mayor Anton...

Mittelstaedt and the Weekly, together again

Eighteen months after he lost his news editor job at the LA Weekly to Jill Stewart, Alan Mittelstaedt is back in the Weekly's good graces — as a poster on...

Good week for blogs in L.A.

Patrick Goldstein (plus Ben Affleck), Patterico (plus Judge Alex Kozinski) and Alan Mittelstaedt (plus David Nahai) come together in this week's LA Observed segment that airs Fridays on KCRW. Listen...

Mittelstaedt wins the point

A remarkable editorial in this morning's Daily News admits the paper got used in the news story earlier this week about DWP chief David Nahai offering up data on his...

Patrick Goldstein becomes a blogger

The writer of the Times' weekly Big Picture column will now start posting to a blog, also called The Big Picture. The print column will become a rehash of what's...

Celtics and Lakers 20 years later

Back in 1988, Pete Handelman shot some High-8 video asking ordinary people in Boston who was going to win that year's finals: Celtics or Lakers? It became moot when Detroit...

Blogger gets hot

Billy Vasquez has only posted a few dozen times at The 99 Cent Chef, but he makes them count. He was featured recently on "Marketplace" and tonight he's scheduled to...

What is off the record, post-Fowler?

The Huffington Post blogger's decision to tape, and then post, Bill Clinton slamming Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum is still being discussed and dissected all over the politics and mediasphere....

Who is Mayhill Fowler anyway?

She's the Huffington Post Off the Bus blogger who recorded Bill Clinton's three-minute rant about Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum — and who earlier captured Barack Obama's critique of "bitter"...

Friday desk-clearing

Bob Hertzberg is also sniffing around a challenge to Mayor Villaraigosa — or a run for city attorney against Jack Weiss — the former Villaraigosa friend and foe tells...

Ron Kaye's correspondents

Yesterday it was a freelancer who argues that District Attorney Steve Cooley has gone easy on Jessica's Law. Today it's Doug Dowie, who worked with Kaye at the Daily News...

Oldest blog rookies of the year

Andrew Malcolm, the former New York Times correspondent and Laura Bush press secretary (as well as part-time Karl Rove assistant), talks about his conversion from L.A. Times editorial writer to...

Magazines observed

Los Angeles this month has Mark Lacter's profile of Gina Marie Lindsey, the head of Los Angeles World Airports. Another LA Observed contributor, David Davis, has a piece on U.S....

Lakers blogger took down blog herself

Laura Lane tells USA Today that she pulled her Blogspot site offline on her own. "I saw it was getting a lot of crazy attention," she says of her post...

Blogger hates LA.com

Megan McArdle blogs at The Atlantic's website about life in Dean Singleton's declining SoCal empire. (Update: It's her blog, but ex-Singletonian Conor Friedersdorf wrote the post.) As a former employee...

Lakers blogger goes offline

Hmm, ESPN.com blogger Laura Lane's blog item where she calls the wife of Kobe Bryant insane — and talks about rumors of an affair — has gone off the air....

Reporter cussed out by Vanessa Bryant

Laura Lane covers the Lakers for ESPN.com. She wrote a mildly invasive item about that weird purple tutu thing that Vanessa Bryant wore on the floor the night Kobe picked...

Spend the night on Mt. Wilson

I had no idea you could do this. Author Aimee Bender reserved the Mount Wilson Observatory's historic 60-inch telescope for the evening and took along two dozen writer friends and...

Monday shorts

KPFK wants to broadcast "your big fat gay wedding," as the OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano puts it. Navel Gazing Catch a photo of FishbowlLA bloggers Mayrav Saar (on the...

Stuff God hates?

Jewish Journal God-blogger Brad Greenberg suspects the new Stuff God Hates blog is from the same Culver City writer who posts the very popular Stuff White People Like, just not...

Ask Paul DePodesta, but not about the Dodgers

Former Dodgers general manager Paul DePodesta, now with the Padres in San Diego, has started an interesting blog — he knows a lot more about baseball than the sportswriters who...

Kareem's blog goes indie

For the past few months Kareem Abdul-Jabbar posted to a blog on LATimes.com. As of Monday, it has moved to Abdul-Jabbar's own website (with sound, so turn down your speakers.)...

Book blogger's rep comes back to bite...or not

Mark Sarvas is often biting in his reviews and commentaries at The Elegant Variation, a point that Scott Timberg makes up front in his Q&A with Sarvas in today's LAT...

Blogging his taco truck outing

Eric Stone coaxed novelist Christa Faust to leave the keyboard long enough to hit a few Eastside taco trucks the other night. He writes that "the woman can write. But...

W visits Arianna

The May issue of W (with Cameron Diaz on the cover) proclaims Arianna Huffington more influential than ever, with her new book doing well and the Huffington Post "arguably the...

Times rewards Top of the Ticket

I've heard more grumbling than usual from the features side of the L.A. Times newsroom about the time and money devoted to this week's touchy-feely innovation session, facilitated by a...

Another reason I love the web

Jon Weisman's blog prompt began, "My most devastating breakup occurred eight days after the 1994 baseball strike began (with the Dodgers trapped in first place in the National League West)...

New guy in charge at LAPD news blog

Lt. Rick Banks introduces himself to readers as the officer in charge who manages the blog "by approving the postings and reading all of your comments and evaluating which ones...

More blog glitches in LANGland

We're mentioned in the latest memo from Daily News online editor Ryan Garfat....

Trouble with the Daily News blogs

Gary Scott, formerly at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Daily Journal and now on the staff of Warren Olney's "Which Way, L.A.?" and "To the Point" on KCRW, blogs...

Blogging California's cathedrals

Author and Roman Catholic deacon Eric Stoltz and Los Angeles photographer Francesco Cur are engaged in a project to document the state's cathedrals in fine art photography and text. They...

Kaye does sound like a pol

From ex-editor Ron Kaye's new blog: In my mind, it's time for people to make a stand for what they believe in, to act like the free people Americans are...

Ron Kaye's LA *

The former editor of the Daily News has his first blog post up (at a different address than mentioned in the Morning Buzz, which came from the LA Weekly's blog.)...

Ken Layne and Wonkette

His business partner in the politics site is Henry Copeland, the founder of Blogads and a longtime friend of Layne's. Layne tells Tony Pierce of the LAT blog Web Scout...

Christina Gonzalez sues LAPD

Veteran Fox 11 reporter Christina Gonzalez filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city and the police department, saying she suffered "shock and injuries to her nervous system" and "severe...

Gawker sells Wonkette, Gridskipper

Ken Layne, one of the founders of LAExaminer.com back in the day, has some investors and is taking over Wonkette, the Washington D.C. politics site where he is the managing...

Changes at Fishbowl LA

Kate Coe was fired as co-editor in a dispute over money, says her friend and former colleague who blogs as Tabloid Baby. He's glowing about her, but I'm surprised it...

Dooce profiled

Heather Armstrong, famously fired in Los Angeles for blogging before she moved to Utah and became better known for revealing intimate details of her life as Dooce, talks in the...

Local Webby finalists

The Webby Awards are annual plaudits bestowed on corporate and institutional websites and a relative few blogs, with 8,000 entries in nearly 70 categories. Five finalists in each category were...

Politics site sums up LAT morale

This cartoon by Rob Tornoe runs today under the headline "Sam Zell must be very proud" at PolitickerCA. That is the relatively new local outlet of a national chain of...

The Atlantic likes Lacter

The Atlantic's new blog The Current gave one of its three "Best Opinion" slots on Friday to Mark Lacter's recent post at LA Biz Observed wondering why most Americans feel...

Finke makes news again

Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger Nikki Finke didn't disclose that a law firm she wrote about is representing her in a lawsuit against E-Trade over surreptitious recording, the New York Observer...

New blog from Curbed

Racked LA will cover shopping, neighborhood stores and the local retail scene. The chain also has a Racked NY. Editor here is Tasha Adams, who they say has written for...

Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule

That's the name of one of L.A.'s most literate film blogs, mentioned here now and then through the years. Now here's the backstory behind the name, pegged to the start...

Now the 64 worst things about L.A. *

Riffing a little on Los Angeles magazine's 64 Greatest Things in L.A. contest, Los Angeles Metblogs has started polling on the 64 Worst Things about L.A. The blog's competitive pairings...

DWP rate hike held over a week

The City Council will wait a week to vote on the hike sought by the Department of Water and Power. Time for more politicking study. The Daily News, which has...

Cops-and-crime blogs spreading

Borrowing a page from Frank Girardot in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, adopted sister paper the Daily Breeze has launched its own crime scene blog. Reporters Larry Altman and Denise...

Stuff white people like to read

Christian Lander, the Culver City-based writer of the hit satire blog Stuff White People Like, has gotten a William Morris agent (Erin Malone) and a book deal out of the...

Kareem on the anger thing

In his blog on the Times website, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says that one of the most common perceptions of him when he played basketball — that he was angry a lot...

LAT blogger caught in Cuban's net

Andrew Kamenetzky, half of the brotherly duo that travels with the Lakers and covers the team every day for their L.A. Times-owned blog, was denied access last night to the...

New politics blog in town

KNBC Channel 4 has tapped David Markland, a "city captain" at LA Metblogs, to write a couple of items a day under the California Faultline banner. He will focus on...

Blogs a big mistake for newspapers, Cuban says

Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and media-savvy blogger, writes that the rush by respected publishers to re-brand their content as coming from bloggers "is easily one of the many...

Dodgers Nation on YouTube

Two days ago, Dodger Thoughts blogger Jon Weisman signed up as a YouTube user and posted footage of Dodger farmhand Clayton Kershaw throwing one spring training pitch — strike three...

Jackie Johnson, up close

It's been a while since LA Observed readers first met math-challenged weather babe Jackie Johnson. If you have always craved just a little bit more, the CBS2/KCAL website has what...

Where's Nell Soto?

Assemblywoman Nell Soto, the 81 year-old Democrat from the San Gabriel Valley, hasn't been in Sacramento since at least September. She has been out ill. She also hasn't filed the...

The blogger-journalist distinction

Madness has swept KCRW and they're letting me host Politics of Culture today at 2:30 pm — a half-hour of live radio on the blurred lines between journalism and blogging...

And the Dodger Talk host is...

Emmy winning writer, director, producer and blogger Ken Levine will do the post-game honors on KABC 790 AM this season. Levine has done play-by-play gigs for the Padres, Mariners and...

Politics wins again at LAT website

News and politics did well in the LATimes.com stats for February, so maybe there's hope yet. Politics blog Top of the Ticket led the pack of in-house blogs in February...

Naked babe on Promenade

Writer and blogger Tom Teicholz was on the Santa Monica Promenade this afternoon when he spotted a woman strolling naked and preening for a video camera and still photographer. "This...

'Talking Points Memo' profiled

Last week Joshua Micah Marshall wins journalism's George Polk Award. This week the New York Times feigns surprise that he doesn't blog in his pajamas and has an office. To...

Sonenshein takes a blog

Even poli sci professors, columnists and all-around political pundits are doing it. Raphael Sonenshein, who's all three and the author of books about Los Angeles politics, is writing the Jews...

Why Gawker Inc. items might seem a little hyped

Media gossip blogger Maggie Shnayerson was let go at Gawker after less than six months. It's all about the ratings, per this item at Radar: An e-mail from Gawker Media...

Dutton's reaction rolling in

A lot of sites and media are reacting to the sad news — first posted here at LA Observed early this morning — that Dutton's Books in Brentwood will be...

More signs of the (new) Times

Jacket Copy, the blog written by the staff of the L.A. Times' books section, today added a new voice: Carolyn Kellogg's. She is the former editor of LAist who left...

Go Fug Yourself watches Oscar arrivals

Heather and Jessica got a gig live-blogging the red carpet for New York magazine's website, starting at 3 pm Hollywood and Highland time....

Lohan pics provide her a simple pleasure

Dana Goodyear, the New Yorker's blogging L.A. staff writer, had her own paparazzi encounter recently near the Chateau Marmont that inspired her to check out New York magazine's nudes of...

Blog wins a Polk Award

Talking Points Memo, the Democratic politics blog run by Joshua Micah Marshall, received a prestigious (within journalism) George Polk Award for legal reporting. TPM "led the news media coverage of...

How Kareem came to blog for the LAT

Kareem Abdul Jabbar's blog on the Times website seems to be working its way through his personal African American Hall of Fame — the latest subject is Charlotte E. Ray,...

One day of homicide blog entries

These didn't occur on Valentine's Day, but they hit the Homicide Report en masse. Got my attention. Athens: Antwan Cole, a 19-year-old young black man, was shot multiple times at...

News of the blogs

L.A. Now has gone live on LA Times.com, with posts on the news and the region from the recently hired Veronique de Turenne (yes, that one) and veteran Times staff...

Gawker way to blog, by the book

An internal memo leaked out of the Gawker blog empire (which is Defamer here in L.A., plus Wonkette, Gawker, Valleywag, et al) advises writers on what makes a good blog...

New name blogger in town

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has taken up a blog for the Times. So far he has talked about the Giants' win in the Super Bowl, the video he helped make for Barack...

Lisanti turns in his Defamer blazer

Mark Lisanti has posted, by his estimate, 9,000 to 10,000 posts since he began as the original, and anonymous, Defamer. This one today was the hardest:...

We'll always have Paris, unfortunately

I know firsthand that media types who mention Paris Hilton (or Britney Spears) are likely to hear harangues from readers/viewers/listeners turned off by all the celebrity worship that's on the...

Not moved by cartoonists of color

Count Los Angeles cartoonist Donna Barstow (who writes the blog Griffith Park, Interrupted) unimpressed by this story about minority cartoonists banding together to draw identical panels in yesterday's newspapers. It...

Blogs make the book

At least two Los Angeles blogs are included in a new book, "Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web," edited by the NYT's Sarah Boxer. They are Go Fug Yourself...

Celebs drive a lot of LATimes.com traffic

The latest report from web executive editor Meredith Artley shows the most important traffic drivers to the Times website are celebrity news and Hollywood. Nothing beats the page view-inflating efficiency...

Meghan Daum gives her playlist

The novelist and Los Angeles Times Op-Ed columnist shows up today on the New York Times' books blog, in a weekly feature that posts "a playlist of songs from a...

Where's Claire Hoffman?

The Portfolio contributing editor and former LAT writer — she covered the porn beat for a time and did that great West magazine piece on Joe Francis of Girls Gone...

Al Martinez starts a blog

The veteran Times columnist, briefly dumped last year, holds his nose and starts posting on Blogspot: A blog is generally a loathsome, tedious creation of the electronic age, an opportunity...

Fox 11's John Schwada takes up a blog

The talent at Channel 11 has been strongly encouraged to blog for MyFox LA, the branding given the station's website. Reporter John Schwada has taken to it easier than most...

Debate topic: Zappa and the Philharmonic

Mark Swed's Jan. 7 LAT review of an L.A. Philharmonic performance of pieces with an urban theme said, among other things: In between came Frank Zappa's 'Dupree's Paradise.' Short, diverting...

How do you follow a post on crotches?

If you are Emerald City, the L.A. Times' environment blog, you follow yesterday's post on your friend's bikini crotch with a post today on the underwear your mother gave you...

'Top of the Ticket' catches on

The Times seems happy with the traffic performance of its national politics blog, which has been covering the presidential races mostly in posts by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. It...

Theresa Duncan's final blog posts

Another posthumous entry from the late Theresa Duncan appeared on her blog, The Wit of the Staircase, on Dec. 31. An editor's note in October said it was coming, set...

CBS kills 'Public Eye' blog

The internal watchblog that began after Dan Rather's career meltdown has disappeared from the list of CBS News blogs, and Rachel Sklar at the Huffington Post is disappointed. It's a...

Leovy winding down at 'Homicide Report' *

Jill Leovy hinted in this month's profile of her in Los Angeles that she would stop writing the Times' homicide blog in the new year. It's one of the most-read...

Germain running out of letters

Marc Germain, the talk radio host formerly known as Mr. KABC and Mr. KFI, has been let go as liberal-talk KTLK's Mr. K. "A total surprise and not my choice...

Once around some blogs

Ed Boks, L.A.'s constantly embattled animal services chief, is still blogging away. He posts today that the "No-Kill Equation" getting a lot of buzz in the animal welfare community...

Focus on Andrew Malcolm

A long story at Editor & Publisher.com on newspaper political blogs ledes with the veteran reporter who co-writes Top of the Ticket, the L.A. Times campaign blog. The story muses,...

LAT.com makes web moves official

The memo is out on the additions we told you were coming to the Times' web staff — LAist's Tony Pierce and LAO's Veronique de Turenne — plus a couple...

Choire Sicha quits Gawker again

Sicha and two others editors quit the New York news and gossip site, apparently at least partly over a new pay scale. Romenesko rounds up some links....

LAT hires a couple of bloggers

All of us at LA Observed Tower congratulate Veronique de Turenne, doyenne of Here in Malibu, who will join the Los Angeles Times staff after the New Year as a...

Blogger reflects on turning 40

Jon Weisman at Dodger Thoughts: People can minimize it all they want, but these round-numbered birthdays are times that I take stock, and looking at myself, I see a complicated...

Being Christian at the Jewish Journal

Commenters on the God Blog have attacked the Jewish Journal for employing a "God-fearing Christian" with the last name of Greenberg to write for the weekly. (Brad) Greenberg explains his...

Reading some blogs

Long weekend equals time to catch up on some L.A. blog reading. Here's a few; may be more later: Jasmyne Cannick drove down Crenshaw this morning to MLK, thinking she...

Sarah Silverman is Jewish?

OK, just kidding about that. But who knew her older sister is a rabbi on a kibbutz in Israel? I guess you would if you remember Sarah's debut joke on...

Nikki Finke's busy weekend

The writers strike has inspired a frenzy of non-stop posting by Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily. (I shudder to think of the condition of her office.) Since Friday morning...

L.A. blog for the angry Asian male *

An email correspondent caught me up with angryasianman.com by Phil Yu, a 27-year-old Korean American who was the subject of a story last month (!) in the Washington Post. The...

Cartoonist gets a blog

Want to know how editorial cartoonists work? The Daily News' Patrick O'Connor posts early sketches, talks about his process for deciding on a topic and even tells the occasional tale...

Some bloggers do need an editor

Local freelancer Michael Goldstein wonders at his blog, Monday Morning Media Quarterback, if the Huffington Post is getting its money's worth out of unpaid fire blogger Kristen Reeves: Newspapers are...

How it's being covered

Michael Schneider at Franklin Avenue puts all the newspaper front pages together side by side — for headlines we've got an Inferno, an Armageddon, a Firestorm and a Hell on...

Ruminations of an ex-sex columnist

Lara Loewenstein gave up her gig as the sex columnist for the Daily Bruin last year, graduated from UCLA and now has a blog where she ruminates on that phase....

David Hiller, now publisher and blogger

This could be good — or not. Times Publisher David Hiller, who likes to explain at length his view of the emerging media world, has decided to blog it. But...

Blogging while Latino is alive in L.A.

Couple of new ones to me, just as Daniel Hernandez prepares to decamp to Mexico City. Abel Salas, who has written for the New York Times, L.A. Times Magazine and...

Oh no, not awards blogs again

Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson says the season for newspapers to crank up their Oscars-Globes-etc blogs is fast approaching. She gives a rundown on who's doing what at the big...

Now: Boing Boing TV

Mark Frauenfelder, Xeni Jardin and the rest of the very successful Boing Boing blog team launched tv.boingboing.net tonight. Xeni explains on the site: The idea is simple. Explore the same...

Eating L.A. with Eve Diamond

Author Denise Hamilton and Eating L.A. blogger Pat Saperstein did a fun road trip recently, visiting many of the local dining spots patronized by Hamilton's lovelorn newspaper reporter protagonist, Eve...

New schools blog

The Times lost its School Me blog and column when Bob Sipchen quit to edit the Sierra Club magazine in San Francisco and co-blogger Janine Kahn went to the OC...

City vs blog in Claremont

Last week the political anony-blog Claremont Insider posted the pay and benefits totals for a whole bunch of Claremont city employees, based on year-end pay stubs found on the city's...

Beverly Hills hits blog with search warrant

The city of Beverly Hills wants to poke around in the visitor logs of LAist because of comments to a post last week that detailed an encounter between an angry...

J-prof swings and misses

Today's Times Opinion section runs another piece proclaiming the blogosphere lacking — this time in factual political reporting. It read to me as if journalism professor Michael Skube wasn't familiar...

Editor of LA.com responds *

Jason Middleton has something to say about Lesley Balla's dig at LA.com earlier this week. He emails: Normally, I wouldn't respond to a competitor's blog posting, but there are some...

LA.com's lack of soul *

Lesley Balla helped in 2003 to launch LA.com as an informed, even sassy hub of opinionated takes on Los Angeles. She doesn't like what has happened now that the Daily...

End of a blog

Sickcandy has given it up: Sickcandy was a blog published from May 15, 2003-July 4, 2007. It died for several reasons, including (but not limited to) me not wanting to...

Homicide map much improved

The Times has added a whole bunch of filters and details to the new interactive map that goes with Jill Leovy's homicide blog. If you want to just see the...

Most popular hits at LATimes.com

The Lakers blog still leads the pack — followed by Show Tracker — and the Henry T. Nicholas sex story beat out the Antonio Villaraigosa sex story for visitor traffic...

Interview with an L.A. composer

Michael McLean's first violin concerto was recorded last year at Abbey Road Studios, performed on a 1728 Stradivarius accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. How cool is that? Laurie Niles...

Runs in the family

The mother of Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has put up a website to protest development plans for Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills. Peggy Kaus goes for a different style: there's...

The New Yorker adds L.A. blog

Poet and New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear has begun Postcard from Los Angeles on the magazine's website. Her first blog post is an homage to the late Elizabeth Stromme,...

Luke Ford's source *

When Luke Ford blogged (accurately) in January that Mayor Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding ring and hadn't been seen with his wife in months, the information came from Daily...

Ford interrupts her bliss *

Our post earlier this month on Hollywood tabloidist-turned-author Marlise Kast and her pursuit of blissful contentment inspired Luke Ford to interview her for his blog. Or was it the picture?...

Two sides of Marion True *

Sharon Waxman of the NYT bureau here continues to blog about her book research around the Mediterranean (with a stop for a swim on the Greek island of Paros.) Her...

Friend signs off for Theresa Duncan

Editor and writer Glenn O'Brien pens a final entry at The Wit of the Staircase, adding photographs of Duncan and Jeremy Blake and some Steely Dan lyrics that were read...

Nomad lawyer back in town

Paul Karl Lukacs has concluded his traveling sabbatical from the life of a Hollywood lawyer. He blogged from Thailand during the coup, reviewed a book from Jakarta and dropped in...

Catching up on Duncan & Blake

The L.A. Times got around to chasing last week's story on the suicide of Theresa Duncan and possible death of Jeremy Blake, leading with the angle that other reports have...

Columnist eyes Daniels warily

San Bernardino Sun sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge seems to have a bit of a thing about Christine Daniels, the transgender sports scribe for the L.A. Times. Oberjuerge encountered Daniels in...

Reactions on Theresa and Jeremy

Consecutive reader comments on Gothamist regarding the suicide of Venice blogger Theresa Duncan (and the apparent death of her lover, Jeremy Blake) illustrate the poles of emotion we expect from...

Blogging for cash

Business Week has a story focusing on more than a dozen bloggers who are making decent money with their sites, including the L.A. women behind the juicy GoFugYourself. "For Heather...

Another food blog in town

The Daily Dish is blog number 25 at LATimes.com, not counting the phantom USC sports blog that hasn't appeared yet. The DD carries contributions from pretty much all the staffers...

No fun at the fireworks

Erik Himmelsbach didn't enjoy last night's fireworks show at CBS Studio City. It set him back thirty bucks and he wants to share the experience: Like most Americans, we believe...

'Out in Hollywood' turns one

Greg Hernandez writes the only mainstream media blog in town (that I know of) devoted to gay Hollywood. His Out in Hollywood on the Daily News website is also one...

Around some blogs

Good California poll numbers for Hillary and Rudy. Top of the Ticket FishbowlLA continues its run of Q-and-A's with LA Observed contributors by throwing 20 questions at Bruce Feirstein....

Weekend catch-up *

Now Michelle Delgadillo has business tax problems, but abruptly took care of them Friday in advance of a new round of stories. LAT, DN Popular progressive and previously faceless...

No iPhone for Brits

Catherine Elsworth, who holds down the Silver Lake bureau for the Daily Telegraph, would really like to test drive the new iPhone. But she was told by Apple that only...

Lunch and blog

Melissa Grego, managing editor at TelevisionWeek, posts to a blog-driven column reporting on her lunches with Hollywood figures. She started it up in January and most recently has dished on...

Another blogger on the mayor

Alan Mittelstaedt, the former LA Weekly news editor guest-blogging for WitnessLA, posts on the issues raised by Mayor Villaraigosa's divorce and his handling of the announcement. Lets cut a deal...

Three literary salonistas

Producer and author Tom Teicholz hit on a pretty good way to give his next book a shot at a favorable reception. He devoted his column in the Jewish Journal...

No more LABlogs.com

Catching up on my feeds, I noticed that Jonah has shut down LA Blogs.com. Franklin Avenue has a suitable tribute to the site that introduced many of the city's fine...

Times adds national political blog *

Former editorial writer Andrew Malcolm handles the West Coast, Washington bureau editor Don Frederick the east for Top of the Ticket. What can one more blogger bring to the nation's...

Geez, another Daily News item? *

Yes! Sometimes things just work that way. The DN editorial page staff has launched a new blog where editor Chris Weinkopf (from the right), editorial writer Mariel Garza (leftier) and...

Salladay out

The Times' Sacramento blogger Robert Salladay, who took the buyout, signed off this afternoon. Political Muscle will continue in some guise, he writes. From his farewell post: The Political Muscle...

Willow Bay to Huffington Post

The former CNN and ABC Good Morning America/Sunday anchor will be a HuffPost editor at large overseeing the sites new Living Now section and help shape overall content. Release after...

KinseyGram is no more

The Kinseygram, the L.A. Times blog by Calendar editor Kinsey Lowe that offered a morning roundup of entertainment news, has been quietly killed and the evidence obliterated from the LAT...

Huffington Post splits into sections

"Still the same place, with the same address, the same mission, and the same attitude that has always made HuffPost such a great read," Arianna Huffington says in this morning's...

New crime blog

Four Daily News reporters — Jason Kandel, Brent Hopkins, Rick Coca and Rachel Uranga — are contributing items to It's a Crime, with a Valley bias to the mix. Roll...

City vs anony-blog, part 2

This time it's the city of Claremont getting all umbraged up about the Claremont Insider, recounted on the blog of San Garbriel Valley Tribune city editor Edward Barrera. Previous: Foothill...

Foothill Cities up close

Today's San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports on the rise of the anonymous Foothill Cities Blog (note new name) and the controversy over its coverage of politics in Pomona. City officials...

Lit bloggers in the news

L.A. bloggers Mark Sarvas (The Elegant Variation) and Callie Miller (Counterbalance) were quoted in a weekend LAT story on the rise — to a point — of books blogs as...

School Me goes into "hibernation"

The L.A. Times education blog pioneered by former Current editor Bob Sipchen is going away, but not necessarily permanently. "School Me is going into hibernation for a while...while the folks...

City goes after Foothill blogger

The anonymous Foothill Cities news and gossip blog pulled its recent posts on goings-on at Pomona city hall after receiving a cease-and-desist threat from the Pomona city attorney. The city...

Internecine spat

Nikki Finke, apparently a main generator of traffic to LA Weekly's website, seems a mite upset that today's issue credits David Poland's Movie City News with a million visitors a...

A dog's life

For an anonymous dog blog, Skip 365 is pretty witty. Every daily post is a scene from the life of Skip, who my tipster calls a pound puppy in...

New 1947 Project bloggers

Now that 1947 has morphed through 1907 into 1927 (and spawned an L.A. Times imitator blog revisiting 1957), Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak's original website is adding a couple of...

What works and doesn't on the web

Meredith Artley, the new top editor at LATimes.com, sent a missive to the staff talking up new features on the website and ranking the most viewed stories of the past...

New mag on the racks

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...

New fine arts blog

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...

Expect more sausage

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...

Interview with Helena Mara Viramontes

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...

Thumbing a ride

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...

Mystery of 'Carbon Shift' solved

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...

Times as ransom note

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...

Cathy Seipp in ICU at Cedars

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...

Ask for fingerprint, lose a sale

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...

Where's 'Carbon Shift'?

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]...

New blogs: food, justice

Barbara Hansen's TableConversation.com picks up where her ethnic food columns in the Times food section left off.

Blogging advice from...

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...

Not so secret anymore

Santa Monica teenager Cory Kennedy, and her mother, come across as less than stable in Shawn Hubler's profile (The Secret Life of Cory Kennedy) in Sunday's West magazine. Still, Kennedy...

Can't fool the native speakers

Chris Ayres, Los Angeles correspondent of the Times of London, liveblogged the Oscars and found Her Majesty Gwyneth Paltrow's vocal stylings a tad odd. For a Crossroads girl, anyway: "My...

L.A.'s crows explained

Designer and blogger Marc Grobman (the guy campaigning to de-uglify Donald Sterling's Times ads) became so curious about the crows invading his Santa Monica neighborhood each winter that he went...

Blog update o' the week

Nemesis of Evil posted tonight at 9:01 pm that the bomb squad was outside the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Weyburn and Gayley in Westwood Village. Then came the...

99 homicides and counting

Jill Leovy's LAT homicide blog now takes note of 99 killings across Los Angeles county so far this year, about three a day. That's lower than last year's daily average,...

LAFD blog goes on 'hiatus'

Staffing issues blamed, Brian Humphrey posts: "We hope to return to regular postings of significant Los Angeles Fire Department incidents, events and issues soon."...

America rejects L.A.'s future

Results are in for The History Channels City of the Future design competition. On-line voters selected Chicago the winner. New York came in second. The Eric Owen Moss design for...

He is her Sonnenschein

TV and magazine writer Michael Sonnenschein, the erstwhile Fishbowl LA blogger for the Mediabistro empire, is getting back in the game. He is sitting in as guest editor of the...

News at LAVoice

Ryan Knoll and Scott Schmidt, the Republican political and communication consultants behind RSC Partners, are the new landlords at LA Voice.org. Creator Mack Reed made it official tonight that he...

Dowie's politics script gets an option *

Convicted and sentenced former Fleishman-Hillard exec Doug Dowie has optioned a screenplay to Jonathan Sanger, a producer on The Elephant Man, The Producers and Vanilla Sky. "It's kind of an...

Academy goes after Oscar blog

Sasha Stone has run OscarWatch.com for seven years, but suddenly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has hit her with a cease-and-desist letter over the name. She posts...

L.A. gets a homicide blog

Covering murder and mayhem in Los Angeles for the Times, Jill Leovy has been driven crazy knowing that for every homicide that captures the media eye there are others that...

TypePad blogs down

The TypePad service is "currently unavailable," knocking thousands of blogs — including those at the LAT — off-line for the moment. Update: I noticed them back at 2 pm....

Don't cook tonight...

Most entertaining blog promo for a friend's project that I've seen in awhile — and nicely retro too — from Mickey Kaus at Slate: In 1969, as a senior in...

Stein the gift that keeps giving

As a clicks-generating tactic, LATimes.com could do worse than having op-ed columnist Joel Stein chat live with visitors again. Last week's chat brought in a few readers and some attention....

Web celebs

Local bloggers and web entrepreneurs placed well on the Forbes Web Celeb 25, called "the biggest, brightest and most influential people on the Internet [and]...famous primarily for creating or appearing...

Bee takes Weintraub behind the wall *

The Sacramento Bee today announced a big new risky online gamble: a premium politics website called CapitolAlert that costs a whopping $499 a year and gives subscribers early access to...

Bravo!

By day Susan Patron is a senior librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library system, where she has worked for thirty-five years. She is also an accomplished author of children's...

Mack Reed giving up LAVoice.org

After a four-year run, the creator of LA Voice says he has too much going on in his professional and personal life to keep going. He announces in an open...

Media breakthrough *

Govindi Murty, co-founder of the Liberty Film Festival, sits in the guest chair this weekend on "Ebert and Roeper." She joins a lineup that has included Jay Leno, director Kevin...

Dutton's dispute still rages

Dutton's Beverly Hills closed December 31, but the hard feelings continue. At a city council meeting last night the city manager of Beverly Hills apparently made a report blaming the...

LACMA does another free thing

Tyler Green's blog-jabs about the high cost of L.A. art seem to have gotten the goat of the folks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Last week, you...

New LAT blog: BuzzBands * (updated)

Kevin Bronson's Buzz Bands column in Calendar Weekend is now a blog. He's been doing it quietly since New Year's Eve, but the news just filtered down. Bronson writes of...

First LAO cat blog ever

Regular readers of Kevin Drum's Political Animal blog, successor to CalPundit, are used to his frequent diversions about his cats. So it's not surprising that his Jan. 4 post, Final...

Afternoon snacks

Michael Goodwin was convicted of murdering his former business partner, Mickey Thompson, and the racing legend's wife in 1988. Prosecutors will not seek the death penalty. CBS2 Alleged details...

Instant review of Du-Par's (* Updated)

Not good, blogs Colleen Cuisine. She didn't go in looking for a gourmet experience but "just hearty good food:" After shuttering its doors for remodeling nearly two years ago, Du-par's...

Blog pecking order shuffles (* updated)

Eat the Press analyzes how Technorati's somewhat-incestuous Top 100 (which measures not readers or popularity, just inbound links from other blogs) looks different now than it did a year ago....

Patterico's take on the LAT

Right blogger Patterico's fourth annual review of a year in the life of the Los Angeles Times is up. It has become kind of a yearly event for the conservative...

Tuesday shorts

Longtime local news figure Ross Becker is leaving NBC4 and the on-hiatus daytime show he anchored, The Local Story, for an anchor slot at KTVX, the ABC-affiliated Channel 4...

Good reads

No Morning Buzz today, but here are some offerings from LA Observed contributors. How not to blog: When his piece flinging around 23 n-words riled a friend, Bob Baker faced...

Now in the game for the Clippers...

No, not Allen Iverson — not yet anyway. LA Observed contributor Bob Baker has taken over from Rick Cipes as the official, paid Clippers blogger at LATimes.com. He'll be spending...

Spoofing Nora Ephron

The author and screenwriter contributed a blog entry on Condoleezza Rice to the Huffington Post over the weekend that begins: I met Condoleezza Rice last weekend. She was much prettier...

A mother's fear

L.A. journalist Mona Gable has stirred up a storm at the Huffington Post with a post reacting to her 16-year-old son receiving mail from the National Guard, the same week...

NY critics go with 'United 93'

The New York Film Critics Circle today voted United 93 their best film of the year. Martin Scorsese was deemed best director for The Departed. Anne Thompson has more at...

Huffington Post to hire journos

Melinda Henneberger, a Newsweek contributing editor who used to be at the New York Times, joins the Huffington Post as political editor and will hire reporters to cover Congress and...

Kinsley on web egos

In a column at Slate, Michael Kinsley remembers his shock when a Washington colleague put up a personal website for the first time. Now it all makes sense, he writes:...

Gas not beer

Angelenos older than about 40 probably remember signs for Brew 102 as a downtown L.A. landmark off the Hollywood Freeway. Next to the brewery were some giant tanks that as...

Goldstein rates the bloggers

Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein is given a page in today's print version of The Envelope to deliver his take on four of the bloggers who occupy his space in...

The student behind TVNewser

Brian Stelter is 21, attends Towson University near Baltimore, and through his blog has the ear of just about everyone who matters in television news. Now he also has a...

Flattery

Does Nissan's new serialized commercial for the Sentra rip off artist Matt Johnson's sculpture Breadface, which was seen all over Los Angeles on banners for the UCLA Hammer Museum's Thing...

Calacanis leaves AOL

Jason Calacanis made a ton of money selling Santa Monica-based Weblogs, Inc. to AOL and for the past year has been working there and running Netscape. Yesterday his mentor at...

Los Angeles redesigns

New logo, typeface, departments and architecture to the magazine, which celebrates 45 years in December. It's the Power Issue, hitting newstands now with pieces by me on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa,...

Harvey Levin's encounter with O.J.

In the alley behind Nicole's Bundy Drive condo, two months after Simpson was acquitted....

Cars vs. bikes on PCH

Veronique de Turenne gives bicyclists their space on Pacific Coast Highway, but asks the same in return. "Share the road, you arrogant cyclists. Sure, it's narrow, sure it's scenic, sure...

Variety starts a food blog

If you want to be technical, The Knife is "a blog about restaurants favored by the entertainment industry. Monday through Thursday, The Knife is where to eat and drink in...

Boyarsky joins LA Observed

Bill Boyarsky, the newest LA Observed contributor, used to be city editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote a local column called "The Spin" for many years, and created the...

One small step into espaol

On the same day that his publisher calls for a new Hispanic business strategy, Bob Sipchen's education column in the Times runs in both Spanish and English on his School...

Cruise Wagner given United Artists *

Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have inked a deal to take over MGM's dormant United Artists film label, Anne Thompson reports at the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz...

Paris blogger goes on assignment

The Times' Susan Spano is heading to Asia for a month and turning over Postcards from Paris to a guest blogger, new-to-Paris author Elliott Hester. Spano critic Amy Alkon, writing...

Variety's new blog

Wilshire & Washington is designed to "highlight the enduring relationship between entertainment and politics. More than a mere curiosity, the intersection of these worlds play out daily in fund raising,...

Cracking down on photos

Paparazzi agency X-17 is making plans to go after celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton for profiting from the company's photos. Radar Online says the agency is talking to other creators...

Afternoon snacks

Franklin Avenue's Mike and Maria turn up on HGTV's "What is My House Worth?" LAist wants Lakers and Clippers bloggers. Dawn at Griffith Observatory. Crazy Wendy at the Santa...

No more Jessica at Gawker

Jessica Coen is posting her final Gawker items today after two years at the blog. On the way out, she's telling a few (blind-item) tales and maybe holding a match...

Forget LAT - go for online

Those billionaires interested in buying the Los Angeles Times should put their money into creating a new web-based news venture, says Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at...

With Antonio in China

City Hall beat reporter Duke Helfand is on the mayor's trade trip to China and blogging about it for the Times website. In the first post we learn that Villaraigosa...

Coup blogs

Remember in June when entertainment lawyer Paul Karl Lukacs quit the rat race and took off around the world, blogging about it at Knife Tricks? He got as far as...

New TV blog

Perhaps bracing for a premature end to his team's baseball season, Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman has launched Screen Jam. I'll let him explain: As readers of Dodger Thoughts may know,...

A MEChista's pain

Cindy Mosqueda at Loteria Chicana is tired of hearing race-baiters on the right demonize a group that she doesn't recognize. Her blog-rant was triggered by a YouTube video that she...

Political football

The anonymous blogger at Los Angeles City Nerd says that Councilman Bernard Parks hosted a Monday Night Football viewing party starting at 4 pm yesterday in the "media room" at...

LA Voice offline

Mack Reed's site is down temporarily due to a recurrence of hosting problems. 2:20 pm: They are back up....

'Political Muscle' flexes today

The Los Angeles Times launched its California Politics website and blog today, four days after it was promised. There are links to today's LAT stories out of Sacramento, video of...

Visiting with Rupert Pole

Today's feature in the Times on the Silver Lake home where Rupert Pole lived with the writer Anais Nin is the best chance I'll ever get to link to this...

Latino L.A. blogging

Changes are happening at LatinoLA.com. The site, billed as "your online guide to LatinoL.A.," gathers together a rich array of community links, articles and event listings each week and has...

Can't say I'm surprised

Arianna Huffington's new book, On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work and Life, has morphed instantly into a new feature section at the Huffington Post: "...devoted to promoting fearlessness in all aspects...

Details on LAT politics blog

Fear of the long knives from Chicago is rampant again in the Los Angeles Times newsroom at First and Spring streets downtown. You know people are skittish when a rumor...

Times reporter's book: Iraq a failure

T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau shows up on the blog at the Huffington Post with an entry about the subject of his new book, Blood...

Monday blogs eclectic

Ten posts from the feed reader... Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth blogs about the Beatles' penultimate road concert, forty years ago today at Dodger Stadium. It was a Bob...

Chiding USC from within

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes extensively on what he sees as the abuses of copyright and the law's dampening effect on free exchange of ideas and art. Just because he's...

Joining the g-word fray

Jenny Burman blogs at Chicken Corner that the LA Weekly's David Zahniser is a fellow Echo Parkster and describes the view of gentrification from her corner of the neighborhood. Next...

Getting in the game

Blogger Zach Behrens (In the Oaks and LAist) is running for a seat on the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council. He's unopposed, so it looks like he should be addressed in...

Guest bloggers sign the papers

After several weeks as resident guests, and some time before that as anonymous visiting bloggers, Mayrav Saar and Kate Coe are official at Fishbowl LA. Mayrav is a former Orange...

New L.A. blogger for pay

Alyssa Shelasky will be posting about her L.A. dating life for Glamour magazine's new website — with a little twist. Apparently, she will ask readers for love advice then put...

What I read at lunch

You get pretty far into Mary McNamara's LAT piece on Mary-Louise Parker (pegged to tonight's return of "Weeds" on Showtime) before you learn that she is not a happy faux...

Daily News prepares to expand online *

The fifteen "InsideSoCal" staff blogs fed mostly out of the newsroom in Woodland Hills — and the absorption of LA.com — were just the beginning for the Daily News' online...

Blogger in the news (again)

Charles Johnson of the Los Angeles-based war blog Little Green Footballs and co-founder of Pajamas Media got most of the praise due the blogosphere for uncovering the fake documents about...

Introducing Chicken Corner

One of the additions we've talked about at LA Observed — and have been hatching in the background — is encouraging writers to blog occasionally (or more) about the places...

News happens to a Bon Apptit editor

In her blog diatribe about suffering bad service at a Los Angeles area restaurant, visiting Bon Apptit online editor Martha Simon doesn't name the place. But if you suspect it's...

New Yorker on blogs as journalism

In this week's double issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann struggles to comprehend the rise of blogs as a news source and the boosterish label — citizen journalism —...

Another one debuts: David Rensin

David Rensin has been a contributing editor of Playboy since before web browsers came along. He has written more than a hundred interviews for the magazine and devotes most of...

Hackers who are hacks

Writer, producer, novelist (and significant other of Helen Hunt) Matthew Carnahan had his personal home page taken hostage by pro-Palestinian hackers. Ray Richmond blogs that Carnahan hasn't written or done...

Book on KROQ

Former CityBeat columnist Erik Himmelsbach has taken his Valley Boy persona to the blogopshere. In his second post, he talks about the book he is writing about legendary Los Angeles...

LA Observed 2.0

Time for a change. A fairly major change, in light of the way things have been done here so far. There won't be a Morning Buzz today so I can...

Curses, foiled again *

KCRW thought they had U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad all lined up to guest with Warren Olney on "To the Point" at 1 pm, but the station regrets to...

LA Voice off the air

Some kind of problem at Dreamhost has knocked LA Voice.org off line. We're all hostages to our hosting services, unfortunately. Best of luck to Mack as he gets them straightened...

L.A.'s dopest lawyer blog

In addition to running alt weekly ads that brag she's the dopest attorney in Los Angeles, criminal defense lawyer Allison Margolin has taken up blogging on the site of the...

Notes from the blogosphere

Movie City News has added rough, uncut video interviews to its mix of blogs. Up currently is a three-part chat with Vinessa Shaw, who strolls self-consciously through Palisades Park in...

Three good L.A. blog posts

Regular readers of The Wit of the Staircase know that writer, filmmaker and former video game designer Theresa Duncan lives in Venice and is likely to post about literature, clothes,...

Congrats

Two of the contributors at Blogging.la are getting married this weekend — and not to each other....

Brad Blog in the news

Brad Friedman's Los Angeles-based liberal blog has been all over the vote irregularity issues in the Busby-Bilbray congressional race in San Diego County. Friedman is scheduled to appear tonight on...

Guest blogger comes out

Yesterday's Morning Buzz mentioned FishbowlLA's search for a staffer to replace the "guest blogger" who has been holding the fort. Later in the day, this week's guest blogger, one of...

Hard journo to pay a compliment *

Yesterday's almost entirely positive media story on Nikki Finke gets another day in the news, thanks to her insistence that the piece by Jon Friedman of Marketwatch was "misogynist" and...

Friedman likes Nikki *

Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman got columnist-blogger Nikki Finke to come out to lunchdinner with him in Santa Monica and calls her "a rarity at a time when many entertainment...

PaidContent's 'next big step'

Following the news in this morning's Wall Street Journal (and in the Morning Buzz), Rafat Ali makes announcements about his deal for financing at paidContent.org. The site based here covers...

Ode to soy

When a non-political blogger actually does some digging to get a story, we applaud. So kudos to Ethan Lindsey at LAist for noticing that the veggie dogs had vanished from...

New DN blogs

Mariel Garza has moved her observations about riding the bus from her personal blog onto a sanctioned Daily News spot. Steve Rosenberg, a copy editor on the Daily News features...

Going for the C

This week's Los Angeles Alternative goes where few of us would dare tread: restaurants that earned the health department's dreaded C grade. They wouldn't risk their own staffers, of course—they...

Afternoon news snack

CityBeat's cover story by Celia Farber delves into the controversy over the possible AIDS death of three-year-old Eliza Jane Scovill, her mother Christine Maggiore's identity as a skeptic of...

Another blogger-editor moves on

Claude Brodesser, who has been flying solo at FishbowlLA since Michael Sonnenschein exited the scene in early April, posts that he is leaving to write the industry column for TMZ.com,...

Etude, blogger?

My favorite blog reading is not about politics or Los Angeles (or even ice hockey.) What I enjoy is eavesdropping on aficionados in some field I know nothing about. Hence...

Life after L.A.

LAist editor Carolyn Kellogg is leaving our fair city and the blog for the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes in her farewell missive,...

Paperback blog

Paperback Mysteries, reviews of new books by Dick Adler, reviewer for the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly and longtime Los Angeles author and journalist. Add books: Jailed PI Anthony Pellicano...

A decade in Los Angeles

Blogger Michael Schneider has lived here for ten years now and over at Franklin Avenue he marvels at the changing cityscape. When I got here, no one was talking about...

Doing Laurel Canyon right

Seems to me that Michael Walker is doing the whole book-blog synergy the right way, and creating a readable and valuable Los Angeles neighborhood website. (I'd say this even if...

Memorial Day short links

♦ Just how capriciously does the county apply its practice of releasing jail inmates early? Quite, according to DA Steve Cooley. ♦ The Daily News endorsed Cindy Montaez in the...

L.A. behind the scenes

Behold the late-inning dessert cart for fans who make it into the luxury boxes on the Club Level at Dodger Stadium. Click on the photo for the whole chocolicious scene....

Trying the Red Line

The new blogger at Red Line Diary has made the switch: he's commuting from home in Burbank to the downtown civic center via subway. Not that the MTA makes it...

Police Academy journal

From an anonymous officer, posted at LAPD Wife: Exhaustion. I have been sleep-deprived for three months now. I kicked the caffeine habit before I ever set foot in The Academy,...

Waiting for a cop

Andrew at Here in Van Nuys blogs about calling 911 after a pickup truck blocked his driveway and a man in para-military garb got out and began throwing things at...

Server glitches

LA Voice.org is having an up-and-down day due to server issues at DreamHost. Looks to be currently...very slow....

'Connected's other blog

In addition to host Lisa McRee's web reports from the show's road trips, the "California Connected" crew at KCET is also posting to a newsroom blog that looks like it...

Hiltzik returns

Guess it was true about Michael Hiltzik landing in Sports when the defrocked Los Angeles Times columnist-blogger returned from suspension. He wrote the Sunday feature on Clipper Elton Brand's "checkered...

Weekend shorts

♦ "There is no exact moment when the cultural epicenter of the country shifted from New York to Los Angeles," Manohla Dargis writes in the NYT, "just a series of...

Blogging with conviction

It's not every day that a guy goes home from a bad day in federal court—conviction on twelve felonies—and blogs about life. Former Fleishman-Hillard VP John Stodder, of course, has...

JournalSpace down *

Bloggers who use JournalSpace to host their websites have been offline for several hours today. Members are emailing me that they received no warning and still haven't heard from JournalSpace....

Friday, 5.12.06

More on maggots at the morgue, the sordid conditions inside our jails, Guerdon Stuckey files his report and other news and views after the jump. From late yesterday, don't miss...

LAPD goes blogging *

The Los Angeles Police Department launched its official blog with a burst of opinion (a rebuttal to an editorial in the Daily News) and a welcome message from Chief William...

Thursday, 5.11.06

How it feels when your dental hygienist somehow gets your number and asks you out, plus Chief Bratton argues for less oversight, Antonio's endorsement of a successor to Jackie Goldberg,...

'Profitable' Huff Post to expand *

Arianna Huffington told magazine editors in New York today that the Huffington Post makes money and within two months will spin off a sister site devoted to political satire. Even...

Ms. Spano in Paris

In the two years that LAT travel writer Susan Spano has been living in Paris, I've noticed two kinds of reactions among LA Observed readers. One is envy and resentment...

Afternoon snackage

♦ Answer: Mayor Villaraigosa, Sheriff Baca, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, Magic Johnson, Natalie Cole, Johnny Grant and Councilman Tom LaBonge. Question: Who shows up when Channel...

Thursday, 5.4.06

Watching Antonio squirm—Dowie and Stodder too, and Dodgers fans, and the art experts at Cal State Northridge who OK'd some suspect Chinese antiquities. Plus a big win for the Mighty...

Cost of truants: nada

Not only won't it cost the L.A. schools $2.1 million for yesterday's 27,000-plus protest absences, it pretty much won't hurt at all financially. School Me, the new Times blog on...

Monday, 5.01.06

There's an extra-long Morning Buzz chock full of good stuff after you turn the page, catching up to the weekend. Of course the news of the day in Los Angeles...

The Hiltzik Affair

Michael Hiltzik came up, of course, during my interview of Los Angeles Times Editor Dean Baquet on Sunday at the Times Festival of Books. He beat me to the punch,...

Friday, 4.21.06

Media reaction to the Hiltzik blog disclosure, a city budget with money for more cops, some awards, some obits and General Zinni is in town. Much more after the jump......

Hiltzik's blog suspended

This notice is posted at the top of Michael Hiltzik's Golden State blog on the Los Angeles Times website: The Times has suspended Michael Hiltziks Golden State blog on latimes.com....

Three names better than one? **

Liberal L.A. Times columnist-blogger Michael Hiltzik and conservative prosecutor-blogger Patterico have been butting heads and online personas ever since the former joined the blogosphere last October. Even earlier, perhaps, if...

Army on gossip columns

Reacting to the scandal about extortion, horse trading and freebies at Page Six, former Variety columist Army Archerd—whose marketing slogan is "Hollywood's first blogger"—blogs a tale out of his past....

Thursday, 4.6.06

Selective news judgment on Derek Lowe...mysterious illness of a local congresswoman...the mayor and the Chinese vice premier...plus yet another Hollywood media blog, an L.A. blog award, a bloggy romance and...

Wednesday, 4.5.06

Some Pellicano news, the start of the Dowie-Stodder trial, a new blogger on the City Council and of course so much more—including a farewell in the Daily News newsroom, a...

Hollywood media snack

♦ David Poland of Movie City News takes 1,400 words to explain why his column The Hot Button is going down to three days a week. It's all about the...

Greg the newsstand guy *

For a little slice of life from below-the-media-radar Los Angeles, check out the personal tributes I'm gathering over at The Valley Observed about the man who ran the newsstand at...

DealBreaker launches

Today's the first official day of original Gawker (and ex-Mediabistro editor) Elizabeth Spiers' new money-backed Wall Street blog, DealBreaker.com. As she describes it, "an online business tabloid and Wall Street...

Clips get a blog

Had to happen, with the playoffs-bound Clippers turning respectable. ClipperBlog.com is from Kevin Arnovitz and friends. He is the Slate magazine Fray editor who confessed his season-ticket status at Slate...

Another newspaper blog

Looks as if the Daily News and its sister papers have quietly launched Hollywood Babble On, "where our film, music, TV and Hollywood critics dish out their latest thoughts!" I...

Immigration shorts

Notes from around... ♦ An estimated 5,000 students are protesting outside of school today in San Pedro, Compton, Bellflower and the Valley, according to NBC4. ♦ There's a 1 pm press conference...

Trash politics

Every Los Angeles political story has a backstory. At his blog, John Stodder takes off from the recent news about Sunshine Canyon landfill to reconstruct how, when he was the...

Wednesday, 3.22.06

Turn the page for items on Dean Singleton's California strategy, Sheriff Baca's Compton strategy, a Saudi prince gets booed at Town Hall Los Angeles, celebrities at the fashion shows and...

Why she blogs

Orange County Register columnist Mayrav Saar writes in the paper today about what she gets from posting at Big Action!, a group blog whose writers include Leslie Gornstein (E! Online's...

Afternoon snack *

♦ New indictment coming in Pellicano case in early April, prosecutor says. ♦ Funny how the fate of Knight-Ridder's Northern California newspapers could be settled by either Ron Burkle or fellow L.A....

Channel 5's sad blogs

I just caught up to the official KTLA blogs written by four of the station's top news anchors. In theory they represent an admirable step in connecting the talking heads...

Catching up: The Bloggies

The Weblog Awards were handed out for the sixth time on Monday at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. I was on the road that day, but some...

Clooney v. Huffington

Comments by George Clooney on the Huffington Post about being a proud and unabashed liberal created a small blogosphere boomlet this week, but the aftermath may prove more entertaining. Clooney's...

Be your own Escher illusion

Boing Boing points to a service called TurnYourHead that will make a custom-lathed "pirolette" that contains your profile, "like an MC Escher litho come to life, starring you, you, you."...

New DVD blog

Pan and Scan promises everything DVD "from media news and gossip, to the latest release dates and reviews, up-to-minute industry developments, and technology trends, we cover all aspects of digital...

First thing Wednesday, 3.8.06

Runoff for school board...more strangeness around the Ferrari Enzo crash...Rob Reiner's campaign chief steps out of the limelight...L.A.'s blogging pet czar blasts the Animal Defense League...while Cardinal Mahony seeks a...

First thing Monday, 3.6.06

First reviews of the Oscars and Jon Stewart: not good. Also, Arnie Berghoff's diabetes roast gets some scrutiny, the Times finds waste in the local bioterrorism budget, Villaraigosa promises to...

Nikki Finke goes daily

The LA Weekly has created another new blog, "Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily." The kickoff post announces that she will be live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday: Come for the Cynicism...

KTLA's freebies slammed

James Gilden writes The Daily Traveler blog at LATimes.com, but being a Tribune cousin didn't inhibit him from taking a fair shot at the Channel 5 "Morning News" anchors who...

First thing Tuesday, 2.28.06

Why the Los Angeles Times may be getting some new window blinds, blog reaction to the death of Otis Chandler, Channel 5's anchors accept a free night at a swanky...

Weekend shorts *

Fed all weekend, with new ones at the bottom... ⇒ Layoffs at the Los Angeles offices of Clear Channel, reports Franklin Avenue. ⇒ West magazine's fourth week is its first...

First thing Friday, 2.24.06

Full plate for a Friday morning: Plaschke rips the silver from Sasha Cohen's neck, Steve Cooley's least favorite Mexican fugitive is nabbed, the Writers Guild invites Cheryl Rhoden to stay...

First thing Thursday, 2.23.06

Maria Elena Durazo watch begins, the Z Man appears in the LA Weekly, "Ask a Mexican" cracks Column One, questions about Ed Boks—all this and an old murder in Alhambra...

First thing Wednesday, 2.22.06

Another near-miss at LAX, Vin Scully signs on for three more years (but that's probably it), chiding Erin Aubry Kaplan on race, the editor of the LAT's Home section moves...

New era at blogging.la

Blogging.la and the rest of the Metroblogging empire this afternoon unveiled a thorough redesign. Gray shades, bigger pictures and bolder text are among the visual changes, plus there are new...

Hot blogs

Dave Sifry of Technorati tracks what bloggers link to and notes in his latest report that the New York Times receives by far the most inbound links—and that mainstream media...

L.A. blogs sampler

Mimosa and Cafe Beaujolais L.A. Ritz Sunshine in a basket LAPD Wife Lebowski Fest West 2006 Sergio Leone & the Infield Fly Rule Official Skunks Document Dump Skunks of Los...

Stodder rates a story

Today's Daily Journal (no link) features a front-page piece on John Stodder, the indicted former Fleishman-Hillard executive turned blogger who I began telling you about last month. Erin Park reports:...

Is blogging so over?

Trevor Butterworth argues in the Financial Times that, as a business model, blogs never were here. Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed...

First thing Thursday, 2.16.06

Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register See/ReadStar-News Read Variety ReadHwd Reporter ReadLa Opinin Read Slate: Today's Papers Terry Christensen wasn't...

Remembering the Long Beach Pike

Inspired by yesterday's long-lost amusement parks post, Susan at 2020 Hindsight spools out her Pike stories....

L.A. vs. the Valley

Jim Bursch at West L.A. Online is peeved at the Daily News for some language in today's news story about the jaw-dropping cost of extending the Red Line all the...

Blog discovery of the day

Tony Mora in North Hollywood posts photos of the wall murals he finds at carnicerias, mariscos emporiums and taco stands. The Valley is his usual canvas, but he has been...

Blogging in the biz

You know it's been a tough location shoot when you get stabbed in the forehead on set and the producers get in a brawl. Second item under Studio City Tales....

First thing Friday, 2.10.06

An exclusive on the new boss at "California Connected," a $15 million payday for three LAPD cops, Rocky's legal memo to the police commission and more Barry Munitz farewells—plus the...

Munitz out at Getty *

East Coast blogger Tyler Green seems to have it first, with the email from Getty chairman John Biggs: To all Getty Staff: I wanted to let you know before we...

Shrinking world

Chris Ayres, who interprets Los Angeles for the Brits back home as the correspondent here for the Times of London, now blogs about it on the paper's website. So L.A....

Rethinking a post

LAVoice has taken down a long anonymous entry accusing a Hollywood strip club of various crimes. Mack Reed explains why. He also notes his site's 1,500th post....

First thing Wednesday, 2.8.06

Richard Katz reportedly doesn't get the MWD gig, friends of Cesar Chavez turn their legal guns on Marc Cooper, everybody it seems is investigating the SEIU's outpouring for Martin Ludlow,...

Afternoon observed

⇒ Truthdig.com's Blair Golson contends that Times editor Dean Baquet would not meet with representatives of the United Farm Workers union to hear their challenges to the paper's recent investigative...

Bloggy coincidence

I just came from a session where this year's Coro Foundation fellows interviewed me about blogs and the media. Asked to name my favorite L.A. blogs, I mentioned Theresa Duncan's...

First thing Monday, 2.6.06

Eyewitness News goes hi-def, James Frey has a few words for the LAT, the Downtown News loses patience with Villaraigosa and a former mayor goes in for a tuneup—plus a...

Weekend shorts

⇒ Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez writes that the Democrats would have reached more Latino voters had Antonio Villaraigosa given the English-language State of the Union response: "the ethnic politics behind...

First thing Friday, 2.3.06

Jack Weiss makes his ambition more or less official, Anthony Pellicano comes back to town, the Ambassador gets a proper send-off, Channel 13 News adds a comic, more bad news...

Pajama party posted

That Los Angeles Magazine piece by RJ Smith on Pajamas Media is now online, along with Smith's cover story on George Clooney ("The sexiest man Bill O'Reilly loves to hate...

Amsterdam explained

Brian Flemming gives a good argument for why a bunch of bloggers taking a freebie to Amsterdam is not a big deal. (Scott Olin Schmidt, writing at Spot-On, views it...

More on the KTLA video

Franklin Avenue has further details, including that KTLA paid $5,000 for the video of that Chino shooting by a sheriff's deputy and managed to get some of the footage on...

First thing Wednesday, 2.1.06

In the news this morning, the FBI looks at that videotaped shooting by a deputy in Chino...misreading Los Angeles...quitting James Frey...buying off Stuckey...and Hollywood's gay thing analyzed from a couple...

Face of an actor

Character actor Charles Lane turned 101 last week. Jon Weisman counts 322 roles on his Imdb credits, including more than two hundred movies before he became a familiar face on...

Local bloggers junket to Amsterdam

Tony Pierce and Brian Flemming are among 25 bloggers—including Ezra Klein, AmericaBlog's John Aravosis and the gossipists at Jossip and Perez Hilton—who have accepted free airfare, five free nights in...

More Channel 2 blogs

Since the last time I looked, CBS 2/KCAL 9 has added The Reporter's Blog by veteran Paul Dandridge and In the Field by news photographer Bryan Frank. Dandridge is using...

Pajamas party

In the February issue of Los Angeles magazine, RJ Smith examines Pajamas Media to ask whether it is a fledgling media phenomenon or a blip with $3.5 million in seed...

Morning media tidbits

⇒ Three Los Angeles-based blogs—perennial number one Boing Boing, plus The Huffington Post and Crooks and Liars—are in Technorati's Top 10 based on link popularity. ⇒ Remember the USC cheerleader...

'Stein is one cynical bastard' *

While the right continues to hammer Joel Stein for his "I don't support the troops" op-ed column, and bloggers channel his possible response, Tabloid Baby thinks the piece was a...

First thing Wednesday, 1.25.06

Meruelo rejected...AOL targets Beverly Hills...spotting old Three Stooges locations...the end of DVD Exclusive...plus some blogs observed, the front pages of eleven newspapers and more after the jump....

First thing Monday, 1.23.06

A new week begins with happy birthday greetings to the mayor, a glitch at KPCC, the Defamer-in-chief in Vanity Fair and a dustup between Cathy Seipp and a New York...

Weekend shorts

Some goodies from here and there. Late adds will go at the bottom. ⇒ Former LAT syndicated columnist Norah Vincent's book on going undercover in the male world, Self-Made Man:...

HuffPost goes contagious

The Huffington Post Contagious Festival is a new exercise in traffic building and also, in their words, "a unique opportunity for talented designers, political activists of any persuasion, filmmakers and...

First thing Thursday, 1.19.06

The mayor draws a crowd in Sherman Oaks, the UCLA controversy, bunch of reporter moves at the Times and Long Beach cops still can't find their shotguns...that and much more...

More UCLA

The attempt by a conservative website to out and possibly intimidate UCLA professors who espouse political views has media legs, at least today. Shawn Steel, the former California Republican Party...

First thing Wednesday, 1.18.06

In the morning news rodeo, op-ed newcomer Erin Aubry Kaplan dumps on Herb Wesson, what the Golden Globes could do to slow immigration, why you won't see many A380's at...

Cos revealed

LAist's Carolyn Kellogg extends kudos to whoever made Bill Cosby appear in the BloodRayne billboard on Fletcher Drive....

If you read just one Globes roundup...

My choice is Defamer. The scene, the parties and the gossip viewed from slightly askew. They also anoint Isaac Mizrahi as the new king of red carpet dish. I didn't...

First thing Tuesday, 1.17.06

Smelly beaches in the South Bay, no new Wal-Mart in the Valley, horny females on Channel 2 and the winners of the Golden Globes—plus where Alex Padilla will eat breakfast...

First thing Monday, 1.16.06

The House that Jack Kent Cooke Built might be no more, air rights are hot again downtown (and so is Richard Meruelo), Tad Friend expounds on Los Angeles car chases...plus...

Live-blogging Stardust

Susan Kitchens at 2020 Hindsight stayed up through the night to post about the return of the comet-exploring spacecraft Stardust: "Look, I can understand all this middle-of-the-night stuff when Mars...

First thing Wednesday, 1.11.06

Another Pellicano case guilty plea, Arnold's illegal problem, Patterico and Hiltzik go mainstream, DA Cooley wants to reform three strikes—plus the end of the UFW series, Michael Eisner, Mack Reed,...

First thing Tuesday, 1.10.06

The UFW urges emails to the editor of the L.A. Times, Chick and Romer cozy up, one less obstacle for New Times and a stalwart of the Los Angeles Rams...

First thing Monday, 1.9.06

Turn the page for the fill-in on Gov. Schwarzenegger's fat lip, the latest on the Times' UFW investigation, Eric Garcetti week at the city council, Sheriff Baca's defense of Compton,...

First thing Friday 1.6.05

Today's LAT editorial page delivers on its Rose Bowl wager to say something nice about Texas: "Any state that gave us Lance Armstrong, Lyle Lovett and Larry McMurtry can't be...

First thing 1.5.06

We're number two! USC lost the Rose Bowl and the national championship to Texas 41-38. Thirty-two of those points came in the last quarter. Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read...

Food bloggers stand divided *

Today's Food section of the LAT waded into the subject of blogs about food that can be found around the web, to a mixed reaction from the locals. Deep End...

Hiltzik takes on Patterico

I don't know whether Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik is the paper's designated hitter or just is being allowed to take his Golden State blog wherever he feels it naturally...

New Wonkette

The New York Observer says that Ana Marie Cox is moving on and that the principal new Washington gossip for the Gawker empire will be David Lat, recently outed as...

First thing 2006

Welcome back to work. Since it's been awhile, I'm letting it run long... Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read Washington Post See/ReadLA Times See/ReadDaily News See/ReadDaily Breeze See/ReadPress-Telegram See/Read Register...

New to the blogroll

If they are not there already, later today I'll be adding these noteworthy new participants in the L.A. blogosphere. Bill Bradley is the California political analyst with the mostest Schwarzenegger...

Friday media mix *

Newest adds at the bottom... ⇒ KNX 1070 reporter Michael Linder's website details his background as a KTLA reporter, creator of "America's Most Wanted" and "The Jesse Jackson Show" and...

Thursday melange

⇒ New managing editor at the Long Beach Press-Telegram: it's John Futch. Also, Jason Gewirtz becomes city editor for business and John Canalis moves to the editorial/opinion pages. ⇒ A...

Safe on the ground

Los Angeles blogger Jeremy Hermanns and his fiancee were on the Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Burbank that lost cabin pressure at altitude, causing a scary time for everyone...

Wednesday mishmash

⇒ Only in L.A. quote of the day: "Just 2,200 square feet—it's practically an apartment" — Screenwriter Naomi Foner, mother of Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, complaining in the LAT that...

Fun with Dick and Jane (& Peter)

Variety's review today of the Fun with Dick and Jane remake coulda and probably shoulda said that one of the executive producers is none other than reviewer Justin Chang's boss,...

'I just wanted a cup of coffee'

At the Hollywood crew blog Totally Unauthorized, "Peggy Archer" tells the story of a mean-looking power juicer who got drafted into a scene as a security guard because the guy...

Weekend chatter

⇒ The Daily News' Beth Barrett takes off from last week's nugget (and follow-up) about City Council time off to compare the L.A. council's pay and perks to other cities....

Hotel memories

L.A. blogger Tim McGarry grew up with the Ambassador Hotel in his life. He accepts that the new schools will be a good thing and he likes where Koreatown is...

TypePad broken **

A major technical malfunction has thrown blogs on the TypePad service from Six Apart—all of them, apparently—back to their older backup versions. Bloggers can't log in nor can readers add...

First thing Wednesday, 12.14.05

The L.A. Times is dropping the shell that remains of its national edition. Once a full-scale newspaper sold on the street in Washington and New York as part of a...

New editor at LAist *

It's Carolyn Kellogg, who blogs on her own time at Pinky's Paper Haus. She replaces Jason Toney, who took over in February. * Today's LAist Interview: Adrienne Crew puts questions...

Weekend shorts *

Tookie Williams has asked for a stay of execution by the state Supreme Court. No word yet. (* Also: Gov. Schwarzenegger won't divulge his ruling on clemency until Monday, his...

Correction o' the four days

LAT watcher Brady Westwater has been watching closely to see how long it will take for the Times to correct a story that said Los Angeles was incorporated as an...

First thing Thursday, 12.8.05

Public Radio International's Tavis Smiley interviewed condemned Crips founder Tookie Williams by phone on San Quentin's Death Row. Calls are limited to fifteen minutes, so it took two redials to...

Vanishing treasures of Los Angeles

Franklin Avenue has begun a fun blog exercise. He's seeking nominations for the treasures of Los Angeles that are getting up in years and will be missed when if they...

NYT blogging memo

All these newspaper awards show site creators ought to get together before choosing their brand names. The New York Times' new online effort announced today is called Red Carpet, same...

Magazine Watch

Los Angeles has posted the top stories from the December issue, including Steve Oney's feature on Defamer Mark Lisanti and the rise of online gossip. The most influential and intimidating...

Two sports blogs *

She hasn't posted since the Kings began their annual fade in the standings, but actress Elisha Cuthbert is on board as the L.A. hockey team's blondest, most exclamation-pointed official blogger....

Donnelly chats up the boss

LA Weekly Deputy Editor Joe Donnelly had a pleasant enough interview with Mike Lacey, the New Times co-founder who will soon be in charge of the Weekly (and its OC...

It's catching on

The Daily News feature staff has started a blog called Red Carpet. It apparently began a test run last month with Fred Shuster posting from the American Music Awards. In...

Times does L.A. blogs *

Scott Martelle has the cover piece in the Weekend Calendar section on local blogs: "In an odd synchronicity, as the pervasiveness of the Internet and mass media homogenizes mass culture,...

Caveat lector

In the classroom and panel discussions I've been having lately about blogging, someone always asks whether blogs can be believed. I usually give a spiel on knowing who to trust...

First thing Tuesday, 11.29.05

Hollywood will add jobs this year and next, but the overall picture is still cloudy says a report to be released today by the L.A. Economic Development Corp. Advancers in...

First thing Monday, 11.28.05

Nearly a dozen posts made their way onto the blog during the so-called holiday break, including the first (exclusive) list of which familiar names look to be leaving the L.A....

T.J. dings his paper's blog

Sports columnist T.J. Simers claimed in Thursday's Times column that he just noticed his paper's month-old, Daily News-citing Lakers blog—and says the Times should have gone with the other NBA...

Early holiday shorts *

The board of directors met today and decided on a split vote to let me start roasting their turkeys a few milliseconds early, provided I make up the time later....

Pajamas Media it is, again

Would-be blog moguls Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson have jettisoned the OSM identity they took when they jettisoned Open Source Media, the name that replaced their original working title...

Defamer takes the comments plunge

Joining the gossip-fray at Defamer is invitation only, to a point: "Well be sending out a first round of invitations to frequent tipsters, assistants, bloggers, loose-lipped craft servicepeople, etc etc...

Open Source Media really OSM? *

The new blog collective that yesterday called itself Open Source Media responded today to the accusation that the name was already taken. The explanation is that the site's trade name...

First thing Thursday, 11.17.05

♦ Yeah, curator Marion True shouldn't have taken that $400,000 loan from two wealthy art collectors right after the Getty acquired their collection. Today's front pages New York Times See/Read Washington...

Blogs as a business

Item 1: Items from five Gawker Inc. blogs, including Defamer, will be featured on Yahoo! News. The Huffington Post already has a deal with Yahoo. Item 2: Open Source Media,...

First thing Wednesday, 11.16.05

♦ Reacting to the Times' series on abuses by conservators for the elderly, the Board of Supes formed a task force and an L.A. judge ordered an investigation into one of...

Pajamas Media gets $3.5 million *

The fledgling blog and advertising network to be launched Wednesday by Los Angeles bloggers Roger L. Simon (the novelist and screenwriter) and Charles Johnson (operator of the controversial Little Green...

Friday follows

Bob Scheer's dis-invite from the Times op-ed page resonated all day: ⇒ Email from ex-Timeser David Crook: "Re this line in Scheer's au revoir: 'My only regret is that my...

First thing Friday, 11.11.05

♦ Today's Jewish Journal cover features a large noose and the question: Should Tookie Die? Today's front pages New York Times See/Read Washington Post See/Read LA Times See/Read Daily News See/Read...

Army Archerd blogs

The venerable and recently retired Variety columnist began posting yesterday and says that Michael Hiltzik's blog in the L.A. Times inspired him to take the plunge. "I'll avoid the obvious,...

First thing Wednesday, 11.9.05

♦ You know how Washington Mutual has been letting anyone take cash from their ATMs for free? Not anymore. ♦ To see whether Jose Huizar eked out a clean win in the...

Starbucks helps a girl out

Lornamatic needed to lose a guy in a hurry. Starbucks came through....

Hummers in hiding

The blogger at The Mess That Greenspan Made heard reports that the Hummer dealer in Westlake Village was having big trouble moving inventory. Talk had it that the dealer was...

First thing Friday, 11.4.05

♦ A senior Times editor says the paper checked out Mickey Kaus' second-hand report of a big Halloween gang rumble in Brentwood—just a few blocks from Editor Dean Baquet's residence—and was...

First thing Thursday, 11.3.05

In addition to the newsy posts below about Nissan and Chief Bratton, here are some morning nuggets... ♦ The City Council approved an unusual tax-exempt bond scheme that could be worth...

Rumble in Brentwood? *

Mickey Kaus reports at Kausfiles that he was told of a large gang fight on Halloween night at the corner of San Vicente and 26th Street on the border of...

First thing Wednesday, 11.2.05

♦ A new network city blog launched here Tuesday. Curbed LA, an offshoot of New York's Curbed, says it will "look at the changing face of our fair city and its...

First thing Monday, Halloween

Yes, some tweaks to the look and the front pages box. The latter drove the former. The box now has separate links to view the actual front pages (where available)...

News from the other LA

The Los Angeles-based website Violinist.com covered a pretty cool event this weekend. Every member of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra was left homeless by Hurricane Katrina and the later submersion of...

Cathy Seipp talks about her cancer *

The L.A. journalist revealed her secret today at her blog, Cathy's World: Because sure, breast cancer is no fun; Ive had friends whove died of it. But it also has...

Call Hiltzik a columnist-blogger *

Business page columnist Michael Hiltzik will be the next Times staffer to start blogging. Golden State is already up on the paper's website, leading with an entry on publisher Michael...

LAT rolls out a travel blog

The Rob Barrett-Joel Sappell-Richard Rushfield team at LATimes.com has a lineup of new blogs and other projects in the wings, nearly ready to hit the public stage. First out into...

He's bullish on New Times

Former New Times Los Angeles reviewer Luke Y. Thompson is optimistic that the return of NT through the LA Weekly will be good. He even flew the colors last night...

First thing Wednesday, 10/26

Not everything, but a little something to get the day going... ♦ Chief Bratton says he'd like to stay around for a second term, starting in 2007. ♦ City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo...

Zod in '08

General Zod's campaign platform: When I first came to your planet and demanded your homes, property and very lives, I didn't know you were already doing so, willingly, with your...

Blogging Fashion Week

The LA Weekly has embraced Fashion Week in a big way. On the website there's a busy blog of items from the shows and parties by Linda Immediato, Caroline Ryder,...

On the Lakers' blogwagon

Just hours after I posted below about the OC Register's Lakers blog, the Times sends a news release about the launch of a blog following the team on LATimes.com. From...

Weekend notes

♦ Variety is ending the VLife experiment. Last issue is Feb. 1. I believe Mike at FishbowlLA was first up with the news. ♦ Daily Breeze music writer Corey Levitan announced that...

Ump-a-chump

Angels fans are bananas over the strange call by umpire Doug Eddings that gave the White Sox an extra out to win last night's game. If you missed it, the...

First thing Thursday, 10/13

 ♦ Robert Iger and Steve Jobs make nice, and will start making ABC shows available on the new video Ipod.  ♦ Add a new pro to the ranks of local bloggers about...

First thing Tuesday, 10/11 *

Oops, sorry about the day (the headline said 'Wednesday' for the first nine hours or so. We think ahead around here...)  ♦ Whispers in the wind say that Times editor Dean...

First thing Monday, 10/10

Since Columbus Day is not one of our two dozen company-paid holidays here at LAObserved LLC...  ♦ The Supreme Court hears oral arguments this week in Garcetti v. Ceballos, the case...

Weekend shorts

Follow-ups, catch-ups and clearing off the desk for Columbus Day...  ♦ Sunday's L.A. Times fronts a Steve Lopez column about his violin-playing street person, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, taking in the stage...

Threat to Library Tower redux

President Bush said yesterday said that a serious terrorist threat to the tallest skyscraper in Los Angeles (now called US Bank tower) was thwarted sometime since 9/11. Just how serious...

First thing Friday, 10/7

 ♦ Mayor Villaraigosa nearly filled the Tom Bradley Room on the top of the City Hall tower with media there to hear him recite the accomplishments of his first 98 days...

Blogger strikes gold

Weblogs Inc., the collection of 85 blogs and about fifteen full-time employees started two years ago by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, has been bought by AOL, PaidContent.org reported last...

First thing Thursday, 10/6

 ♦ Marc Weingarten reports in today's New York Times on a bitter lawsuit here in L.A. between singer Leonard Cohen and the manager he says looted millions from his accounts while...

Weekend bold-face

Kim Day got the offer she couldn't refuse to leave as head of LAX personally from Mayor Villaraigosa's in-house counsel Thomas Saenz and deputy chief of staff Marcus Allen, according...

First thing Thursday, 9/29

 ♦ Tempers flared during the ten hours the city council locked itself in to finally select Gerry Miller as the CLA to replace Ron Deaton, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily...

It's Bush by a purple nose

In that blog poll about George Bush being conducted by Professor Bainbridge, "he's drinking again" has pulled way ahead. Here's yesterday's setup....

On not reading the LAT

In today's New York Observer, Bruce Feirstein attempts to help Gothamites understand why on his block in upscale, literate Democratic-voting Hancock Park, only three of twenty homes get the Pulitzer-winning...

Fun with blog polls

UCLA Law scholar and well-read local blogger Professor Bainbridge is running a reader poll titled "What's up with Bush?" George Bush has always elicited divergent views, but lately some of...

Terminating is hard to do

Matt Szabo has been in the campaign trenches as a communications guy with Bob Hertzberg and others. He blogs today that Arnold Schwarzenegger's standing ovation last night on Jay Leno...

First thing Tuesday, 9/27

 ♦ St. Vincent's did a liver transplant on a Saudi national who was #52 on the waiting list, collecting $339,000 from the Saudi Arabian embassy and screwing a patient at UCLA...

Pajamas Media ramping up

Pajamas Media has scheduled Nov. 16 as launch day in New York for its right-leaning (but perhaps not entirely) blog news service and advertising combine. The leaders are high-traffic political...

Transactions wire

Claude Brodesser did indeed join FishbowlLA this morning, as reported last week. The former Variety reporter looks like a nice addition to the lineup. He will help out regular fisheye...

First thing Monday, 9/26 *

 ♦ Rachel Uranga reports in the Daily News on the phenomenon of L.A. immigrants skipping English to learn whatever is spoken in their neighborhood: "Peruvian immigrant Miguel Aliaga always knew that...

Light weekend reads

US Weekly's WORLDWIDE EXCLUSIVE NEWS BULLETIN on the wedding of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher runs three paragraphs and carries eight credit lines for "exclusive reporting." People confirms the news...

First thing Friday, 9/23 **

Light day on the blog. I'll be at USC judging the Online News Association awards for this year.  ♦ I know a true con man never stops conning, but this is...

Tracking Beatty

Joe Scott blogs today about the Warren Beatty-for-governor rumors, which are being fed by the actor's political speeches around the state. Beatty told ABC last week that he won't rule...

Brodesser clarified

Elizabeth Spiers, editor in chief of mediabistro, emails that Claude Brodesser will not be starting a new blog for them. She says Brodesser will begin guest-blogging about film and entertainment...

First thing Wednesday, 9/21

Happy Wednesday...  ♦ DWP workers got the big raises they were demanding: up to 28% over five years. The Council voted 10-3 to go along. DN, LAT  ♦ Bill Burke withdraws from...

First thing Tuesday, 9/20

A sampling of starters for the day...  ♦ Simon Wiesenthal died in Vienna at age 96, the center on Pico Boulevard announced. Standing ovations in every temple in L.A. on Friday...

The revolution is delayed

"The Los Angeles Lunar Society advocates the secession of Venice from the city of Los Angeles, and does not preclude the use of revolution to achieve this end. However, many...

First thing Thursday, 9/15

• Looks like Gov. Schwarzenegger announces Friday that he will run for reelection, the Times says. Also, La Opinin says its reporter was denied entry to the governor's recent community meeting...

First thing Tuesday, 9/13

• Expect an announcement today from Times publisher Jeff Johnson that Michael Kinsley has been formally replaced as Editorial and Opinion Editor. The editorial page, Op-Ed and Current will report to...

Tiffany Stone has a guest

Mark Treitel, one of the writers chosen to shoot an NBC pilot for the Bravo reality show Situation: Comedy, guest-blogs about it all today at Breakfast at Tiffany's. Right now...

First thing Friday, 9/9 *

Posting will be light today...    • Mayor Villaraigosa safaris out to Tujunga this morning to unveil his appointees to the Fire Commission. If you don't know where that is, well, it's...

First thing Thursday, 9/8 **

Good morning, everybody. Here are some observettes...    • Gov. Schwarzenegger says through an aide that he will veto the gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature, citing the earlier vote of...

WWII movies on demand

Local website Cinemocracy has redesigned and launched a cool new service: video-on-demand of selected classic (or at least old) "politically relevant" films, free of charge in MPEG2 format. The first...

First up Wednesday, 9/7

   • Screenwriter Tom Benedek shoots his own unproduced scripts—literally, with a .45-caliber pistol—and mounts them as art. His exhibition "Shot by the Writer - Works on Paper: 1982-2004" opens this month...

First thing Tuesday, 9/6

Summer isn't really over, it just feels that way.    • Some Katrina links: Los Angeles blacks feel New Orleans' pain...LAist found a server at Swingers who did her part... la.foodblogging on...

Laura Esguerra

Laura lost her battle with cancer on Saturday night. Her sister Celia blogs about her loss with love and a heavy heart at 5th and Spring. I never met Laura...

First thing Friday, 9/2

Some appetizers:    • Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly and the Nation will be the guest host on KCRW's Left, Right and Center, today at 2:30 and 7 p.m. It's his...

Mayor Sam scoops the Times—about itself *

The political blog Mayor Sam's Sister City is not anonymous any longer. Two of the ring-leaders came out of the closet in a post today, after the Times asked them...

Be very afraid

Colleen Wainwright reports at Blogging.la that an L.A. Times circulation clerk offered her a lower price to take the paper for more days, if only she would not switch to...

Reading Josh Friedman

I just caught up with the new blog of screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, Black Dahlia), and now I can't get any work done. He calls it I...

First thing Wednesday, 8/31

A little morning briefing...    • Brian Cullen, the suspected killer of model Iryna Singerman, was found dead in a Tijuana motel room. Authorities say he killed himself with a bullet to...

First thing Monday, 8/29

   • KCAL and KTTV each won nine local Emmy Awards on Saturday night. Among the top honors, KCBS won for best daytime newscast ("CBS2 News" at 6 a.m.) and best daily...

Rutten's take on talk radio

Tim Rutten's Saturday column in the LAT, nominally about the declining audience for Republican radio, posits that "While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers claim to have a quarrel...

First thing Friday, 8/26 *

•  Jill Murphy, the Getty's 33-year-old chief of staff with no art background, is leaving and apparently won't be missed. Her mentor since college at Cal State Sacramento, Barry Munitz, concedes...

Feeding the L.A. dark side

The 1947Project, the creative blog trip through a year in L.A. crime culture by Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak, has thrown in with Rodger Jacobs' 8763 Wonderland to jointly bring...

Ink for Flemming

Brian Flemming is back in the news—at least in the L.A. Times—with a "Beliefs" page feature on his new hour-long documentary questioning the existence of Jesus Christ. The God Who...

LAVoice returns

Mack Reed has gotten his blog back online. LAVoice.org....

LAVoice update

The community blog run by Mack Reed is still offline this morning grappling with a hacker attack. It looks like Mack has finally been table to take down the page...

LAVoice.org is under attack

Some anonymous jerks keep hacking Mack Reed's blog LAVoice.org. He's offline now (except for RSS feeds, which are getting through), and may be for awhile. He's asking for help from...

Blogger needs blood

I've posted before about Laura, who blogs about her tribulations with oropharyngeal cancer at Kevin's Dead Cat. The intro banner there now reads: "After surgery sliced off an entire tumor...

Banned at Reason

Longtime local conservative blogger Xrlq posts that he has been summarily banned from posting comments at Hit and Run, the blog of (loosely) Los Angeles-based Reason magazine. Spotted at Patterico's...

Weekend shorties *

* Newest at the bottom • Will Campbell blogs revealingly about the anticipation of meeting his estranged 15-year-daughter for the first time in five years. She happened to pick a Chili's...

View from the crew

Hollywood's sound stages and location crews are swamped these days. At her blog Totally Unauthorized, Peggy Archer regularly posts about what it's like from the working stiff vantage point. In...

LAVoice.org goes multi-media

Mack Reed's website LAVoice.org already stood apart among local blogs as a place that welcomes disparate voices to have their say about whatever is on their minds. He writes more...

Back-in-town shorts

Still catching up to the backlog... • CityBeat's current "Real. Best. LA" theme issue is the largest yet at 108 pages. Fun tidbits include the revelation that some King Tut treasures...

Bloggy ink *

Both LA.com and Defamer got some credit in Sunday's New York Times Travel section for shining light on the excessive celebrity-and-hipster sucking-up going on at the Hollywood Roosevelt. It's a...

Defamer as celebrity

Defamer's Mark Lisanti is "the newest and hottest foot soldier on the front lines of the celebrity takeover of modern culture," Rachel Abramowitz writes in Sunday's LAT. "He's the witty...

Weekend shorts *

Getting an early start on the weekend. It is summer, you know—and I've already posted ten times today. As new shorts are added, they will be appended to the bottom....

Tweaking LAist

Downtown blogger Eric Richardson doesn't much care for the editorial "we" style used by the folks who write and edit LAist and the other Gothamist websites. So he created an...

Thursday shorts *

* Newer shorties at the end... • Big cover story on "self-described Jewish hustler" Dov Charney and his views of sex with underlings in the new Jewish Journal. The boss of...

Forbes 'Best of the Web' *

L.A. Observed is one of the Los Angeles-based blogs named in Forbes.com's Best of the Web. The other locals are The Elegant Variation for literary blogs, Metroblogging in the city...

Daily News plans politics blog

It will start up in the next few months and likely focus on local politics, an exec of the L.A. Newspaper Group tells James Nash in the L.A. Business Journal...

Cooper gets mini-profiled

The Blogometer, the new-ish daily roundup of the political blogosphere from the folks at The Hotline, puts its "blogger spotlight" on the LA Weekly's and The Nation's Marc Cooper. When...

Hiltzik blogs

Summer is a time for guest bloggers, and at Kevin Drum's Political Animal (written in SoCal but affiliated with Washington Monthly), L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik is taking a whirl...

Afternoon shorts

• The Daily News lost Sports Editor Michael Anastasi to the Salt Lake Tribune not too long ago and now is losing another his successor. Doug Jacobs is leaving to be...

Jeff Wald sues Luke Ford

The Hollywood manager and the blogger have been going at it since at least 2002, when Ford profiled Wald on his website. Ford then posted the transcripts of Wald's angry...

First thing Monday

• American Media CEO David Pecker confirms in the New York Times that part of the controversial magazine deal with Arnold Schwarzenegger was that the tabloids would lay off when he...

Attention tourists

If you're coming to L.A. this summer, you probably don't want to stay at the new Hollywood Roosevelt....

Seeing the big picture, with names

Hollywood freelancer (for the New York Times and others) Ross Johnson has fallen into the blogging web. And for his first meaty entry at The Ross Files, he names names...

Breitbart back to Drudge

Luke Ford reports at his blog that Andrew Breitbart, the West Coast editor for the Drudge Report until he left in April to help launch the Huffington Post, returned to...

Digging deep

FishbowlLA turns sleuth and checks on the cred of a semi-anonymous trendy mentioned in last Thursday's New York Times Styles section. The trail leads, possibly, to Alexandra Kerry. Fishbowl also...

Monday shorts

Mondays are always so busy... • This news won't help the layoff jitters sweeping the LAT's newsrooms this week. Tribune Company stock was downgraded Monday to "neutral" from "buy" by brokerage...

Tut tut *

Tyler Green, reviewer for Bloomberg News and the blogger at Modern Art Notes, lives on the East Coast but keeps up on museums out here. He has posted scoops on...

Friday shorts

• Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa took the official oath privately in his office, with Corina and children Antonio Jr. and Natalia Fe attending. It doesn't take effect until July 1, of course....

Tuesday media shorts

• Times feature writer Roy Rivenburg is going legit, transferring to the Metro staff in Orange County. Writes Style editor Rich Nordwind, in a memo to the staff today: "The O.C....

Monday media shorts *

* Never fails. Something new comes in every time I post one of these shorts lists. Fresh shorties at the bottom. • The Times live-blogged the runup to the Michael Jackson...

Spearing the LAT

Readers of Mickey Kaus's blog at Slate know he's no fan of the local paper, but the Times really got him going this week. On Wednesday he blasted the LAT's...

Bree and Jim

Over at the Huffington Post, former L.A. television news anchor (now actress, production exec and blogger) Bree Walker takes a shot at ex-husband (and likewise ex-anchor) Jim Lampley. Maybe. It...

Weekend shorties

An evolving post, with the newest items at the bottom: • If true, this will open up some movement in local politics. According to email from a senior staffer at City...

Media and blog shorts *

• Bob Hertzberg, chairman of the Villaraigosa transition team, will be on KPCC's Talk of the City Friday at 2 p.m. with guest host Jon Beaupre. • Mayor-elect Villaraigosa has signed on...

Bloggy shorts

• Sean Bonner at blogging.la discovers a parking meter scam run by street people in the toy district downtown. • Tim McGarry, a frequent commenter on L.A. blogs (and here when I...

Notes from all over *

Ever heard of Angelo Mozilo? He is chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., and king of the L.A. Business Journal's list of highest-paid local executives. His take last year:...

Getaway day shorts

Here are some items from the week. Posting over the weekend will be sporadic at best. • Los Angeles magazine celebrated this month's comedy issue last night with drinks, schmoozing and...

Blogging about cancer

Laura at Kevin's Dead Cat has lost a third of her tongue and undergone surgery and radiation. Last week she had a second tracheostomy (announced by her new husband), but...

More Daily Journal departures

In addition to editor Katrina Dewey, whose resignation letter was posted on L.A. Observed last Friday, four other veteran staffers are about to leave the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Melissa...

Comments back at Ventura Star

Last week the Ventura County Star got some press for shutting down the increasingly nasty comments being posted by the public on the paper's news blog. The L.A. Times followed...

Good three-dot Monday

First, from the swirl of politics. Newsweek puts Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover of Monday's issue, using his landslide election as the peg for a story about Latino power. An...

Times blogging **

It's kind of rough and thin on compelling content, but at least LATimes.com is trying some new stuff. Snapshots from Election Day have been posted so far from four separate...

Tuesday notes

• Pierce College out in Woodland Hills is offering a course this summer that could be the answer to high gas prices. Fundamentals of Mule Driving, also known as Equine...

Monday shorts *

* Fresh items are at the bottom, as usual... • This is anniversary week (the second) for L.A. Observed, a fact that the Downtown News dug up and turned into a...

Huffington posts

The first day of the Huffington Post offers blog items from Laurie David, Michael Isikoff, David Frum, David Mamet, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, Mike Nichols and the husband-and-wife team of...

Friday shorts

• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if Monday's launch of the Huffington...

Thursday shorts

• Friday's City Council meeting was cancelled so those who wish can attend the funeral of slain LAX police officer Tommy Scott. Why do I expect it will be a mayoral...

Wednesday shorts *

• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. He left KABC in...

Arianna: no ghost writers

One of the assumptions skeptics seem to have made about the Huffington Post is that the celebrity contributors will, inevitably, use their assistants, advisers and agents to polish or even...

Weekend three-dots...

Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca, the Daily Journal says...The Times...

Friday notes *

• Zankou Chicken in Glendale was vandalized with red paint after the owner chose to stay open last Sunday, the day commemorating the killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey...

Signing on with Arianna

Andrew Breitbart's career shift from the Drudge Report to a key role with the upcoming Huffington Report must be so surprising in his circle that he has issued a statement,...

Catch up, or catch you later

The cover of Business Week's May 2 issue advises the corporate (and media) world that their customers and competitors are figuring out where blogs fit in, so they better jump...

Weekend mlange

Long but terser-than-usual roundup, due to a books-filled weekend away from the computer. It was great to chat with old friends, new readers, media people and bloggers and to hear...

Chron to add blogs

The exact form that will fit with journalism standards is still being discussed, says San Francisco Chronicle managing editor Robert Rosenthal, but the paper will launch some kind of blogs...

Classical man

Councilman Eric Garcetti uses his blog mostly to keep the 13th district informed about local happenings. This week there are items on a visit by Gen. Tommy Franks and a...

Morning Report

Marc Cooper reviews the pricey new field level seats at Dodger Stadium and finds them, as I suspected, not worth $100 — or even $10 — if you like to...

April 20, 1947

Kim at the 1947 Project observes that "for as long as theres been a highway into the hills, young lovers have gone up into Angeles National Forest on Saturday nights...

Blogs discussed

Alex Ben Block, the editor of Television Week and former editor of the Hollywood Reporter, will be on Larry Mantle's Airtalk tomorrow at 11 a.m. on KPCC to talk about...

Cheap media types

FishbowlLA threw its Mediabistro-sponsored launch party tonight at Pearl in West Hollywood. The blog's Michael Sonnenschein posted his thanks at 10:40 p.m., apologizing for some "rough patches" and passing along...

Another walker

Her intentions are not quite as grand in scale as Walking in L.A., but mixed-media artist Lisa Salem says she will leave her Echo Park home in May and walk...

Bloggers get seriously legal

The Bear Flag League, an association of eighty California bloggers, has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that case up north where Apple is demanding that a website identify its sources...

Book festival tix

Free tickets to hear panels at this month's L.A. Times Festival of Books can be grabbed on Ticketmaster starting at noon Sunday. Authors who will be speaking include Madeleine Albright,...

Apology noted

Longtime ESPN baseball columnist Peter Gammons lifted a few lines Wednesday from a Steve Henson piece in the L.A. Times about Dodgers centerfielder-slash-reformed head case (and potential team leader?) Milton...

Media shorts *

Couldn't find any fresh media mentions of Xeni Jardin today, but there are these things to know (updated at the bottom): • Local websites nominated for Webby awards from the International...

Paid by the nipple slip

Not exactly, but Mark Glaser at USC's Online Journalism Review delves into the subject of how commercial blogs like Defamer and Wonkette pay their writers, and finds that the money...

Weekend shorts

• Tracks magazine has gone on hiatus after a little more than a year, while management pursues "new financing support with the goal of relaunching the magazine in the future." • The...

The Star Wars story

Sean Bonner's item a couple of days ago at Blogging.la about Star Wars nerds lining up at Grauman's Chinese Theatre — the movie isn't scheduled to screen there, but they...

Notes from Wednesday's in-box

• Denise Hamilton's newest Eve Diamond novel, Savage Garden, hits the shelves on May 3. There's a Jayson Blair-like subplot swirling around our favorite fictional LAT reporter. • Tim Brown, the LAT's...

New tabloid blog

Gawker today is launching a new blog, Sploid.com, that will try to push into the Drudge Report's news space with a British tabloid style and politics "between the whiny left...

Regulating blogs

You may be hearing that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is going to vote on an ordinance that would require election bloggers to register and report expenses, as if...

Morning media notes *

It's Pulitzer showdown day between the Times and OC Register: both have series up for the Public Service medal. The prizes start posting at noon L.A. time. Also: Some new,...

Media and books notes

Drex Heikes, recently replaced as editor of the LAT Magazine [actually, he was doing the #1 job from the #2 slot, with the top editor job vacant], becomes deputy editor...

Top L.A.-based blogs

The Defamer item below reminded me it's been a year since I checked in on the popularity rankings of local blogs. On Technorati.com's Top 100, which ranks based on how...

Defamer Inc.

Mark Lisanti and Defamer get nice front-page treatment in the new L.A. Business Journal. The story goes into Lisanti's background and blogging ethos—"he tries to distinguish between credible information and...

Riordan, end of the line!

LAist's Josh Strike says that ex-mayor and current education secretary Richard Riordan was humbled yesterday at LAX. With about 500 people in the security line at Terminal One, Riordan tried...

1947

Imagine a blog that does nothing but noirishly count off the days in 1947 Los Angeles, felony by bloody felony. Stabbings, gunshots, suicides, interspersed with photographed visits to the scenes...

Media notes

Catching up with some reading and email after a slow online day: • Venice gets the 36 Hours treatment in Friday's NYT Escapes. Janelle Brown has the gig and visits the...

Some blog awards

Some local blogs were honored with 2005 Bloggy Awards announced this afternoon at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin. Boing Boing won for weblog of the year and...

Weekend dabbles

Updated occasionally, newest at the bottom. • Bob Hertzberg tells the Daily News he's undecided about what the future holds for him. • That Friday Times piece on Estrich v. Kinsley is...

Once around some blogs

Catching up on my reading: • LA.com catches Susan Estrich un-wowing at the William S. Paley Television Festival. On her website, Estrich sort-of apologizes for bringing up Michael Kinsley's health in...

Weekend notes *

Let the Oscar speeches begin. Updated from time to time, newest at the bottom: Sharon Waxman: Jon Friedman at CBS Marketwatch participates in the Sharon Waxman book tour. Interview excerpt:...

How's this for city service

Remember my post on Tuesday about blogger Steve Smith's grandmother and her broken ankle? Brian Humphrey, the blogging public information officer for the L.A. Fire Department, visited Smith's site, read...

Of places and books

Hilary Kaplan of the website The Next American City sits down with D.J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and the new Where We Are Now: Notes from...

LAT and mayoral gossip

Who knew that blogger Mickey Kaus' call for the L.A. Times to run more gossip about the private lives of politicians would have such legs. First John Carroll used the...

While I was out...

Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law professor and columnist Susan Estrich...

Shorts for the weekend

As expected, the name of Carlos Vignali has surfaced in the mayoral race. But this time it came from Bernard Parks, who charged that Jim Hahn's TV spots about Vignali...

Bloggers again *

The Sunday Opinion feature "Outside the Tent" seems in love with bloggers as the critics of the Times that count. Today it's Patterico's turn. Writing as Patrick Frey, he argues...

Weekend shorts *

Updated through the weekend Lesbian chic: Screenwriter and "L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken is profiled in Sunday's NYT Arts section. "In 1999, after writing a magazine article about same-sex couples...

Quick notes

Finishing off Monday's queue and looking into Tuesday: • LA.comfidential takes a look at the pro-Bush, anti-Hollywood billboards that Citizens United is buying near the Kodak Theatre in time for the...

Update from LAVoice.org *

Mack Reed's site is temporarily down and he sends this word: A public announcement to LAVoice users: The site has been moved to the new host, but the database isn't...

L.A. as fishbowl *

Mediabistro is striking off in a new direction with media gossip blogs focused on New York, Los Angeles and Washington. Fishbowl LA launched officially today, written by Michael Sonnenschein, a...

Wasserman leaving LAT?

L.A. Observed reported back in September that the Times had promoted Tim Rutten to the new post of Associate Editor of Features and gave him authority over the Sunday Book...

Bloggers are in

The Los Angeles Press Club has established an entry for weblogs in the online category of its journalism awards this year. Here is the entire category, from the entry form...

Luna Park's big C

LA.Comfidential has an item about Luna Park, the restaurant on the ground floor of the Wilson Building at Wilshire and La Brea, claiming that its C grade from county health...

Walking the river

Walking in L.A. took a stroll this month along, over and in the Los Angeles River in Burbank and Glendale. He has put up a batch of photos and...

Kinsley reviewed

There seem to be two leading schools of opinion about Michael Kinsley's impact on the Times as a voice of Los Angeles. One group believes that in striving to be...

LAT turns to Hewitt

Scanning the Sunday Opinion section yesterday, I completely missed that Hugh Hewitt wrote the second installment of the Times' new commentary spot, "Outside the Tent." That's where the editors intend...

Another City Hall anony-blog *

What is it with City Hall and websites that encourage people with gripes to vent anonymously without standing behind their assertions? Yet another new anonymous site, Blog City Hall, has...

Wednesday shorts

• The L.A. Times has an obit today on Marcus Arnold, who rocketed to Internet stardom as a 15-year-old legal expert on AskMe.com. Turns out Arnold died back on May 1,...

Monday notes

Short items for a new week: WeHo mayor: BoifromTroy comments on West Hollywood mayor John Duran buying a share of Frontiers, which bills itself as "California's gay biweekly." Hewitt book:...

LACMA vs. blogs? *

Sean Bonner at blogging.la has a beef with the County Museum of Art. He says the museum put a firewall on its computer system that blocks staff members from reading...

New year, new week

A roundup of items in the news: Prostate cancer: Channel 7 weatherman Dallas Raines disclosed his disease on the air and underwent surgery today. The station website has video of...

Patterico pontificates

L.A. blogger Patterico has split his annual year-end rant from the political right about the Los Angeles Times into two installments. Part one finds liberal bias rampant in the paper's...

Sandra Bullock steps up

The actress donated $1 million to the American Red Cross for tsunami relief efforts in Asia and Africa. She had previously sent a million to the Red Cross after the...

Websites observed

Both Monday political notes columns glance at Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign website, which was relaunched last week. Rick Orlov in the DN says that Villaraigosa is borrowing from the Hertzberg play...

Holiday notes *

Posting will be light through New Year's Day. But I will probably add a few notes here during the coming week, with the freshest at the bottom. See you all...

L.A. fireblog

The Los Angeles Fire Department's media relations staff has started a blog with releases on incidents in the city. It went up yesterday and reports on four structure fires. There's...

Grading the websites

LAVoice.org has competition for its series keeping tabs on the web presence of the five top candidates for mayor. In the Downtown News, Jon Regardie submits their websites to expert...

Catfight at Channel 7 *

On her blog, radio personality and voice actor April Winchell has posted an MP3 file of an on-air tiff (audio she wants you to listen to it from her blog,...

Change of heart?

The link to the Third Floor View blog from inside the L.A. Times goes this morning to a "not found" error page. There's no indication whether the blogger is giving...

Return of 'The Body Politic'

Joe Scott wrote a notes column called "The Body Politic" that ran on page two of the Herald Examiner during the 1980s. It was a must-read for politics junkies. Before...

Dan Gillmor leaves Mercury

Upstate in San Jose, the Mercury's longtime technology writer, Dan Gillmor, is leaving the paper to start up a "citizen journalism" venture. Here's the Mercury's announcement and Gillmor's short-on-details blog...

WoHi is the new Westwood

The website LA.com has been based on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, somewhat close to the trendy shops, clubs and restaurants that its writers frequent. But this week, they and their...

Blog-media crossover

Regular readers of New York's Gawker and its L.A. spinoff Defamer may have noticed a certain fascination with gossip about teenager Lindsay Lohan on both blogs (and with her nipples...

Noted on the weekend *

* Updated all weekend, newest posts at the bottom • A new (to me) blog of L.A. street photography: The Streets are Alive, by Nitsa of Streets of Los Angeles, where...

Statue to the stars

Eric Spiegelman at Cinemocracy treks to the wilderness of Beverly Hills—"or, as I usually refer to it, across the street"—to check out the odd monument to film celebrities that rises...

New Times blog

Ken Reich reported for the L.A. Times for 39 years until last spring, when he was allowed to retire after bullying a newsroom aide. Now he has started a blog...

Victorian-era blog on eBay

Xeni Jardin posts at Boing Boing that the old-fashioned paper blog is a "handwritten journal attributed to a woman who lived in Boston in 1878. It's filled with talk of...

New pro blog in town

Editor Laurie Pike of LA.com writes that the city guide site is rolling out a second blog, Clothes Hoarse. The underline: "What's Worn. What's Scorned." The first several items mention...

Friday notes *

* Updated through the day • Mark Schubb reads the LAT website closer than most, and finds another case of promotional copy for a car dealer being posted as a news...

Lott and the LAT

Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum calls on Michael Kinsley to stop publishing conservative pundit John Lott on the Times op-ed page. The man is a fraud and the Times demeans...

Monday notes *

• Remember that MVP buzz around the Dodgers' Adrian Beltre? Didn't happen. The amazing Barry Bonds won his seventh trophy (no one else has more than three) and became the oldest...

Online journos in town *

The Online News Association conference began at Hollywood and Highland yesterday and wraps tonight with presentation of the awards I helped judge a few weeks back. There's a substantial barrier...

Meaningless stat of the day

A national Gallup Poll of people who don't live in Los Angeles—and by the looks of it have never visited—rates L.A. as the third most unsafe big city in America....

Escaping to downtown

Janelle Brown gives downtown the 36 Hours treatment in today's New York Times Escapes section. Chinatown galleries, dinner at Ciudad, Saturday morning at the flower market, a walking tour with...

The press follows up

The Times reports today on that mini Internet dustup about tanks supposedly intimidating demonstrators at Tuesday's Westwood protest. The cops agree that, as already pointed out here and elsewhere, the...

Seipp vs. CityBeat *

Who didn't see this divorce coming? The left-leaning weekly apparently cut conservative columnist Cathy Seipp's freelance rate and asked that her local media pieces stop being rewrites of her blog....

Blogger on the scene

During today's hostage situation at the Mexican consulate near MacArthur Park, Brian Flemming shot video of the SWAT team moving in from his apartment. On his blog he describes dealing...

Beware the Book Nazi

Dutton's warns anyone who comes to see Tom Wolfe at the Brentwood store next Monday that the author has laid down a few ground rules. Violate them and, I guess,...

Jake Jacoby, reporter was 89

The LAPD press room at Parker Center is named for Norman "Jake" Jacoby, who reported on the cop beat from 1935 to 1991 for City News Service, the Los Angeles...

Defamer ID'd **

Lloyd Grove, the New York Daily News gossiper, reported this morning (followed by an LA.com item) that the December issue of Esquire will unmask the anonymous blogger Defamer as Mark...

Eschewing the pledge

Regarding that pledge of blue-red civility and support for the president that blogger Jeff Jarvis made over the weekend, Reason magazine's Matt Welch dissents on his personal blog: To split...

Voter stories

If you want to read blog accounts of other people's experiences at the polls today (long lines, fairly smooth procedures), they are up at LAVoice, Blogging.la, Defamer, LAist, BoifromTroy, Franklin...

Two more days

High profile New York blogger Jeff Jarvis, reacting to the last wave of "spit and bile and venom" from ultra-partisans as the presidential campaign comes to a close, posts this...

5 days to go

The late Richard Avedon's portraits of the election season run for 32 pages in this week's New Yorker. They are great. A slide show can be entered at this page,...

Variety adds a blog

It's been awhile since I checked in on Variety's experiment with free weblogs outside the trade's online subscriber wall. The newest, called Stylephile (spotted at Franklin Avenue), is about shopping...

Reading L.A. blogs

Metrofeed LA is a new website that does nothing but use RSS to pull together postings from various Los Angeles-centric blogs that actually "create content," as the techies say. Today's...

They like their Cheesecake

Both LA.com and LAist have items today announcing that Madame Wu's has closed in the Grove and will be replaced soon with a Cheesecake Factory. The latter blog likes CF...

Nick Nolte not

The blog Nick Nolte's Diary isn't by the actor, and he's pissed. E! Online News reports that aspiring screenwriters Christian Newton and Casey McAdams came up with the site. They...

4th Floor shutting down **

The anonymous City Hall blogger has decided the job risk isn't worth it. After some lengthy discussions, and a few cocktails, it has been decided that the now infamous blog...

Did Parks threaten a blog?

Councilman Bernard Parks let the 4th Floor know by email tonight that he was not pleased with a recent item. After dishing out some (gratuitous to me) insults, Parks concluded...

Around L.A. Bloggerville

• Will Campbell at blogging.la called out councilman Eric Garcetti in a Monday morning post that complained about getting no answer to his plea for help to clean up a homeless...

Questions for Laurie Pike

The Editor-in-chief of LA.com is the subject of today's LAist Interview by Jessica Ritz. 9. What's your favorite LA-based movie or TV show? Mildred Pierce. LA is all about reinvention,...

Nick Nolte's blog

He says that journals are for sissies but Hemingway kept a diary, so that's what his website is called. He writes about being at home in Malibu and getting into...

Gawker blogout explained *

Gawker Media's troubles staying online Tuesday (affecting the blogs Defamer, Gawker, Wonkette et al at various points in the day) were due to a credit card snafu at Network Solutions....

Writers writing, selling & talking

• John Gabree, the author and former Newsday book reviewer who created Santa Monica's late L.A. (The Bookstore), writes a wide-ranging blog that he calls Impractical Proposals. He noted yesterday that...

Inside blogball **

LAist, one of the local New York-owned city blog offshoots, has found a new way to generate buzz about itself. Publisher Jake Dobkin (Gothamist) posted a chart showing LAist has...

Tension at LR&C

I only caught the end of their exchange on Friday, but it didn't sound like the new guy on KCRW's "Left, Right and Center" panel was playing nice with station...

Reverse Cowgirl back online

Xeni Jardin reports at Boing Boing on the return to the web of writer-about-sex Susannah Breslin. Her new website, The Invisible Cowgirl, offers an excerpt of her forthcoming semi-autobiographical novel...

Tightening up in Calif

Sacramento Bee opinion blogger Dan Weintraub passes along two new polls that pick up a slide in Kerry's lead over Bush among California voters. In one, the Democrat's edge is...

Three months of agony

On his other blog, Mack Reed exorcises the pain that devoured his summer. A sample: The most horrible, vicious, ice-pick pain of my life rips slowly across my skull, and...

Debates as mini-series

Analyzed at Cinemocracy: Youve got a three-act structure (four if you include the vice presidential encounter), recurring characters, and a narrative line driven by the ups and downs of the...

'4th Floor' buzz *

Rick Orlov writes prominently about the City Hall insider blog in today's Daily News. The 4th Floor has yet to disclose much in the way of inside dish, focusing more...

Gawking at Rushfield

Last week it was Stacey Grenrock Woods, Daily Show wractress and Esquire sex columnist. Today the other guilty party behind L.A. Innuendo, Richard Rushfield, quips his way through Gawker's 5x5...

Best of L.A.

Even bloggers do those annual lists now. Blogging.la's favorites for 2004, posted today, tend to the Silver Lake-Los Feliz-Melrose side of things, but not rigorously. One contributor even endorses the...

Wonkette's coming to town

Ana Marie Cox, the Washington, D.C. writer who blogs about politics with a splash of sex as Wonkette, has signed on to be the keynote lunch speaker when the Online...

Hertz-blog goes daily *

Mayoral candidate Bob Hertzberg was first out of the gate with a website, ChangeLA.com, and a blog. The content has not been scintillating, but since the last time I looked...

Season of prickly dread

At 3:30 in West L.A., the bamboo is wilting, the cat is pawing the walls, my wife's sinuses are cooked and the sounds of the city and passing planes are...

Liberal on liberal

Conservative critiques of Robert Scheer are about as newsworthy as a Scheer blast at George Bush or Rush Limbaugh. But Kevin Drum, the SoCal-based house blogger for the Washington Monthly,...

Rathergate's drum beaters

Local bloggers Roger L. Simon, Patterico, Hugh Hewitt and Little Green Footballs have been all over the CBS debacle and receiving varying levels of credit in the blogosphere. Simon, for...

Times offers Del Olmo columns

Los Angeles Times Books apparently had one more in-house compilation in the works. Ninety collected columns by the late editor and writer Frank del Olmo have been pulled into a...

Nosing around the 4th Floor

The new City Hall blog 4th Floor reprints a terse email from Mayor Jim Hahn reminding staffers who drive city cars to obey parking signs and pay their tickets. It...

Bloggers to the world

Digital media maven Jason Calacanis today pronounces L.A.-based Metro Blogging, founded by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo of Blogging.la, "the largest local blog network in the world." They added Tokyo,...

City Hall insider blog

4th Floor is named for the level in City Hall where all of the elected city council members have their offices. The floor teems with ambitious aides who know what's...

Monday shorts *

   • Architecture: The owner of Santa Monica Place is in quiet talks with the city to raze the Frank Gehry-designed shopping center and build an open-air adjunct to the Third Street...

Willie Crawford, R.I.P.

Jon Weisman's appreciation of the troubled and now late local phenom Willie Crawford continues to bring in comments at Dodger Thoughts. Some samples of the latest: • I also always liked...

Shooting the news

KCAL-9 news photographer Bryan Frank blogs about his work and life (with his wife) at beFrank. He gives an interesting glimpse at the unpredictable day of a TV news shooter....

Book blogs

Publishers Marketplace, the site that issues Publishers Lunch, has added blogs to its menu of services to authors and others in the book world. Mark Sarvas of the local literary...

Freeway protest

The anti-Bush sign poster who calls himself the Freeway Blogger plans to put up 100 signs over L.A. freeways today "protesting the war in Iraq and the failure to find...

Shalit nuptials

Easterner-turned-Angeleno Ruth Shalit's wedding blurb in the lead spot in last Sunday's New York Times is attracting some blogospheric notice. Vanity Fair's James Wolcott writes, "the recent nuptials of former...

Convention blogs didn't catch on

Sure the media (and of course, we bloggers) wrote about them a lot, but Paul Colford writes in the New York Daily News that the anointed convention blogs didn't attract...

Fact-checking Zell Miller *

Joseph Mailander writes that his anti-Bush blog Martini Republic is getting lots of links and traffic today for reporting that Zell Miller's speech at the Republic convention drew heavily on...

Going stir crazy

CityBeat columnist Erik Himmelsbach loses his day job and gets in touch with how much he loathes personal blogs. Before I went on forced employment hiatus a few weeks ago,...

Blogging the RNC

Reason's convention blogger Matt Welch catches up with former California AG Dan Lungren and, in a Madison Square Garden stairway, with Pat Buchanan. An excerpt of his encounter with the...

On location in New York

After a night of parties, the Republicans get going today in New York. KCRW's Warren Olney goes on the air from the convention at 1 p.m. with "To The Point"...

Playing catch up

Some things to note from while I was gone:    • Larry McCormick: The co-anchor of the KTLA "News at Ten Weekend Edition" began at channel 5 as a weatherman in 1971....

We all feel his pain

| 9 Comments
Lee Watters tried to register for CalendarLive. It didn't go well. He emails: I registered. They sent me the confirmation email. I logged in. They sent me to the screen...

Gawker editor #3

| 21 Comments
Choire Sicha of Gawker.com is being promoted with the title of Editorial Director of all the websites at Gawker Media, including Defamer here in L.A and Wonkette. Sicha had replaced...

Charging for links **

| 6 Comments
Fark is one of the most popular blogs that links to stories, but competitor (see comments) Jason Calacanis tells Wired News that the site asked him for money in exchange...

Blogger acceptance *

Mark Glaser writes in USC's Online Journalism Review that more newspapers are cooperating with bloggers to link stories and drive readers to the paper. The prime example is the Wall...

Green card TV

| 2 Comments
The headline is from Franklin Avenue, the blog by Michael Schneider and Maria Villar that is having a good week. Their top item today is about this morning's L.A. Times...

Axing blog comments *

| 37 Comments
Not here, not yet — despite some recent talk in various comment threads. But Michelle Malkin, the former L.A. Daily News editorial writer and current syndicated columnist who blogs, has...

Less free lunch online

| 1 Comment
Starting Sunday, craigslist will charge $25 for placing job ads on the website in Los Angeles and New York. The cheapskates who want models, actors and artists to work for...

The view from Boston *

| 4 Comments
Roger Friedman, the gossip columnist at Fox News, wraps up his backstage view of the Democrats' gathering with this zinger: Did we learn anything in Boston? Yes. For one thing,...

Journos have feelings too *

| 1 Comment
Local music writer Kate Sullivan writes on her blog about trying to interview Pamela Anderson and David LaChapelle recently. It didn't go well. The interview was probably the most emotionally...

ManfromTroy with a blog

While local blogger BoifromTroy enjoys his stint as the guest Wonkette, the starting quarterback for his favorite football team has begun to blog. Matt Leinart's website reports on media day...

L.A. in Boston

Edited and updated Rick Orlov in the Daily News notes that both the L.A. City Council and the county's Board of Supervisors shut down for the week because a majority...

Another blogger returns

| 36 Comments
Ken Layne, no longer in Los Angeles, but of the place. He co-founded L.A. Examiner.com with Matt Welch, wrote for the Online Journalism Review at USC and began blogging four...

It's a small blogger world *

| 3 Comments
Local blogger with attitude BoifromTroy says he will be filling in as the guestblogger at Wonkette when Ana Marie Cox takes her amusing shtick to MTV for the Democratic Convention....

A blogger returns

| 20 Comments
L.A.-based French radio journalist Emmanuelle Richard has resumed her bilingual blog with a new design, following a long hiatus. She writes that the break was partly due to the insatiable...

Weekend blog shorts

| 7 Comments
The Juxtaposition is less a blog than a showcase of occasional essays by the two local writers who share the space. In La Ciudad, Scott O'Malley muses on the specialness...

Wilson and the media

| 16 Comments
Tim Rutten considers in the Times why Roger L. Simon would call the former ambassador-turned-author Joseph C. Wilson "a deeply evil human being" and other blogger obsessions, in a piece...

Bremer spoke, Times goofed *

| 7 Comments
That micro-controversy over whether or not the L.A. Times erred in making the point Tuesday in a front page story on Paul Bremer that he left Iraq without speechifying has...

Bugging Mr. Eisner

| 15 Comments
A couple of bugging devices were found and removed from Michael Eisner's office on Disney's Burbank lot this past weekend, the anonymous Industry blogger A Fly on the Wall says....

On the other hand

Marc Cooper turns his blog today over to a correspondent who has something to do with the Department of Homeland Security and who has a different take on the border...

Times and Iraq

| 5 Comments
Mickey Kaus takes a break from being unhappy about Kerry's strength to lead his Slate blog with a recitation of L.A. Times stories out of Iraq that he says have...

Kerry girls throw a party

| 12 Comments
Phototopia blogs pictures of the town's first Kerry-Edwards fundraiser, a turnout of lesser stars Tuesday night at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood. The sisters Kerry (Alex and Vanessa, pictured)...

Double for Orlov

Rick Orlov's lead story in today's Daily News also tops the Daily Breeze that's on the street, if not on the website. It looks at Mayor Hahn's conundrum — he's...

Politics and martinis

| 2 Comments
The blogger and frequent L.A. Observed commenter Joseph Mailander is now part of a group blog with three friends called Martini Republic. Their mission: "To say things without regret about...

Blogger ink

Caryn Coleman of art.blogging.la and the sixspace gallery is profiled in this week's Downtown News, with photo by Gary Leonard. It's part of a series on young movers in the...

Blogging.la goes national

That is, the founders of blogging.la, Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo, have launched a network of similar group websites under the label of Metroblogging. Today L.A., New York, San Francisco...

Still mad about Clinton

| 2 Comments
Not on the right (of course they still loathe him), but on the left. From Marc Cooper's blog, chiding liberals who feel good about Bill Clinton, on the eve of...

Writer ♥'s Google hits

"Six Feet Under" writer and supervising producer Jill Soloway emails Tiffany Stone, thanking her for some blog praise and revealing how Soloway came to be quoted in an L.A. Times...

Saturday in L.A. Bloggerville

| 3 Comments
• BoifromTroy was out at a California League of Conservation Voters meeting and swears he heard L.A. councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, the John Kerry campaign co-chair, say: "After all, let's face it....

Let SAG be SAG

| 1 Comment
Blogger Greg Dewar writes that the Screen Actors Guild has been besieged with complaints that Ronald Reagan's portrait is not displayed with other past presidents of the guild. Except that...

Good Taste Award

Lonewacko screen grabs Drudge and suggests he give the flashing banner ads a rest for one day:...

Memo to Kerry staff *

| 6 Comments
Next time your guy announces that he is halting campaign events to honor a deceased prez, make sure no pro-Bush bloggers are around. A Moxie scoop (provided her sources are...

Unclear on the concept

| 17 Comments
In this media crazy world, some people consume too much news — and some people evidently too little. A woman who lives in Santa Monica thinks the Ronald Reagan funeral...

Cruise to blog: desist!

| 5 Comments
A Fly on the Wall has made a quick name for his/herself since catching the blogging bug last month. The site posted the news of Julia Roberts' pregnancy a day...

Reacting to UCLA rape verdicts

Joz at blogging.la posts on the case of the UCLA student who says she was raped by three Carson High School students who got into the dorm. Last week, a...

Coupla new blogs on the L.A. scene

| 21 Comments
Richard Rushfield is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, the co-creator of L.A. Innuendo and the author of On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood. His JournalSpace site launched yesterday;...

Subtract another one *

| 2 Comments
Prints the Chaff was a blog for copy editors written by Tom Mangan of the San Jose Mercury News. Archives that he felt deserved saving are now at his personal...

Kobe, Scott and the law

| 1 TrackBack
The woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape won't be referred to in jury instructions as the "victim" -- only as a "person" or by her name. Jeff at the...

Losing anonymity

| 3 Comments
Last week it was Patterico shedding the relative comfort of anonymous blogging to reveal he is a local deputy district attorney. Now the former Armed Liberal has let it be...

Saturday blogging panel *

| 1 Comment
The organizers of that joint L.A. Press Club-American Cinema Foundation event on Saturday night — the one with all the brouhaha over Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs — have...

Say it ain't so

| 3 Comments | 1 TrackBack
Freelance writer Nancy Rommelmann is shutting down "Leaving Los Angeles," the blog about her wilder years in L.A. and her final year before moving to Oregon with her new husband....

Escort as blogger

| 2 Comments
"Lindsey" writes on her blog that she is a Los Angeles escort -- and no, she doesn't take email or business calls off the site. The blog is her private...

Patterico in the news

| 1 Comment
The latest Online Journalism Review column by Mark Glaser explores the impact that bloggers are having on mainstream media. One of his main examples is the case of the Los...

Liberal blogger added to panel*

| 20 Comments | 2 TrackBacks
Some L.A. Observed commenters were concerned last week by the ideological makeup of Saturday's L.A. Press Club panel on bloggers and politics. Panel organizer Cathy Seipp heard the cries and...

Recruiting bloggers as authors

| 9 Comments
Kate Lee is a 27-year-old assistant at International Creative Management in Manhattan who pals around with some New York bloggers. The New Yorker's Ink column this week also credits her...

Wonkette meets Washingtonienne

If you've followed the scandalette of the week in D.C., catch the end as Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox has a drink with the most famous (now ex-) anonymous sex blogger...

Inside baseball

| 3 Comments
Blogads, the people who sell and serve up the ads that run on the right side of L.A. Observed and several dozen other blogs, collected an unscientific survey this week...

Blogs are for grieving too

Hollywood screenwriter Robert J. Avrech (Body Double, The Devil's Arithmetic) has started a publishing company, Seraphic Press, to encourage novels written for religiously observant Jewish children. The project is in...

What are the odds...

Some of you may remember last year when Michael Schneider of the blog Franklin Avenue wrote about his parked Honda being crashed into on Franklin near the Shakespeare bridge—for the...

Blogger rates L.A.

| 1 Comment
UCLA law prof and blogger (mostly about law, wine and religion) Professor Bainbridge tells the group blog Crescat Sententia what he sees as Los Angeles' best pluses: Woody Allen famously...

Hope it's a joke...

| 8 Comments
The anony-blog A Fly on the Wall posts that UPN is considering a new "reality" series from Nash Entertainment in which real families would be shown grieving after being tricked...

Ink for blogging.la*

| 2 Comments
The Los Angeles group blog started in November by programmer Jason DeFillippo and designer Sean Bonner gets a nice feature (sub. required) in today's LAT Weekend Calendar. The early posts...

Scientology better than porn?

| 2 Comments
LAVoice.org has a neat little counter that lets visitors know just how many times a blog entry has been read in its entirety. Last week's item on the Midnight Special...

NPR does Defamer

| 1 Comment
Monday on "Day to Day" from the show's website: "America's shallowest Online 'blog' launches a new site about what some consider America's shallowest city -- Los Angeles. We'll talk to...

Going and coming

| 1 Comment
Ubiquitous L.A. freelancer and personally revealing blogger Nancy Rommelmann is now about six weeks from Leaving Los Angeles. She's been coming to peace with her impending move to Portland on...

New website in town*

| 2 Comments | 3 TrackBacks
Gawker Media's long-rumored L.A. blog Defamer joins the party Tuesday morning. It's said to be mostly about Hollywood. The company run by online veteran Nick Denton is also behind Gawker...

New L.A. events blog

L.A. Brain Terrain: "A SoCal-based blog recording upcoming intellectual activities for Angelenos interested in more than just driving, f*cking and (net)working!"...

Easterbrook quits blog

Yesterday's final entry of Gregg Easterbook's blog sucked up, as he puts it, to everybody from George W. Bush to John Kerry to the New York Times. As of today,...

The revolution won't be blogged

| 3 Comments
In the May/June issue of Mother Jones, George Packer writes that there is "something peculiarly stale and tired" about political blogs. He reads them anyway. First, a confession: I hate...

How much Wonkette dish is wrong?

| 3 Comments
Over at Slate, Mickey Kaus dings the LAT's Mark Z. Baraback over some political analysis, and predicts that Wonkette (and by extension the other Nick Denton-run gossip site, Gawker) could...

New blogger-columnist

Lake Elsinore blogger Kynn Bartlett (Shock and Awe) has begun writing a column every other week for the Californian in Riverside County. His first this week is about supporting the...

Owen Wilson's secret blog?

| 7 Comments | 1 TrackBack
That's a hot Hollywood rumor about the pseudonymous Rance, says Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin....

Little Green Footballs, pro and con

| 13 Comments
LGF is a Los Angeles-based warblog by Charles Johnson that generates 3,000 comments a day and invites strong opinions about the war, Islam and questioners of Administration policy. Critics consider...

Cooper falls into line*

The LA Weekly's (and the Nation's) Marc Cooper has a new blog. Next! * And: Jon Wiener too. It's mostly the lineup for his weekly show on KPFK, audio archives...

Arianna the blogger gives back

| 6 Comments
On her new blog, Arianna Huffington pledges not to cash her $494.20 car tax refund but to turn it over to the California State University Foundation. In order for me...

More Wonkette

Yesterday's Christian Science Monitor tossed up a little feature on Wonkette Ana Marie Cox: A political blogger, untamed, rattles cages in D.C. Previously at LAO: Wonkette revealed...

Breakfast at Tiffany's gets ink

| 10 Comments
Rosanna Mah at the L.A. Independent discovers (and clearly adores) Tiffany Stone. The headline calls her "Princess Tiffany: Bridget Jones of the Blogs" and a great photo of the blogger...

Wonkette revealed

| 1 TrackBack
Mediabistro hangs out at last weekend's overdue launch party for Wonkette.com in Washington (graced by bi-coasting Venetian Mickey Kaus) and sits down to find out all about the woman behind...

LAO the mug?

| 4 Comments
The Juxtaposition actually expends bandwidth, intellectual and digital, suggesting that I offer an official L.A. Observed coffee mug. Hmm, maybe someday. [Just do it. Accepting that ad for the immortals...

Local bloggers unite(d)

| 1 Comment
Jonah at LABlogs.com arranged an open gathering of Los Angeles bloggers last night at Farmers Market and reports on the good-sized turnout here. He links to others' postings about the...

Sports guy out, DJ in

| 2 Comments
Michael Schneider reports in Variety that Tony Hernandez has been let go by Channel 5. His last day is April 16, if he makes it that long after ragging on...

Playing with numbers

Mack Reed at LAVoice.org has some fun with celebrity campaign contributions via the database at fundrace.org, which lets you search Federal Elections Commission records by name, address or zip code....

Blogging in memoriam

| 1 Comment
Last week's plane crash and house fire on Mar Vista Hill -- a few blocks from the L.A. Observed bunker, in a neighborhood that's home to several journalists -- has...

Blogger on the move

Robert Tagorda adds some perspective to the Claremont McKenna College hate crime/hoax episode as an alumnus of the tight-knit school. Meanwhile, Tagorda announced last week that he and his wife...

Calpundit is no more (almost)

He's now posting fulltime as Political Animal at the Washington Monthly site. The old Calpundit locale will be used only occasionally for personal items, he says. Previously: L.A. blogger goes...

Boing Boing feted

Boing Boing, the group blog co-written by Mark Frauenfelder and Xeni Jardin in Los Angeles (as well as others), cleaned up in the 2004 Weblog Awards, or Bloggies, announced today....

Reading Gawker & Wonkette

| 3 Comments
Jack Shafer, Slate's media critic, clicks on Gawker and Wonkette a dozen times a day but hates to admit it. He wishes the Nick Denton experiments in blogging for profit...

L.A. blogger goes legit

| 1 Comment
High-traffic liberal blogger Kevin Drum will be writing Calpundit for money for the Washington Monthly, starting as soon as the new URL comes down. Yes, I have sold out to...

New journo blog noted

| 1 Comment
Timm Herdt, newly linked on the left, is state bureau chief for the Ventura County Star. He blogs mostly about politics on the Star's site, and in a recent item...

Rough day at JournalSpace*

The blog host went down earlier today to upgrade, putting up a notice that it would be back in service by noon L.A. time. The promise later changed to 1...

Defending Martha

As the Martha Stewart case goes to the jury, UCLA law prof Stephen Bainbridge argues in a column at Tech Central Station that criminal charges never should have been brought....

Bloggy sarcasm alert

Matt Welch poses a question that every presidential candidate should be asked: if God loves the United States, does he love the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and American...

Welcome to L.A.

| 5 Comments
Blogger Brooke Schreier Ganz, better known online as Asparagirl, recently moved to Los Angeles to be with her new (as of November) husband, Scott Ganz. They blog together at The...

298 comments and counting

| 3 Comments
L.A. author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon has been a prominent "former-lefty-turned-Bush-supporter" on his blog, but he wrote this week of his disappointment over the president's move against gay marriage...

Moving up in Ventura

| 4 Comments | 1 TrackBack
The Ventura County Star today announced that Howard Owens, one of the journalist-bloggers linked in the left rail, has been named the daily's director of New Media. Owens has been...

Checking up on the journo-bloggers

| 3 Comments
There's a new journalist blog in town and on the list of links down the left side of this page. Tony Castro, Beverly Hills book author and columnist for the...

Must be contagious

| 4 Comments
Jonah has redesigned the look of LABlogs.com and added a spot to run ads. Fear not, his impressive roll of the L.A. blog community remains, just moved to the left...

Check your guacamole

| 8 Comments
I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't just make their own guacamole, but if you need a reason to stop using the store-bought goo that passes for the real thing, here's...

L.A. blogger and the Bush nose

| 3 Comments
Earlier this month, Brian Flemming threw together a bunch of photos and puckishly invented the speculation that President Bush had gotten a nose job. Last night, the nose job rumor...

Learn how to blog

Kynn Bartlett, a website designer and host who blogs at Shock and Awe, Inland Anti-Empire, Next of Kynn and Maccessibility - and who comments occasionally here - is teaching an...

It was 40 years ago today (again)

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Rip Rense wasn't going to write about the 40th anniversary of the Beatles' appearance on American TV, but he couldn't resist. His position is clear. The Beatles are only the...

Dan Weintraub on blogging

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Dan Weintraub is the Sacramento Bee opinion columnist who began to blog last April, just about the time the Gray Davis recall effort took off. His California Insider broke news...

She never forgets

Justene Adamec at Calblog feels the urge to call her mother, who would have been 64 this month, and say "OK, 12 years, you've been dead long enough. Stop fooling...

'Advice Goddess' Q-and-A

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The cover story in this week's Ventura County Reporter is an interview with Venice-based advice columnist Amy Alkon, who blogs here. (Thanks to Emmanuelle for the tip)...

Mayor Moonie

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Blogger and occasional Salon writer John Gorenfeld is all over the case of the Downey mayor -- and former L.A. County Republican chairman -- who he says speaks at events...

Bloggy stuff

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My practice on links in the right-hand rail is to err on the generous side. I don't "trade" links as such. If its local and I think enough readers might...

Judge Reinhardt interviewed

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Stephen Reinhardt is the judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who the left likes most and the right most despises. He is married to the former ACLU...

Kaus kills in NH

Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles has been on the ground on the campaign trail (on Slate's dime) for a couple of weeks, getting back in touch with his inner Democrat. Good stuff,...

Dodger blogger meets Olney

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Jon Weisman, who writes the Dodger Thoughts blog, will be a guest on "Which Way L.A.?" with Warren Olney tonight at 7 p.m. on KCRW (89.9 FM). The topic: Frank...

Freelancing blogger

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Matt Haber, half of the duo that writes the very readable blog Low Culture, had a piece in yesterday's New York Times' Arts and Leisure section on Sidney N. Laverents,...

'Can Never Be a Conservative'

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Journalist RiShawn Biddle throws off the gloves on his blog and declares, "Why I Can Never Be a Conservative (Ever Again)." It's complicated, but here's a snippet: As Berlau notes,...

New L.A. blog (and 20 old ones)

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LA.com, the city guide website being jointly produced by Gannett, Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group and Stephens Media Group, has a new blog up: LAComfidential. Most of the recent posts are...

There's always next year

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A couple of blogs mostly rooted in Los Angeles, Slate's Kausfiles and the Volokh Conspiracy, were finalists in the Blogger of the Year category of the first Opinion Awards given...

Blog experts and amateurs

UCLA professor Mark A. R. Kleiman uses some pointed blogger critiques of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Chicago professor Daniel Drezner to make interesting points about the clash...

Defending Maria

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Jeff A. Taylor at Reason's Hit and Run blog argues it's OK for Maria Shriver to report for NBC and help to govern California, which she's been doing by pressuring...

'Godless Harlot' and The Brights

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"Advice Goddess" Amy Alkon shows up in the new Psychology Today quoted as a member of The Brights, described in the piece as "a growing group of atheists, humanists, and...

Blogger asks Donde?

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L.A. journalist Joseph Mailander recounts on his blog (Joyrides Without Maps) how he got caught up in yesterday's cancellation of that Aeromexico flight to LAX, due to fears of Al-Qaeda....

Lonewacko returns

Four months, 10,000 miles and many blog posts later, the Lonewacko blogging tour of America concludes. And he'd like some coin in his Amazon tip jar to show for it....

View from The Shack

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It's been a busy, and fruitful, blog week at Joyrides Without Maps. Check out Joseph's short ode to Playa del Rey (as viewed from The Shack): "If you've been in...

No friends of Dowd

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CityBeat media columnist (and blogger about L.A.) Cathy Seipp is taking on an added blog gig -- she will opine from the right once a month about New York Times...

Blogs and their stats

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Law professor Eugene Volokh uses the web traffic stats compiled by The Truth Laid Bear to argue that there is no solid evidence the blogosphere slants to the right politically....

Master of his domain

Indefatigable L.A. blogger Robert Garcia Tagorda ("Priorities and Frivolities") has changed his address. He's now the proud owner of www.tagorda.com. Check out his clean new design....

Variety adds blogs

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Variety.com has added more blogs since I last looked. The new ones are on porn's crossover to the mainstream and trends in the comic book world. The site's first two...

Argument for blog comments

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I never knew or even heard of author and Daily News book editor Bruce Cook until posting his obituary early last month, but plenty of people liked him. Another praising...

Also in AJR...

In addition to the reconstruct of the Times' Arnold stories, the new issue of American Journalism Review has a piece on newspaper blogs. In it, Dan Weintraub says his California...

Volokh on blog comments

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UCLA Law's Eugene Volokh explains in a long post why the popular Volokh Conspiracy group blog does not allow visitors to post comments. Excerpts: 1. The first is esthetic, which...

New L.A. group blog

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Moxie points to Blogging.la, a site put together by Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo. Contributors include Xeni Jardin, Wil Wheaton and Moxie. And speaking of blogs...the L.A. Times Calendar section...

Murray Fromson, blogger

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Longtime USC journalism professor (and former CBS correspondent) Murray Fromson has put up a blog. The Fromson File is doing longer pieces, the current one a remembrance of the night...

Much ado about not much

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Roger Simon got his first batches of Academy screeners today, but he didn't have to sign for them and three films from Lions Gate came on DVDs. All of which...

Welcome to Porn Valley

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"60 Minutes" on Sunday is doing a double-length segment on the $10-billion pornography business, and apparently the Steve Kroft piece will spend a lot of time here in the Valley...

Silber returns

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L.A. blogger Arthur Silber, who had to shut down when the MTA strike cost him all his work, was helped out financially by a number of other bloggers and now...

Blogger threatened for comments

Orange County blogger Xrlq is taking the point position in defense of Justene Adamec at CalBlog, who has been threatened with legal action over comments posted on her site. The...

Delete one journo blog

Jim Evans blogged from his perch as managing editor of California Journal, but he's taking a job covering the business of government for the Sacramento Bee and sends word that...

Newsrooms too quiet

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Rip Rense says if he ran a newspaper he'd bring back typewriters and paper just to make the environs seem less bizarro. I had a tour of the San Francisco...

He's out, thanks to the MTA

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L.A. blogger Arthur Silber is shutting down because the lingering MTA strike here has pummeled his finances, despite his predicament getting some attention in the blogosphere. (Hat tip to Matt...

Elvis likes Zooey

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The two-month-old blog low culture catches New York Times film reviewer Elvis Mitchell adoring Zooey Deschanel...and again...and again. Now other NYT fanboys -- er, make that male reviewers -- are...

Dissing Ms. Postrel

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Joseph Mailander at Joyrides Without Maps could do without Virginia Postrel's free market philosophy, but it's her writings on style that really frost him:Ms. Postrel, in short, like most economic...

Islanders are back

Journalists Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair and their two young daughters have returned to Los Angeles from Rarotonga in the South Pacific. Mark posts at bOINGbOING, which he co-founded: We'd...

Oh the tree-manity

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Eugene Volokh usually teaches law and posts to his blog at UCLA, but this semester he's in a strange and alien place far, far away. I've noticed that the trees...

You know who you are

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Robert Tagorda at Priorities and Frivolities recycles this quote from former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. Did she have certain bloggers in mind? Beware the politically obsessed. They are often...

Maybe Scott didn't kill Laci

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After five days of testimony in the Scott Peterson prelim, lawyer blogs on the left (Talk Left) and the right (SoCalLawBlog) agree: so far they got nuthin' on him....

Blog ads

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A couple of liberal politics blogs, Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo and Atrios, are publicly pondering the pros, cons and blog ethics of taking candidate ads. Atrios already accepts them,...

At your service

The Seattle-based City Comforts blog -- "cities, architecture, the 'new urbanism,' real estate, historic preservation, urban design, land use law, landscape, transport etc etc from a mildly libertarian stance" --...

Thanks for the rain, Rip

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Rip Rense is feeling so down on L.A. these days that today he ripped off a second Riposte column for the week. He calls it "This Town is Toast." His...

Relevant

L.A. Observed makes the cut at Relevant or Irrelevant?, where the slogan is "I decide."...

Kaus votes for no editors

Prompted by the Gregg Easterbrook flap, Mickey Kaus offers a long defense of unedited blogs. In the course of it, he manages to compliment Luke Ford....

Bad neighborhoods

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"Tony Rafael" at In the Hat, the website where he writes about L.A. gangs and crime, posts a lengthy observation spurred by Jill Leovy's Slate diary on the way bad...

Easterbrook clarifies

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Responding to the continuing and heated criticism of his post about Kill Bill and Jews at the studios, Gregg Easterbrook has put up a long explanation and apology at his...

In praise of the busblog

Tony Pierce is singled out for writing "L.A.'s most entertaining Web log" in the graphic that runs with James Verini's story on Los Angeles-centric websites in today's LAT Weekend Calendar....

What was Gregg thinking

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At the end of a long screed against Quentin Tarantino over Kill Bill, New Republic blogger Gregg Easterbrook suddenly singles out Harvey Weinstein and Michael Eisner because they are Jewish....

L.A. photo blog gets a nod

A New York Times' Week in Review story today on the ethics of phonecams includes an anecdote and photos from members of the Los Angeles-based photo blog community Buzznet.com, which...

Recall Jack Valenti!

Hollywood writer-producer Roger L. Simon declares on his blog that the backlash against the MPAA's no-DVDs policy begins with him: This Academy voter (and film lover) is not going to...

Why some blog edits may be good...

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In a small group discussion tonight during a USC gathering hosted by the Online News Association and OJR, I praised Kausfiles' handling and prescient call on the LAT groping story....

Dallas trusts its bloggers

The New York Times covers the issue of newspaper sponsored blogs with a small Business section piece that contains an interesting tidbit: the Dallas Morning News does not pre-edit the...

Leaving L.A.

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Writer Nancy Rommelmann (LA Weekly, Los Angeles mag, lots of other stuff) plans to depart Los Angeles for Portland next June when her daughter finishes middle school. She is writing...

On media blogs, from one who does it

Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, began posting items on the paper's site in August. He conferred with the Sacramento Bee's Dan Weintraub first, and worked out with...

(Psycho) analyzing Arianna

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Dr. Kaus puts Huffington on the couch to figure out why she got so peeved by Arnold's needling. I've noticed this distressing character trait in Huffington, who can be extremely...

The post-Internet paper

Jeff Jarvis, who started Entertainment Weekly and was Sunday editor of the N.Y. Daily News, has some interesting format ideas for the "post-Internet newspaper." He goes beyond "shorter stories" and...

Talk about loyal readers

CalPundit's Kevin Drum posted the following message and got 26 comments: I'll be spending the day in lovely El Segundo today. Blogging will resume this evening. One of the comments...

Weintraub: what muzzle?

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Dan Weintraub tells Mark Glaser at the Online Journalism Review that the shift in his editing regime at the Bee is a minor deal. "Obviously I liked it the way...

Going to the source

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Kudos to Mickey Kaus for getting the Bee's executive editor on the phone to talk about the Weintraub blog, and for correcting the always far-fetched notion that the Bee's editors...

Give Weintraub a break

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I see that the always smart Justene Adamec at the pro-recall conservative CalBlog joins me in saying let's wait to see IF Dan Weintraub's freedom to blog away has in...

Beware of e-mail interviewing

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This is an inside baseball kind of post for the journalists and writers who come here, and long, so I'll break it up into two sections. There's a small but...

Weintraub reined in?

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His bosses at the Sacramento Bee have ordered Dan Weintraub to submit his California Insider blog items to a high-level editor before posting. Tony Marcano, a former LAT editor who...

Judge's candor causes a stir

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Remarks by 9th Circuit liberal jurist Harry Pregerson in Henry Weinstein's story in the L.A. Times on Saturday have legal types talking. Pregerson was on the three-judge panel that blocked...

Reading behind Jill

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Jill Stewart's latest anti-Gray Davis column from Sacramento is being aggressively fact-checked by liberal-leaning lawyer Steve Smith at his blog and in the comments to a Matt Welch post at...

'Cocksure analysis and occasional self-indulgent rants'

The L.A. Times today takes its turn trying to figure out Mickey Kaus -- "a brainy, iconoclastic dart-thrower." The widely read, Venice-based blogger for Slate tells Bob Baker that he'll...

Don't mess with this redhead

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Syndicated columnist Amy Alkon wrote a remarkable piece for the Los Angeles Times a few years ago (I think in the magazine) about tracking down the creep who stole her...

There he goes again

Boy, that Mickey Kaus has some nerve. He keeps violating the blogger code by actually leaving his computer to report stories. Couple of weeks ago he went to the gym...

Seipp likes Kausfiles

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Cathy Seipp's media column in CityBeat this week is about her pal Mickey Kaus and his runaway success as a blogger (gets paid by Slate, draws 20,000 hits a day,...

He objects to Welch story

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Richard Karpel, the head of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, takes issue with Matt Welch's piece on blogs in Columbia Journalism Review (recommended by me here). He doesn't object to...

An L.A. blog remembers Zevon

Brian Linse, who blogs at Aint No Bad Dude, has up a nice tribute to his friend Warren Zevon....

Snopes does the mea culpa

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Local blog Shock and Awe recently took a fair shot at Snopes.com (the Urban Legends Reference Pages, also SoCal based) for a screed against Michael Moore over his remarks about...

Lonewacko bags Kansas peak

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SoCal blogger Lonewacko is driving across country and filing brief reports with photos. Over the weekend he posted a picture from the highest point in Kansas, Mt. Sunflower. In actual...

The blogging story

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Writing for an audience that is not primarily other bloggers, and some who don't visit many websites of any kind, I get a lot of questions about the form and...

Weintraub explains his gig

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Dan Weintraub feels compelled today to explain that as a politics blogger for the Sacramento Bee, as well as the paper's opinion page columnist, he is above all else an...

L.A. crime blog goes Euro

The unusual L.A. blog In the Hat has caught the eye of Danish television, which sent a crew to get the tour of Eastside gang turf from "Wally," who monitors...

They breathe it then pay for it

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The Aesthetic wonders, reasonably: Something that has always puzzled us, particularly now that gas prices have gone through the roof, is why the price of gas isn't cheaper in El...

How Kaus outed the Oui interview

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The back story of how Arnold Schwarzenegger's Oui magazine interview about smoking hashish and having group sex got into the news is in a short L.A. Times article by Carla...

'Give Pete a medal'

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Rip Rense writes an appreciation of his neighbor Pete, a third-grade teacher who still likes his job but who needs to rant. He leaves his West L.A. home every morning...

L.A.'s the place for a Big Mac

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Roger L. Simon is linking on his blog to the good news -- outside of Switzerland, the best place to be a worker with a Big Mac craving is here...

Another Q-A with Dan Weintraub

This one is by Dennis Romero in LA CityBeat. The first question asks how Weintraub likes all the attention he's gotten with via the recall: It's helping me promote my...

Gawking L.A.

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Elizabeth Spiers, the editor of Gawker, has been in Los Angeles for a few days and posting her observations back to New York. In the latest she shares a list...

Kaus & Scheer & Arnold &...

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Mickey Kaus' lead item today muses on the possibility of Arianna dropping out of the recall race in favor of Arnold, but the good stuff is he digs up old...

Hasen is everywhere

Don't feel confident that the recall ballot won't run into Florida-style snafus, election law professor and blogger Rick Hasen warns on the L.A. Times op-ed page....

Term limits for op-ed writers

Roger L. Simon suggests it as a way to breathe some life into too-predictable columns....

L.A. Greens lose one blogger

Bob Morris, the Valley-based writer of Politics in the Zeroes, resigned from the Green Party council in Los Angeles County and explains why in a long post here. I have...

Fudging the stats for God

UCLA professor of public policy (and serious blogger) Mark A. R. Kleiman argues in a piece at Slate.com that a faith-based prison program favored by President Bush and conservatives actually...

Kaus profile now online

The Los Angeles media column about the blogging life and political demons of Slate's Mickey Kaus got the L.A. Observed treatment awhile back here (with some reaction here) and is...

Offending Kobe site is by USC grad

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Eliot Javdan, class of 2002, was the stand-up guy secretly behind the website pushing the home phone, address and email and even satellite photo of the house where Kobe Bryant's...

Kobe's home address, phone & email aren't on the Web

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But his accuser's are now, and so is her name, her photo and where she goes to college. Some L.A. bloggers, including Luke Ford, are linking to the site that...

Kaus irks them on the left

Our report last night on the Mickey Kaus profile in Los Angeles magazine is fueling some robust comments among the liberals over at CalPundit....

LA Mag parses Mickey Kaus

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The Mickey Kaus cachet, writes R.J. Smith in the August issue of Los Angeles magazine: ...comes from being a liberal willing to attack liberals...He's an elite journalist speaking to the...

Sunday Blogs etc

A few more worthy L.A. based blogs have come to my attention: The Juxtaposition is by two young guys in the South Bay, writing about freeways and other aspects of...

Roger L. Simon takes questions

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At the Writers Guild of America website, Ross Johnson's interview with L.A. author-blogger-screenwriter Roger L. Simon contains this painful admission: Simon lost $1 million of his own scratch on an...

No commenting on this Foxblog

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Fox Searchlight Pictures, the 20th-Century Fox unit behind the Internet marketing hit 28 Days Later, launched a Blogspot site over the weekend. The blog is "covering" media reports friendly to...

A Volokh conspirator moves up

Oren Kerr, one of the regular writers on the UCLA-based Volokh Conspiracy blog, has to stop contributing because he is now a clerk to Supreme Court justice David Kennedy. The...

What would Mickey do?

Kevin Drum at CalPundit wonders out loud how long it will be before pundit blogger Andrew Sullivan turns on new NYT editor Bill Keller. I have been wondering the same...

Did Weintraub hit the wall?

After a furious month of posting on his Sacramento Bee blog, Daniel Weintraub hasn't added an item on the Davis recall -- or anything else -- since 7:34 Sunday morning....

A Sunday trip through the blogs

Michael at Franklin Avenue called directory assistance to get the number for Wahoo's in the mid-Wilshire area, and the voice from somewhere else in the country politely asked: "Sir? Can...

He took the job and shoved it

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He doesn't blog often, this Joseph at joyrides without maps -- subtitle "notes on a reprehensible way of life" -- but I'm wishing he would. I read every word of...
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