Archive: Media criticism

This happened a little bit faster than I expected. Hope there's no deal involved.

Magazine goes deep in a piece that finds an autocratic, distracted leader who insults women and other staffers.

Hillary Clinton's pneumonia takes her out of California to start the week. Inside the gentrification of Grand Central Market. More media, politics and place.

Pacifica Radio board wants to add more Spanish language programming at 90.7 FM.

Trump adds the very mainstream Post to the list of neutral orgs he doesn't want covering him.

The story doesn't include any reports of traffic problems, but some LAT headlines are becoming more about hype than truth.

Sam Quinones is the author of "Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic." CBS didn't go for his pitches, then he saw "60 Minutes" last night.

The Washington Post looks at the relatively new Los Angeles Times practice of accepting money from nonprofits, including Eli Broad's, to help fund education reporting.

There's nothing secret about KNBC's Santa Susana nuclear accident package -- the station broke the story for TV in 1979 with Warren Olney reporting.

AJR has been published for 38 years. The print magazine shut down two years ago.

Edward Snowden's chief journalistic collaborator says the LA Times runs sensitive leaked material all the time and only calls to punish whistleblowers who embarrass those in power.

Nothing he can say about gender issues would trump his participation in the "cultural crime" of Kardashian hype.

A report by the Columbia school of journalism says Rolling Stone's epic screw up "is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable." Inside: writer Sabrina Erdely's statement.

If you want breaking news in the LA area at night, you might be better off not going to the LA Times website. They prefer quakebot copy to real news.

There was a 2.7 micro-quake under Long Beach on Monday. The Times auto-story generator breathlessly reported the quake was centered "347 miles from Phoenix." That's helpful, thanks.

Felch disputes a lot of what Occidental says about him. The college makes a point with me. And this whole story is starting to be a perfect storm of interlocking acquaintances.

Oxy statement disputes claims made by fired LAT reporter. Plus: A Washington Post blogger weighs in.

Actor Wayne Knight did not die Sunday in upstate New York or anywhere else.

San Francisco Chronicle writers Joe Garofoli and Peter Hartlaub offer some savvy local tips to all the writers coming to town to "cover" the city. "Best thing on the Internet today," says a fan on Facebook.

New York Times media columnist David Carr becomes a skeptic about the great OC Register experiment. It's the layoffs and the lack of convincing specifics about the move into Los Angeles.

Don Shirley at LA Stage Times has the toll: Capsule theater reviews will drop from the current seven or eight per week to about two, and commentaries by Steven Leigh Morris will appear every other week, instead of weekly.

The media correspondent for NPR calls Murdoch “the most influential and important media figure in the English-speaking world." We talk about Murdoch's motivations, the trial of his former executives in London and the LA Times.

Well done — nails a minor scourge of our time. From XKCD: The comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.

The New York Times keeps its web ads in the usual ad places and still looks like the NYT. Compare to what the LA Times lets its ad execs get away with.

All big newspapers face financial challenges, but only one turned the top of its page over to a video game bikini babe — on the same day the reporters are busy filling in details on a mass murderer who was obsessed with video games.

The release flacking a raunchy billboard for a sexual service says the sign is near UCLA and targets students — but it's three miles away and never mentions students. Works for HuffPo.

The Onion satirized CNN for leading its website with coverage of the Miley Cyrus twerking debacle by posting a fictional letter from Meredith Artley, the managing editor of the network's news website. Artley is known in Los Angeles as the former editor in charge of the LA Times website.

James Taranto, the editor of OpinionJournal, does not agree with the version of his suspension from the Daily Sundial 20+ years ago offered by the former publisher.

Back in the 1980s, James Taranto — today the editor of OpinionJournal.com at the Wall Street Journal — was a news editor at the Daily Sundial, the student newspaper at Cal State University Northridge. He was a conservative even then and published a cartoon about affirmative action that led to his suspension. Two decades and 7,300 words later, the two sides still disagree.

The consultants for Wendy Greuel and Eric Garcetti talk to Warren Olney about what went right and what went wrong in the just-concluded race for mayor of Los Angeles — and John Shallman repeats his complaint that the LA Times coverage didn't help.

John Shallman, the Valley-based lead consultant for Wendy Greuel's campaign for mayor, didn't care for Times columnist Jim Newton's analysis of what went wrong. He also suggests the Times cheerled for Eric Garcetti, saying in a piece for the LAT website that "The Times was to Eric Garcetti what Fox News was to Mitt Romney."

Aaron Kushner, the hands-on owner of the Orange County Register, is still embroiled in conversation over his comment that the old quip about a newspaper's role — to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — is out of step with his vision of the paper. The latest exchange is with Marc Cooper, the longtime alt-weekly and The Nation rabble-rouser who has been a journalism prof for several years at USC Annenberg.

Last night's Zócalo Public Square panel took up the question of what celebrity-driven news and websites like TMZ are doing to news reporting. And oddly enough there was a top producer from TMZ on the panel.

The Online Journalism Review fell off my radar, and I suspect that of other news types, a few years ago. Now USC Annenberg has given it a new look and a new view of its role.

Sports writers, of course, aren't the only journalists who claim to know that their favorite sources and heroes are honest and, above all, wouldn't lie to them. The big sports stories of this week serve as painful reminders that the media are all too willing to build up people they know know little about for the sake of the story — and it's only getting worse as more web "content producers" get rewarded for eyeballs and going viral but not for, you know, being right. Today it's Rick Reilly's turn to admit that when he was defending Lance Armstrong through the years, he didn't actually know bupkus.

Temperatures have plunged into the 40s and the local news is freaking out.

Villaraigosa tells Conan Nolan on NBC 4's "News Conference" that he was in Cabo San Lucas on vacation, bumped into Charlie Sheen in the hotel, and that Sheen asked to take a photo. "I'm in the picture taking business. I've never said no to anyone that wants to take a picture."

The Washington Post's Paul Farhi takes his stab at explaining why most Americans had never heard of Jenni Rivera until the Mexican-American performer died in a plane crash — and why very few media in Southern California had ever done stories on the local girl who made good. Make that very good.

No, there are not 4.3 million immigrants in the city of four million, though the Los Angeles Times keeps saying there are.

Editorial board predicts an Obama win will mean death panels and "an effort to get 'In God we Trust' removed from U.S. symbols, including our money."

If those who post anonymously on KPCC's website are any gauge, the NPR station's gamble to pair veteran morning host Madeleine Brand with public radio newcomer A Martinez could be in trouble. Brand took to the web tonight to plead for patience: "I totally understand your anger and confusion now."

News artist, designer and visual journalist Charles Apple compiled and critiqued the front pages of more than 75 newspapers that covered this week's Supreme Court decision on the Obama health care reform law.

Friday's Sandusky convictions broke with plenty of time for the Daily News, Daily Breeze, Bakersfield Californian, Oakland Tribune, Sacramento Bee and even the Fresno friggin' Bee to go big with the nation's biggest news story. At the Los Angeles Times, the story landed on the inside LATExtra section, at least in some papers. Michael Schneider does the math.

Cassell's has been on 6th Street in what is now Koreatown for a long time, though not so long in its current location. Soon the place christened a couple of media generations ago as the home of LA's best burger will be moving again — and after many months of darkness, perhaps rebooting again with a new menu.

Sure, a lot of Angelenos have no interest in hockey and no idea about the Kings, the Ducks or anyone else. But the local team is the hottest thing in the sport right now, their games are on national television, and they pack more fans into Staples Center and downtown bars than the Clippers do. So what's the local sports media's excuse? Here's a little infographic to help them.

The former Pulitzer winner at the LA Times elaborates for the first time on the paper's 2008 retraction of his story on the killing of Tupac Shakur, why he thinks the decision was wrong then, and what has happened in the case — and to him — since. The Times stands by its full front-page retraction of Philips' story.

At the Times website, editor Davan Maharaj and national editor Roger Smith took part in a live chat with readers this morning. "At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions," Maharaj said.

Rob Schmitz, the "Marketplace" correspondent in Shanghai who is being hailed today for debunking "This American Life's" big January report on working conditions at plants Apple uses in China, used to be the Los Angeles reporter for KQED and "The California Report."

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.

From the Daily Breeze, sent in by a reader. And is there a single media outlet in Los Angeles that hasn't headlined, or written into the news lede, the...

Read Nikki Finke's note to Variety executives, including this line: "When is Variety going to stop stealing Deadline's scoops without any credit?"

Being attacked these days isn’t the result of saying something badly, "it’s the result of saying anything at all," Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Meghan Daum writes in a long essay on the instant commentary (and abuse) culture so prevalent online, including and perhaps especially at LATImes.com.

For reasons that aren't really clear, Jim Romenesko's bosses at the Poynter Institute have put up a long post wringing their hands about as if they just discovered some issue with the way Romenesko has posted for them through the years.

Shafer was part of the original team that launched Slate with Michael Kinsley in 1996.

What the Huffington Post does with many stories it picks up from others is have a junior writer rewrite them without adding new facts or smart observation, then not hint until the end that the story actually came from somewhere else.

The LAT explains why it didn't, the NYT says why it did, plus revelations on how the L.A. Times got the story in the first place.

Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic, blogs at the magazine's site that a quote used by LAT columnist Tim Rutten has an unusual origin.

I can't help but notice the detailed nature of the criticism leveled at the Times' adoption of "value-added" measures as its metric of choice for rating teachers.

Last week's very pointed academic criticism of the Los Angeles Times' work on teachers rankings has finally gotten a repsonse from the paper.

Tim Rutten's op-ed column in the L.A. Times tomorrow gives Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post and AOL their due for what they do right, journalistically. But he also skewers some of the less praise-worthy realities.

Times' controversial "value added" project is called a disservice worthy of an apology by Colorado researchers. The LAT spins it otherwise.

Curbed LA's Adrian Glick Kudler goes to the numbers to put the lie to the media hype that buyers from China and Russia are lining up to buy Zsa Zsa Gabor's Bel-Air home.

In writing about Dodger Stadium's turf being converted to a Supercross course last weekend (while the baseball groundskeeper sounded like he wanted to cry), Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth threw around some cultural stereotypes. They noticed.

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.

Dana Milbank says Tuesday's election for Fox News Channel was the culmination of two years of hard work to bring down Barack Obama - and it was time for an on-air celebration of a job well done.

Several smaller papers around the country today joined the Los Angeles Times in running a fake front news page to promote NBC's new show "Law & Order: Los Angeles." LA Observed readers react.

NPR media reporter David Folkenflik devoted six minutes to the Los Angeles Times reporting on Bell and the related media coverage issues in a piece for Weekend Edition.

The L.A. Times has rightfully been receiving a lot of credit for its disclosures of the corruption in the city of Bell (and probably too little criticism for enabling the...

Former LAT feature writer Roy Rivenburg zings a few parody arrows at the paper's current word stylists (and editors.)

UCLA's statement this morning says "Coach John Wooden is resting comfortably at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and spent a peaceful night.

Whoa, what got into Jim Rainey? The L.A. Times' media writer not known for his bite channeled his inner Howard Rosenberg in a piece today saying KNBC News has "devolved from cheese to cheesier to, perhaps, cheesiest of them all."

Bill Dwyre and Nancy Rommelmann on having second thoughts about a story.

Charles McNulty's public rant about the Pulitzer Prize awarded today in drama is unusually interesting, not because he's the L.A. Times theater critic but because he was chair of the official jury of drama critics and playwrights that recommended a different prize winner

L.A. Times editor-at-large Jim Newton is now teaching a course in journalism ethics at UCLA, part of his appointment as a senior fellow in the School of Public Affairs. In...

Twenty paragraphs into a sob story about Hawaii's lack of Republicans, you find out the governor of seven years is one.

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

Sara Libby wonders at True/Slant: When I saw the first line of yesterday’s L.A. Times story on NFL linebacker Dhani Jones, I knew I couldn’t read any further. It says:...

Occidental College professor and local progressive leader Peter Dreier has a pretty interesting blog post at the Huffington Post detailing how parents and school officials got the Pasadena Star-News to...

It wasn't just the L.A. Times that didn't know where to place Michael Jackson at first. Jonathan Dobrer, a Friendly Fire blogger for the Daily News opinion pages, posts his...

As expected, Sunday's four-page advertorial section for "The Soloist" in the Los Angeles Times is being talked about as the second act of the controversy that began with last week's...

Politics reporter John Schwada blogs at Fox 11 about studies showing that many people found the news media too blatantly favoring Barack Obama during the campaign. Actually, I find all...

Sharon Waxman, free of the New York Times label next to her name, blogs a question: how long can the mainstream media ignore the National Enquirer story saying that John...

Rafting (or canoeing, kayaking, etc) the Los Angeles River is one of the old standby L.A. feature stories that some journalist will propose every few years, thinking it's a fresh...

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...

The Downtown News steps out of character with an 1,100-word editorial defending the LA Weekly's decision to run a story reporting that labor leader Miguel Contreras died in a botanica...

Occidental College professor Peter Dreier, a leader of L.A.'s progressive political sphere, calls David Zahniser's story on the Miguel Contreras death cover-up "irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value"...

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 —...

Author and former Los Angeles Times science writer K.C. Cole explains why, in her view, print media too often shy away from difficult stories on the science beat. It’s not...

After El Vaquero reported accurately last month on two suicides by students in the nursing program, Glendale College president John Davitt complained that the story reflected poorly on the institution....

Peacefire.org, which keeps track of the political websites and other non-sexual sites that are blocked by content filters, sent a note to subscribers saying that its own website can't be...

Three Los Angeles TV stations are fingered in a Center for Media and Democracy report out today critical of news operations that package video releases from sources and PR agencies...

Former Los Angeles Times staff writer Evan Maxwell left daily journalism two decades ago to fashion a successful career as a romance novelist with his wife Ann Maxwell. Now living...

City Councilman Dan Baker resigned dramatically in front of TV cameras during Tuesday's council meeting, blaming a press "witch hunt" about his business dealings. Before leaving the room he wrote...

⇒ City Controller Laura Chick turned up the heat today on schools Supt. Roy Romer, making a public records act request for all federal, state, county, and internal audits of...

Before he edited the L.A. Times Book Review, Steve Wasserman was deputy editor of the paper's op-ed page and Opinion section (and before that was a researcher for Robert Scheer.)...

♦ Curveball was a screwball and the Germans knew it, but President Bush exaggerated his bad info on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction anyway, the Times said in Sunday's lede story...

When the Times chose to stake its biggest website initiative on the dicey notion that Hollywood awards are a year-round obsession of its readers, my main fear was that the...

About the same time her first-person account of testifying in the the Valerie Plame affair appeared Saturday on the New York Times website, along with a long takeout by the...

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...

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...

Mick Farren at CityBeat writes what a lot of writers and editors in the swirl of local alt weeklies think about the prospect of New Times buying the LA Weekly...

The Online News Association has posted the awards finalists selected by a panel of judges (myself included) that met this weekend at USC. The annual Online Journalism Awards, administered by...

Call it as you see it. In her LA Weekly column about the highs and lows of Katrina coverage, Nikki Finke wrote of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: FNC's Bill O'Reilly,...

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...

From Editor & Publisher: When a Man Dies in a Sex Act with a Horse -- What's a Reporter to Do? You know you want to read it....

• 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...

Bob Woodward confirmed this afternoon that top FBI official W. Mark Felt was his famous secret source for several crucial stories in the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal in...

In today's Times, editorial page editor Andrés Martinez writes that "working at a major metropolitan newspaper these days can feel a bit like working for the East German Politburo, circa...

Jewish Journal senior editor Howard Blume has an interesting media piece on the refusal of reporters at the Daily News and LA Weekly to pursue long-rumored details about Mayor Hahn's...

David Shaw's Sunday media column in the Times struck me as one of his intellectually weakest efforts. His position that bloggers should not be covered by shield laws that protect...

Turns out a second writer had her op-ed piece on the great rains of 1861-62 rejected by the Times. Frances Dinkelspiel, a Berkeley journalist and books blogger at Ghost Word...

David Abel, public policy consultant and publisher of The Planning Report, argues in this week's Outside the Tent that dumbed-down media are largely to blame for the city's pathetic voter...

Madeleine Brand did a good scene piece this morning on Day to Day about how soft the backstage press is with the Oscar winners. Transcripts of the Q-A with best...

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:...

"Jack Dunphy" is the pseudonym of a politically conservative LAPD veteran who contributes to National Review Online. His most recent piece rails about the "carnival of racial pandering" he says...

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...

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...

Blogger Cheat Seeking Missiles didn't like a recent Times editorial about James Dobson and SpongeBob SquarePants, so he called to cancel his 25-year subscription. In the pitch to get him...

Today's profile in the Times touches on the major turns in the life of Antonio Villaraigosa, but it's clear that, at least in the primary, these set pieces won't be...

Hilary Swank picked up another trophy last night at the SAG Awards for her performance as Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby. Earlier in the day, Tim Rutten's Regarding Media...

Rob Schneider bought a full-page ad in today's Variety (pg. 39) to reply to Times columnist Patrick Goldstein's Jan. 26 dig at the studios for making sequels like the upcoming...

Christiana Dominguez blogs at Phoblographer. Her dad runs the group that sponsored yesterday's ceremonial lighting of the Vincent Thomas Bridge that connects San Pedro to Terminal Island and Long Beach....

Columbia professor Todd Gitlin argues on the Times op-ed page Monday that reporting that tries to be objective (by the mainstream journalism definition) is far from finished. Rumors of the...

The Sunday Opinion section in today's Times (with an inauguration cover by the brothers behind JibJab.com, right) introduces a new feature, Outside the Tent. It's billed as "an experimental column...

The former top news executive at CBS (1982-1986), Fox and Channel 2 here has been on something of a kick about liberal media bias lately (he is more conservative). On...

Three network execs and producer Mary Mapes lost their jobs after an independent report concluded that a bogus "60 Minutes Wednesday" story on President Bush's National Guard failed to apply...

On today's L.A. Times op-ed page, author Patrick Moore chides the LAT and the New York Times for not stating in last week's Susan Sontag obituaries that she was a...

Times media critic David Shaw on Sunday ran his list of the year's worst journalism moments. His top 10 include Dan Rather's use of fake memos for a "60 Minutes"...

The LA Weekly's Marc Cooper was quite disturbed by the Times coverage of the death of Gary Webb, the Sacramento reporter who shot himself last week. He's been writing about...

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...

The New York Review of Books is co-sponsoring a panel of journalists this Sunday at Occidental College on "The Media and Iraq: What Went Wrong?" The Review's co-editor Robert B....

Prompted by the gay media speculation about Rep. David Dreier and other recent events, the local chapter of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association will hold a panel discussion...

In most news organizations, Tim Rutten writes in his Times media column, the allegations about a network star like Bill O'Reilly—accused of sexually harassing a younger, junior network producer—would prompt...

Brooks Boliek covers Washington for The Hollywood Reporter and writes today that he's ashamed (sort of) to admit he is a journalist. One doesn't go into journalism for the bucks,...

Talk radio ideologue Hugh Hewitt has a long blog piece seeking to compare the controversy over Dan Rather's probably fake documents about George W. Bush to that anti-Fox speech given...

Joel Bellman (who works for supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky but is writing for himself) has the "Counterpunch" in today's LAT Calendar arguing that the media has bought into a faux frenzy...

Writing in his LA Weekly column, Marc Cooper does some soul searching over the murder of investigative reporter Francisco Ortiz Franco of the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta and the more...

The top editorial in today's L.A. Times, headline Show Riordan the Door, urges Gov. Schwarzenegger to use the latest blooper by Richard Riordan to do away with the "redundant office"...

At best, Tim Rutten writes in today's Regarding Media column, 2004 will be the year of living dangerously for the news media. If they are not so lucky, it will...

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...

Tidbits from Howard Kurtz's story in the Washington Post on a new report card on the media from the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "Americans think journalists are sloppier, less...

Tim Rutten's media column today is another talker (his second this week). He opens with a swipe at what he calls the "nattering class" of self-proclaimed media critics so obsessed...

NYU's Jay Rosen, writing at his PressThink blog, takes issue with Tim Rutten's L.A. Times Wednesday column dinging the idea of the New York Times public editor. Editor John Carroll's...

Jack Dunphy, the National Review mole in the LAPD, predicts that for the media it will be the OJ trial all over again: For those in the news trade, those...

A Howard Rosenberg column in the L.A. Times last month about the way network news programs produce their stories irked ABC News president David Westin, he tells Howard Kurtz in...

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...

The creator of Slate's popular Today's Papers feature at first assembed the column here in Los Angeles, working deep into the early morning to get it ready for East Coast...

LA CityBeat's first issue is online now and includes a cover story (with photo of Osama Bin Laden) in which the LAPD's newscaster-turned-terrorism expert John Miller is turned loose to...

This morning on Airtalk with Larry Mantle, Larry plans to discuss the anti-lap dance ordinance that's before the L.A. city council and talk with Michael Lewis about his new baseball...

The Los Angeles Press Club plans to give its second Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism to Michael Kelly, the editor at large for Atlantic Monthly and...

In response to the John Carroll memo on L.A. Times liberal bias, Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly conjures up a missive to Carroll from the desk of White House...

Steven Zeitchik of Publisher's Weekly covers the party scene and also wraps up the business end of the weekend's BookExpo America held in L.A. It doesn't sound like it was...

L.A. Times managing editor Dean Baquet should be considered a contender for the top job at the New York Times if Howell Raines does not survive the scandals rocking his...

Virginia Postrel, herself a blogger and author, chides the online writers who have been piling on the New York Times knee-jerk style and addresses one of the essential differences between...

Some kind of fees or subscriptions are in the future at the Los Angeles Times website, Tribune Interactive boss David Hiller says. He tells American Journalism Review: "I think that...

Newsweek's June 9 issue offers up a script for a campaign ad should Arnold Schwarzenegger need one, and also considers the personal pros and cons of his running for governor....

One of the most multi-faceted scribes in the city -- two LAT columns, TV and radio commentaries, panels, bookstore appearances, VP of the Los Angeles Press Club -- answers questions...

The Republican majority on the FCC voted as expected to ease federal rules on media ownership. In Los Angeles this means that the Tribune Co. can retain both the L.A....

L.A. Times national correspondent Scott Gold receives some nice praise from Editor John Carroll in the aftermath of Carroll's memo critiquing a recent Gold story on abortion for displaying liberal...

CaliforniaAuthors.com is filing occasional reports from the BookExpo downtown. So is Roger L. Simon on his blog, here and here. C-SPAN2 is also devoting most of the weekend to the...

In advance of this week's FCC vote on media ownership, L.A. Times business writer James Bates remembers when Los Angeles TV channels stopped at 2-4-5-7-9-11-13 and the only Dodgers games...

The Daily News editorial page gets off a good jab at the title given the new city office building in Van Nuys: "Not since the days of the Soviet Empire...

Robinson had been the managing editor at KCBS-TV Channel 2 in the early 1990s and had also worked at KTTV/FOX-TV Channel 11. He won eight Emmy awards during a 22-year...

The longest-established news outlet to focus on Santa Monica is not a newspaper but the website Surf Santa Monica, which opened as The Lookout in 1999, a year to the...

LAT science writer K.C. Cole shows up in this week's New Yorker with a story on Janet Conrad, "the woman who hunts neutrinos." Also in the New Yorker is a...

Thousands of booksellers, publishers, editors, authors and other literary figures are attending the gathering at the L.A. Convention Center. Bill O'Reilly, Molly Ivins, Al Franken and Tucker Carlson are all...

Los Angeles author/blogger Roger L. Simon asks the question, half facetiously we hope, after being underwhelmed by Bob Scheer's latest column on Jessica Lynch in the L.A. Times....

Interest in LAT Editor John Carroll's memo on liberal bias (originally posted here at L.A. Observed) has been heavy, especially at the conservative punditry sites. Opinion Journal's James Taranto led...

Writing in the L.A. Independent, Beverly Hills author and journalist Tony Castro sounds skeptical that ex-mayor and current power broker Dick Riordan will actually produce a weekly newspaper in September...

Susan Estrich, the USC law professor who ran the presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, has an intriguing column out about newspaper op-ed pages. Nine out of 10 op-ed items are...

The magazine is relocating to New York from its offices in Woodland Hills, says Keith J. Kelly in the New York Post. Editor Jerry Kindela was let go yesterday. [For...

The new liberal political magazine being planned from L.A. by Helen O'Donnell won't be a revival of George but it still will try for a little of the Kennedy association....

Best piece I've seen yet on the Rick Bragg affair (the most insight with the least anti-NYT distortion) is Seth Mnookin's report on the uproar about Bragg among other New...

L.A. Observed Exclusive: Memo from LAT editor John Carroll on the paper's "liberal bias."

Gross will become director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication on July 1. He has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for 35 years and...

Checking out the news rack headlines outside Starbucks this morning I did a double take at the colorful Daily News banner, thinking I'd missed a major obituary. Splashed large across...

An LAT personnel memo today (posted at Romenseko's Media News) expands on the Sunday report here about television critic Howard Rosenberg retiring. He will give up the TV column in...

"Obviously, I'm taking a bullet here," the suspended New York Times Pulitzer winner tells Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "Anyone with half a brain can see that. I'm too...

Buzz is sweeping the second floor at the LAT that the television critic will give up his longtime column this summer. If true, news execs (among others) won't miss him....

Macarena Hernandez, the San Antonio reporter whose story was lifted by Jayson Blair, gives her side of the debacle in the LAT Sunday Opinion section. She argues that blaming the...

Rick Bragg, who worked at the LAT for about a month before jumping to the New York Times, has been suspended by the NYT in the Jayson Blair aftermath. There...

The ex-con author and sometime L.A. Weekly columnist died in a hotel room and not heroically. Howard Blume, his editor at the Weekly, does the honors. Howard also gets off...

Memorial Day's "Airtalk with Larry Mantle" on KPCC-FM (89.3) will be a prerecorded show on historic preservation from the ghostly Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, featuring charming stories about growing up...

The victory Tuesday of David Tokofsky means that ex-mayor Dick Riordan lost another bid to hold on to his (and Eli Broad's) influence on the L.A. school board. The mayor...

Miguel Contreras and the L.A. labor council won big in Tuesday's victory of Martin Ludlow in the 10th council district. They already helped elect Ludlow's former boss Antonio Villaraigosa on...

He shot iconic photos of the Watts riots and the Dodgers' welcoming parade in 1958. Neither of those, unfortunately, are in the online gallery at LATimes.com....

You may have missed the headline in this morning's LAT -- buried on B4. Ten Angelenos murdered in an especially violent spate ("We haven't had a weekend like this in...

The ex-mayor and would-be publisher's Brentwood home is the site of a fundraiser tonight for the state Republican Party, Rick Orlov reports in the Daily News. Among the scheduled attendees...

Mal Florence was at the Times forever and was best known for covering USC football and writing Morning Briefing. He was 77 and mostly retired, but I don't think he...

Friends and former colleagues are pouring in heartfelt memories over at LAExaminer.com. She wrote the "Bite Me" column for New Times L.A. before the weekly folded last year and was...

From a Q-and-A on JournalismJobs.com with Matt Labash of the conservative Weekly Standard: JournalismJobs.com: Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and Fox News Channel become more popular...

From a column at ReasonOnline : "'Media bias' is usually code for 'insufficient bias toward my views.'"...

This blog is coming to life in the midst of the scandal over disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. He made up stories, claimed to be in locales where...