
Archive: Websites

























I guess this is what happens when you sell your website to a guy with money, then challenge him openly.


Roger Smith will be the managing editor of the California HealthCare Foundation’s Center for Health Reporting at USC Annenberg.


But oddly, during a 100-minute conference call in which AOL chief Tim Armstrong said he's now in charge, he fired someone for taking out a camera.















Arianna Huffington moves to president and editor in chief of the media group. Jimmy Maymann, previously AOL senior vice president of international, becomes CEO.





Prospect Park publisher Colleen Dunn Bates created the site in 2006 as a companion to the book "Hometown Pasadena."
For them it's about the quality of the content, the most precious commodity in the competition for readers' brains.

The anonymous Twitter spoof account that poses as Deadline.com's Nikki Finke currently rings up suspended if you try to visit. And for whatever reason, the real Finke account is also suspended as of now.




A laid-off newsman starts Newspaper Alum to tell the stories of those who have blazed a new path. Plus: Relaunch for the food site Zester Daily.
In the last 24 hours or so, Facebook changed the default email address that displays in the profiles of users. It's easy enough to change back, if you care to. Plus; NBC 4 on the worm infecting Facebook accounts.

Paratore was a television producer and president of Telepictures, a production division of Warner Bros. Television. He helped to create "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," and in 2006 he teamed up with Harvey Levin to create TMZ.com.





Talk about a new era at the Pulitzers. The Huffington Post just won its first Pulitzer Prize, in the national reporting category for David Wood's 10-part series on the lives of severely wounded veterans and their families. "We are delighted and deeply honored by the award, which recognizes both David’s exemplary piece of purposeful journalism and HuffPost's commitment to original reporting that affects both the national conversation and the lives of real people," said Arianna Huffington. Politico's political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, who is from Los Angeles, wins too. Click for list of winners.

The boards of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting and the Bay Area News Project voted today to merge their organizations.
The Amazon-owned Internet Movie Database is secretive, annoying to the Hollywood people it tracks and the data can be wrong.
The money will be used to help launch a new website and to pay contributing editors, columnists and writers.

Andrew Breitbart was deeply engaged on a mystery project that would mark "a transition into a different kind of journalism," his chief deputy tells the LA Weekly.
Hackers released the names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 100 law enforcement officers whose information was pilfered from the web site of the Los Angeles County Police Canine Association.

Chicago News Cooperative, an online alternative to the Tribune and Sun-Times run by former Los Angeles Times editor Jim O'Shea, will shut down later this month.
Technical problems at parent Tribune Company, staffers say on Twitter. White screen at LA Times.com, nearly so at Channel 5.
Nice one, via Jim Romenesko NEW YORK—Shocked and saddened witnesses at the Huffington Post’s news-aggregation facility have confirmed that employee Henry Evers, 25, died Wednesday after being sucked into the...
Read the letter from an emancipated slave to his former master in August 1865, rejecting an offer of employment.


Arianna Huffington and AOL chairman Tim Armstrong have been dropping hints about the Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN.


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


The note is from Marcia Parker, West Coast Editorial Director for AOL's Patch websites.

Award-winning site lays off four, cuts budget and refocuses the core mission.


Jim Romenesko's first post at the new website is titled "How I ended up leaving Poynter."
Roger L. Simon's mostly politics and media operation is morphing from the L.A.-based Pajamas brand into PJ Media, as he explains.


The Wrap saucily offers to let THR use its website code.
Federal suit by Penske Media Corporation alleges copyright infringement and more.

Shafer was part of the original team that launched Slate with Michael Kinsley in 1996.
He will give up his full-time employee status and post part-time for Poynter, do some tweeting and launch JimRomenesko.com in January. Poynter will rename its site Romenesko+.
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.
The web-based tools and service for authors wishing to promote their own books will close down Sept. 1
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.
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.

Here's a report by Los Angeles theater types who aren't fans of the Center Theater Group model.
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.
Sharon Waxman of The Wrap calls out The Hollywood Reporter under Janice Min for lifting scoops and calling them "exclusives."


The number of full-time journalists that Arianna Huffington now oversees is more than the staffs of the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Still, all's not well in the merger of Huffington and AOL.


New officers named plus plans for Spanish-language Patch sites in Southern California.
Entertainment blogger Nikki Finke may be on medical leave, but a post she put up — then took down — has prompted renewed talk of "Crazy Nikki" and "Hollywood’s leading internet terrorist."
Check out the latest posts at wendygreuel.com.




An NBC source says that "Today" will do a pre-Oscars piece about (or with?) Deadline's Nikki Finke in the 7:30 a.m. half-hour on Friday's show.
Deadline's Nikki Finke has publicly called out The Wrap for taking her content, and reports that a "cease-and-desist" letter was sent from her corporate overseer to Sharon Waxman and her board of directors

We mean Kenneth Lerer, the former AOL and Microsoft official — and ex-Democratic campaign strategist — who helped launch the Huffington Post and remains as chairman.
Jimmy Orr, the deputy editor for LATimes.com, is getting the promotion to managing editor, online.

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.
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.

Arianna Huffington will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group, under the deal reached Sunday night.
KCET Chairman Gordon Bava was asked by Broadcasting & Cable if the Los Angeles station might return to the PBS fold. To much surprise, he said yeah, could be.
The reservation service is a mixed bag of good and bad, says Angeli's Evan Kleiman on her KCRW blog.



Sherman Oaks and Echo Park start up this week, with familiar names involved.
Arianna tells Bloomberg News that the company will make it first annual profit this year.




Even the Washington Post's looongtime media writer has been seduced by the siren call of online fame and riches. Kurtz will be the Washington bureau chief for the Daily Beast.
The AOL news sites are posing a threat to long-established but lesser-funded local news outlets around the L.A. area, says an LA Weekly story by Tibby Rothman.
"How do you resign from a job you never had?," Huffington Post spokesman Mario Ruiz says about ex-blogger Mayhill Fowler.
Mayhill Fowler was the Huffington Post election blogger who got a lot of attention during the 2008 campaign for recording Bill Clinton's three-minute rant about Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum and Barack Obama's critique of "bitter" small-town Americans.
Three years after he got national attention and local criticism for outsourcing some local coverage of Pasadena to reporters working in India (and then in-sourced again), James McPherson says his new Pasadena Now web video channel will also hire in Asia.
Howard Fineman, who the New York Times calls "one of the more recognizable pundits on cable television and a correspondent for Newsweek for 30 years," is leaving the magazine to become a senior politics editor at The Huffington Post.

After Michael Speier was laid off last year as executive editor of Daily Variety, he served a stint as news editor for Sharon Waxman at The Wrap. Now he's joining Waxman's arch-rival Nikki Finke in the new position of managing editor at Deadline.
California Watch has been at it for a year now, and says its 11 full-time reporters are "by far the largest investigative team operating in the state."
The National Pipleine Mapping System website lets you search for the natural gas main lines near you, but in the aftermath of the San Bruno tragedy it is being overloaded with requests.

Last month when the Grim Sleeper arrest broke, the LA Weekly's Christine Pelisek wrote about her background in the case for the Daily Beast. Now she'll join their LA bureau.
In her column at The Wrap, editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman invites arch-rival on the web Nikki Finke to come speak at the Wrap's first entertainment industry leadership conference.
Alan Abrahamson, who covered the Olympics and international sports for the Los Angeles Times and NBC, has started 3 Wire Sports in Los Angeles.
A controlling interest in WeHo News, the West Hollywood cyber newspaper, has been purchased by Mark Hundahl and David Stern, the partners in Frontiers Media LLC, which publishes the gay magazine Frontiers IN Los Angeles.
Many news outlets are reporting on arrests in the Trousdale Estates murder. Only the Huffington Post headline, though, screams "massive manhunt" -- even the story doesn't back it up.
California Watch's site called Politics Verbatim compiles the actual words spoken by the candidates for governor in a searchable database.
Mary Jo Murphy has been an editor at at the New York Times' Week in Review section and on the metro and national desks. Plus morning media notes.

Qewz is a technology-driven slice on the day's news, vowing to gather various angles on big stories and include left, right, middle, upper, lower, etc.

The editor of HuffPost Arts is artist Kimberly Brooks, a habitue of Arianna Huffington's Brentwood salons who is married to actor Albert Books. The bloggers-for-free will include Suzanne Muchnic, the...

Lynn Garrett, who started the Hidden Los Angeles website and wildly popular Facebook pages of the same name about a year ago, has quit her job to run the sites and plans to hire an employee.


The LA Justice Report will be a joint effort of Witness LA, journalist Celeste Fremon's blog, and the Spot.Us project that helps readers fund journalism they support. "The idea is...
After the arrest of Faisal Shahzad in the Times Square firebomb attempt, the Huffington Post quickly grabbed a photo off Facebook and said it was him. It wasn't.

The venture capital firm co-founded by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has, along with other investors, put another $2 million into The Wrap, the site says in a news release.
They can't both be right. I suppose we'll find out pretty soon which one is BSing.
Sharon Waxman sends word that while Joe Adalian is leaving as television editor of The Wrap, the TV blog he brought with him is staying.
Media analyst Ken Doctor parses the Huffington Post numbers at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Joe Adalian just joined the Wrap last June, but he's taking his address book and his TV MoJoe blog (originally started at TV Week) to New York Magazine's entertainment site Vulture.
Gabriel Snyder, let go recently as editor-in-chief at Gawker after several media stints in L.A., is joining Newsweek Digital as executive editor.
David Cay Johnston's visiting blogger piece for LA Observed on Friday about his experiences covering Daryl Gates and the LAPD in the early 1980s has been getting some nice attention and attracting favorable emails. Johnston will be a guest on "Which Way, L.A.?" with Warren Olney on KCRW at 7:30 p.m.
Catching up on some notes.
The investigative reporting venture based up north is looking to add another enterprise reporter and a new position for them, public engagement manager.
Ophelia Chong posts an item at her KCET blog on moving in with some women in the Valley, "so that I can better report back to my friends who refuse to go north of the 134 and west of the 405."
The journalists who are living with a Mexican immigrant family near MacArthur Park posted some new FAQs tonight aimed at addressing some of the criticism directed at the reporting project.
Daniel Hernandez's post about the white journalists living with a Latino family near MacArthur Park has attracted a number of commenters who agree with him that it's a misguided and in some ways offensive project.


The show business news franchise anchored by Nikki Finke's Deadline | Hollywood has hired Nellie Andreeva, television editor of The Hollywood Reporter since 2004, to become TV editor.
The recent onslaught of announcements about new ventures in local news media, leading with The Entryway around MacArthur Park — and my visit this week to a class at USC Annenberg — inspire today's LA Observed Friday commentary on KCRW. Keyword: optimism.

Larry Roberts, hired away last spring from the Washington Post to run the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, is leaving for Bloomberg News.

"Marketplace" aired a story today that looked at how Google ads were used to good effect by the Scott Brown Senate campaign in Massachusetts.
Sylvie Drake, theater critic of the Los Angeles Times for a couple of decades, shows up now in the video series Old Jews Telling Jokes.
The Patch approach of hyper-local news hubs debuted today on the West Coast with the unveiling of a site in the South Bay.
Actually, Labov was co-president of the Hollywood PR firm with Leslie Sloane Zelnik. Therein may lie a clue into his departure.


HealthyCal debuts today, billing itself as "a new independent, non-profit web site focused on the health of Californians and their communities."
Journalists and others with confidentiality issues may no longer have to worry quite as much about Google's new Buzz social media product automatically disclosing their Gmail address and frequent correspondents.
Jack Kavanagh has been producing Rough & Tumble, "the single most essential news source for California political junkies," since 2002 and has logged more than 35 million page views.

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.

A roundup of items in the news and our in-box.
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.
The company backing Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood blog is expanding the site with two more entertainment journalists, including Variety veteran Mike Fleming.


Diane Haithman, the former Los Angeles Times arts and enterrtainment writer, has joined Finke's Deadline Hollywood as an interviewer of TV show runners


Harvey Levin is already staffing up for TMZ Sports, says Brian Stelter in the New York Times. TMZ’s specialty is unvarnished celebrity coverage. And because Mr. Levin sees a lot...
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....
ESPN's new Los Angeles website does have, as rumored, columnist J.A. Adande, plus former Daily News sports staffers Tony Jackson and Ramona Shelburne, Steve Mason and John Ireland from ESPN...
Today is departure day for some of the Los Angeles Times staffers who were laid off this week or who retired and/or took buyouts. Arts reporter Suzanne Muchnic sent a...
More than 780,000 online votes were cast for the best in 50 web and social media categories. The New York Times won for best online newspaper. List...
The books-and-social-networking site Goodreads announced last week it has picked up $2 million in venture capital funding — its second round. Founder Otis Chandler, grandson of the former L.A. Times...
Andrew Breitbart's Los Angeles-based family of aggressively right-wing websites will soon grow by one. Big Journalism's target will be what Breitbart calls the "Democratic-media complex” and the stated goal will...
This is at least the third iteration I recall, but Variety on Thursday will start charging again for some web content. Here's how the trade explains it: After clicking on...
One tactic the Hollywood news site The Wrap is using to get its name out there is to host free film screenings. Judging by tonight, it's working. So many people...
Online Editor Ryan Garfat is leaving the Daily News to be one of five editors working on ESPN's soon-to-launch Los Angeles site, working out of the L.A. Live newsroom downtown....
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...
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...
The sports giant said back in July it was coming to Los Angeles with a local news website, and now we know it will launch Dec. 21. "ESPN's launch of...
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...
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,...
Anh Do, a former columnist for the Orange County Register and vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News (the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S.), will be the managing editor...
My KCRW commentary today talked about two photographers of L.A. who approach their subject from different directions, Bruce Davidson and Martin Schall. It aired, as every Friday, at 4:44 p.m....
Last night on KCRW's Which Way, L.A.?, Warren Olney noted that Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, declined to take questions directly from...
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...


Talk is of a Dec. 1 launch date for the Los Angeles edition of the Huffington Post, which has been interviewing for positions. Tina Daunt, laid off last month by...
The Flash Report's Jon Fleischman spots a coded message to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the margin of a San Francisco Chronicle editorial about the governor's embedded finger to Assemblyman Tom...
Bonnie Fuller is the "tabloid maven," as Style Section L.A. puts it, who is revamping HollywoodLife.com as part of the fledgling Jay Penske media empire. Fuller has hired New York...
About a week after leaving the LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan has been inked to write a new blog for The Wrap to be called L.A. Noir. The site also announced...

The Huffington Post — which, incidentally, has been interviewing potential staffers for its upcoming Los Angeles news site — today announced a book section. From Arianna's post: Since I was...
Now that he's jumped to be west coast editor for Gawker, Richard Rushfield talks about why he left as entertainment editor of the Los Angeles Times website — and why...
Use Expense-a-steak to generate some phony receipts, from a restaurant in midtown Manhattan via Virginia Postrel on Twitter. Hahaha....
David Cohn's Spot.us, which raises money from website readers to finance longer-form journalism, is opening in Los Angeles in association with USC Annenberg. He's looking for a managing editor. The...
Billionaire Phil Anschutz's Examiner.com is acquiring the citizen journalism site NowPublic for about $25 million, according to paidcontent. Remember, back in June Forbes said that L.A.'s most publicly elusive major...
The Smoking Gun was the first site to post an old police mug shot of John Mayer, but for awhile there TMZ claimed it was first — and looks to...


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...
Bluefat is by John Payne, a former music editor of the L.A. Weekly. He calls it "a magazine for music, film and visual art devotees with open minds and a...
Former Los Angeles Times reporters are key players in Zester Daily, which bills itself as "the latest news and information from around the globe about all aspects of food and...
Ron Kaye's new organ for his activist brand of politics and news, OurLA.org, ran a long piece yesterday claiming to debunk the "meltdown myth" regarding the 1959 nuclear reactor incident...

TMZ.com received a lot of attention and some praise — including from me — for scooping the rest of the media on the cardiac arrest and later death of Michael...
Jose Antonio Vargas, a national reporter at the Washington Post who covered the intersection of politics and technology during the 2008 campaign, was named Technology and Innovations Editor of the...
The cable sports giant will announce plans Monday for a website devoted to covering Los Angeles sports teams. It has worked for ESPN in Chicago, but L.A. Times sports boss...
Frances Dinkelspiel, the author who talks tonight at ALOUD about "Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California," is also president of the board at the...
The Los Angeles Business Journal site went dark on Tuesday and didn't come back until late this morning. No, they weren't mourning Michael Jackson. Editor's note posted today: The Business...
Move your cursor around and create some art on the site of poet and Los Angeles-based New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear....
TMZ may have won the breaking news competition, but the Los Angeles Times is happy with the web traffic brought in by Michael Jackson's death. It's a new record for...
While mainstream news outlets played it cautious and lagged behind on Michael Jackson, or flopped around online as the L.A. Times did, it was upstart TMZ that displayed the best...
The Eastman Kodak Co. announced today that it's retiring Kodachrome, the world's first commercially successful color film, after 74 years. Declining demand in a digital age. Huffington Post Regarding Huff...
Josef Adalian, the television editor at Variety for nine years until jumping last year to TV Week as deputy editor, is moving again. This time he is going to The...
Mike Florio, the fan who started Profootballtalk.com eight years ago, hits it big. NBC will announce Monday that is acquiring rights to PFT's content and will run it at the...
Conan O'Brien has lost viewers each night since his debut, and on Tuesday David Letterman won the ratings. LAT, Variety Twentieth Century Props, the entertainment industry's second-oldest prop house,...
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...
Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky is adapting to the new media order by revamping his official website to be more newsy under the guidance of Joel Sappell, who used...
When Elmore Leonard was researching his new novel "Road Dogs," Venice Paper publisher Tibby Rothman showed him around Venice for a few hours. Now she's in some of the book's...
Fortune.com reported the basic story that Hollywood mogul David Geffen recently sought to acquire the 19% stake in the New York Times that is held by hedge fund Harbinger Capital...
Yahoo has promoted Jimmy Pitaro to oversee what they call "North America Vertical Audience Experience," meaning he's in charge of News, Finance, Sports and a whole bunch more. That means...

In this case, Mary Anne Ostrom of the San Jose Mercury News is "Silicon Valley's top political writer," says Capitol Alert's Peter Hecht. Ostrom is joining the gubernatorial campaign of...
Today's segment on KCRW looks behind the scenes at The Wrap, the new Hollywood news website headed by Sharon Waxman. It airs at 4:44 p.m. at 89.9 FM, or is...
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...
NeonTommy.com at USC Annenberg is an "online digital news Web site created to fill a void in local and national news while providing news and commentary across multiple platforms�audio, video...
The website switched over right about 9 a.m. PST....
LA Beez is an online collaboration of "ethnic media organizations featuring hyperlocal news content covering the metropolitan Los Angeles area." The participants are: Arab-American Affairs Magazine Asian Journal Carib Press...
I hate to think what fresh traffic generation gimmicks these stats might encourage at LATimes.com, but the numbers are surprising. Even after all the photo galleries, reader pets, Oscar speculation...
The director's daily weather report on camera from his home in Los Angeles. Because I hadn't linked to it before. Lynch's website...
Barfly Staff Monitoring Service is looking for writers to do some undercover work. Hitch: you must have bartending experience. From a craigslist ad that landed in my email box: This...
USC Annenberg mothballed the original Online Journalism Review in June. But Geneva Overholser, the new director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, announced today that OJR is coming back under...
RealTalkLA lives on, in a way. (I can't get the website to work.) Craiglist has an ad for LA Reporting and Writing Interns Sought that reads: RealTALKLA.com, founded by Jay...
Rafat Ali's Santa Monica-based paidContent.org, which has covered the business side of websites since 2002, will be acquired by Guardian Media Group in the U.K. for �north of $30 million.�...
New Geography.com, based in Sherman Oaks and North Dakota, has launched as a website "devoted to analyzing and discussing the places where we live and work. Practitioners at heart, we...
The Online Journalism Review had survived for ten years under the stewardship of USC's Annenberg School of Communications. No more. Editor Robert Niles posted today: I'm pleased to say that...
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...
Well, just a new name. Jamie Court has abandoned the snooze-inducing Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in favor of...ta dah...Consumer Watchdog.org. Broadcasters everywhere will no doubt applaud the switch....
That audio of O.J. Simpson hollering at sports memorabilia collectors in a Las Vegas hotel last year was worth $165,000 to TMZ.com, reports The Smoking Gun today. TMZ reportedly bought...
The new website created and bankrolled by Liz Smith, Lesley Stahl, Peggy Noonan, Mary Wells and Joni Evans went live today. Backed by $1 million and a fulltime staff of...
No print edition, just online, and not much more ambitious than the mix already posted at the Anschutz media empire's obscure Los Angeles site — AP wires and generic stuff...
The Tribune-owned pop culture and listings site for Los Angeles is looking to hire full-time editors, as soon as possible. They want a copy editor, photo editor, general editor, Style...
Google Stephen Colbert for President and the first listing (other than news about the announcement of his, uh, candidacy) is Colbertocrat.com. That's the website that launched a petition last year...
Betsy Morgan is leaving as general manager of CBSNews.com to lead the HuffPost. Arianna Huffington remains editor in chief and co-founder Kenneth Lerer moves up to chairman of the board....
Writer Frank Coffey's spoof site eTrueSports.com is now in video on YouTube....
Marc Cooper is joining the Huffington Post as special correpondent and will direct coverage of the 2008 political campaigns for OfftheBus.net, a co-venture of the Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net, NYU...
TMZ.com ran a video clip of Superior Court Judge Lance Ito pronouncing O.J. Simpson "guilty as sin" of the Las Vegas charges — except it wasn't Ito. "A stupid mistake,"...
PeopleJam, a self-help website due to launch this month by Hollywood execs Robert Tercek and Matt Edelman, has already been dinged for the lame name and "sickly sweet" approach. Now...
Steve Wasserman and Robert Scheer are together again. The former Los Angeles Times book editor, now managing director of the New York office of Kneerim & Williams at Fish &...
Recurring outages in the South of Market Street area of San Francisco have knocked Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati and other websites offline at times this afternoon....
The onetime maven of media mixers sold mediabistro.com today for $23 million. The buyer is Internet research firm Jupitermedia, which wants the company for the revenue from jobs ads and...
FourStory is "fact-based housing advocacy with a human perspective," and with fiction and a manifesto. It reads in part: This site had its genesis over a year ago with the...
Eric Longabardi of ERS News.com reports that before Mirthala Salinas became involved with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, she was the girlfriend of his good friend and close ally, Speaker Fabian N��ez....
Don Barrett has been informing and entertaining local radio buffs at LARadio.com for ten years, but it sounds as if the thrill is gone. He posted last week that while...
Memo out of the Daily News building in Woodland Hills: We're pleased to announce that Jason Middleton is joining LA.Com as Editor. Jason came to the Daily News in January...
Pasadena Now publisher and editor James Macpherson justifies the move as a cost-saver that could significantly improve local reporting. "Whether you�re at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in...
The new website from L.A. online entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart launched Friday night with an exclusive interview with former Senator Fred Thompson, his first on video since the Republican debate at...
This tree went down yesterday in Leimert Park. Photo is from a new Leimert Park community website by former Daily Breeze reporter Eddie North-Hager, who started the site after taking...
Meredith Artley, named earlier this month to be executive editor of the Times website, tells the Online Journalism Review that her focus will be on strengthening the local impact of...
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...
HuffIt is a new beta-test section of The Huffington Post where readers can indicate (Digg-style) which news stories of the moment interest them. Those stories will then get priority play...
If you enjoy remembering old local restaurants and already exhausted Jonathon Foerstel's Los Angeles Time Machines, writer Mark Evanier's POVOnline is an entertaining place to spend some time. His pages...
What do you get when you put together art and radio? Not much, frankly. But what if you add visuals? ArtScene magazine is doing just that with the newly launched...
Elinor Shields leaves the BBC to become managing editor of the Huffington Post, based in New York. She will oversee day-to-day editorial operations, including the site's expanding ambitions toward original...
City news junkies will soon start hearing more about the "912 Commission." More formally called the Neighborhood Council Review Commission, it is required by the City Charter revamp that created...
Ron Fineman lost his battle with colon cancer today. The founder of the television news website Ron Fineman's On the Record was taken off his respirator Dec. 21 and told...
Hollywood Today calls itself a "newsmagazine, with attitude...we cover the world of entertainment in all its multimedia glory, from screens and stages large and small." The site has been active...
No, Michael Richards did not attend a celebrity roast for Whoopi Goldberg in blackface. Nor did he pour a bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup over Whoopi's head. That was satire...
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...
Inventing Lonelygirl15: Wired's December issue goes inside the Los Angeles apartment where the wildly popular web tale of Bree and Danny was hatched and taped. Writer Joshua Davis met creator...
Ah, the rich cultural history, snow-capped mountains and sun-kissed beaches. Sounds lovely — too bad the Vernon link on Supervisor Gloria Molina's county website doesn't point to the strange little...
Rafat Ali's Santa Monica-based news operation — a success story among the many local web startups — has completely redesigned and shifted to a new content management system. PaidContent.org originally...
The Hollywood Reporter has joined the website redesign parade, giving the site a thorough remake. Flackage: New features include site-wide integration of The Reporter�s database, streamlined video, easier navigation and...
Beirut | Los Angeles calls itself a "nonpartisan albeit progressive project for peace, linking Americans with Lebanon in particular and the Middle East more generally." It's from the Levantine Cultural...
Came across a website that bills itself as A People�s Guide to LA: "an attempt to map sites of racial and class struggle in Los Angeles� history and landscape." Sites...
Suddenly we're awash in online restaurant menus. An email announces the Los Angeles launch of MenuPix, "free access to menus and basic information" on 3,000 local restaurants and fast-food places....
Martin Schall, the German photographer who runs one of the best Los Angeles architecture websites, has posted a bunch of new images at his site You-are-here.com. His latest visit produced...
From the editors of zines The Big Takeover, Dumb Angel Gazette, Roctober, Scram and Ugly Things: Dear Amoeba, We the undersigned, the editors of five of the most long-lived and...
Derek Lowe started the Dodgers opener today and kinda bombed—he gave up eight runs in five innings. Either before or after the game, he also probably got word that revelations...
Anthony Pellicano will go into court today and ask for an expedited trial, possibly foregoing the use of a federal public defender, journalist Ross Johnson reports. Family members tell Johnson...
There may not yet be a Los Angeles Examiner in the fledgling Philip Anschutz newspaper empire, but there is a dedicated L.A. page on Examiner.com. The website lets you choose...
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...
Dateline: Hollywood's spoof of the week headlines the news that "automobile fatalities in Los Angeles are up 85% in the past month as residents seeking meaning in their lives intentionally...
Snopes.com weighs in on the case of the USC cheerleader on the side of she may not be to blame—after all, it was a close play. * Another alternate take:...
District Attorney Steve Cooley's website designed to put pressure on felons who flee to Mexico—and authorities who tolerate it— is getting credit for the arrest in Mazatlan of accused murderer...
Yahoo's hiring of Dave Morgan, the #2 editor in the LAT Sports section, gets a thorough dissection in the forum at SportsJournalists.com....
The new issue of The Planning Report has a Q-and-A with departing L.A. planning director Mark Winogrond, a discussion with planning commissioners Jane Usher and Robin Hughes, and urban critic...
The LA Weekly website redesign I mentioned this morning is currently down; the old design is back up in its place, with last week's stories. They are working on the...
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...
Here's a letter to the editor in the latest Fortune magazine, posted on the website Online News Squared: Could Craigslist turn newspaper classifieds to ashes? If it does, the fault...
Gawker has the news that the Golden Groundhog award will honor the best underground movie of 2005, chosen from among "genuinely outstanding films from the previous year that lacked the...
New media reporter Anne Riley-Katz's LABJ piece on Robert Scheer's venture Truthdig.com focuses less on the deposed L.A. Times columnist and more on co-founder and publisher Zuade Kaufman. With good...
I told you early last year about an extraordinary website that presents hundreds of photographs of Los Angeles landmark buildings, giving dates and information on the architects along with city...
Here's an update to my exclusive post last Friday on the end of Robert Scheer's column on the L.A. Times op-ed page: He went on KPCC's "Airtalk with Larry Mantle"...
Lots of chatter in local media circles these days about the syndicated L.A. Times columnist and KCRW commentator from the left. First, it appears that Scheer is about to lose...
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...
WeHoNews.com promises to be an online newspaper covering West Hollywood as an "independent, fair, balanced and effective local news vehicle." The first issue has features on gay community legends Ivy...
Ripped from the headlines at Dateline Hollywood, TV evangelist Pat Robertson has called for another well-known figure who annoys him to be assassinated. That would be Jared the Subway Guy:...
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...
LAPD Wife posts word of a new club for the wives of officers. From the group's website: The LAPD Wives Club is for women dating, engaged or married to LAPD...
LA.com is jumping into the traffic biz with a monthly newsletter of commuter tips called Car Keys. The first edition carries links to traffic-related stories in the Daily News (where...
Steve Harvey's Only in L.A. column in today's Times points to a new website for rants, discussions and tips about traffic. The forums at The I Hate LA Traffic Homepage...
Up in Sacramento, Political Pulse bought the Capitol Weekly website and newspapers and plans to launch a state political news portal later this summer. The portal, a partnership with Scott...
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...
Over on Wilshire, the online staff at E! is trying to take back a gossip nugget they posted announcing the collapse of the Jessica Simpson-Nick Lachey marriage. Under a red...
Women's Wear Daily's MemoPad page says that Kent Black [mentioned on L.A.O. in February] has filled the long-vacant post of style editor at the soon-to-be-relaunched L.A. Times Sunday magazine. And...
Ron Fineman follows up today with reporting on his scoop last week that KNBC reporter Kyung Lah and "Today in L.A." producer Jeff Soto got fired for having an affair—and...
Jim Hill gives reality tours of Disneyland to tourists who want the inside story, not the official Magic Kingdom pablum. During yesterday's tour, park security and an Anaheim police detective...
Don Barrett's pay site that follows Los Angeles radio has recovered from its system crash. The first email published Thurday is from Charlie Cook: "As long as you are unable...
And now the site is down, possibly all week, following a total hard drive crash. Don Barrett draws every day on his rich archive of Los Angeles radio facts and...
The founder and editor of Salon.com will announce Thursday that he is leaving after 10 years to write a book about Robert F. Kennedy, the New York Times says. Joan...
Where else but here can you get two-week-old news? An emailer just pointed out to me that Spinsanity announced on Jan. 19 that the political truth squad site would stop...
I can't swear that PEN Center USA's website is new, but I just came across it for the first time. Bookmark it as another good place to find about literary...
Not a moment too soon, CityBeat has given up the white-type-on-black look that made its website so difficult to read. The new design is definitely bolder. It's much easier to...
Google is known for its creative holiday plays on its familiar logo. Last year artists came up with a logo for most big holidays plus Earth Day, Bloomsday, St. Patrick's...
My favorite job used to be to roam around upstate California and Nevada looking for stories, then try to write them onto the front page of the newspaper. I would...
CaliforniaAuthors.com has freshened up its exclusive listing of books written by California authors or about the state. Those coming in 2005 include: Wrong Side of the Wall. By Eric Stone....
Friday is Sharon Tay's last day at Channel 5, says Ron Fineman. The longtime KTLA Morning News co-anchor is headed to MSNBC to co-host an entertainment show. She won Emmy...
In a front page story in the latest L.A. Business Journal, Howard Fine says internal campaign polls show Antonio Villaraigosa and Bernard Parks—the two council members in the mayor's race—ahead...
L.A.'s most important Denver-based player, Philip Anschutz, has filed trademark applications to reserve "The Examiner" as the name of newspapers in 69 cities. The Denver Post (via Romenesko) only mentions...
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...
Both the L.A. Business Journal and LA Weekly are getting ready to unveil newsier websites. In the new issue, the Journal announces that over the next two weeks it will...
The Food Section, the New York-based website Gourmet calls "the consummate gastronomic blog," is devoting a week to Los Angeles culinary spots. Guest editor Kristin Franklin, a recent L.A. arrival,...
• Milton Bradley did it again. The volatile Dodgers outfielder was cited for disorderly conduct after allegedly interfering with a police traffic stop near Akron, Ohio. The winter baseball meetings are...
This is (probably) the final follow to the Online News Association conference that was held here last week. I noted earlier that the entry fee of $499, among the highest...
From Garrison Frost in his online "journal of arts and ideas," The Aesthetic: American Martyrs Church: You can't understand the South Bay until you understand Manhattan Beach, and you can't...
Los Angeles schools chief Roy Romer and the school district have sued that disgruntled ex-student who posted gay pornography on a website and claimed it was connected to Romer. As...
The contenders in the Online News Association competition I helped judge over the weekend are now posted. Local finalists include the L.A. Times Outdoors section, the Orange County Register's series...
Some guy with a worker's comp claim against the L.A. school district emails me that in a desperate plea to push his case, he has registered web domains in the...
At the end of last week, the editors at LAist posted that the site would be migrating to a new server over the weekend. Always frightening words. As of Monday...
Mack Reed at LAVoice.org breaks the news that LA.com, the city guide and shopping site put together by the parent of the Daily News and others — but best known...
WriterAction.com is where about 400 members of the Writers Guild go for their daily fix of of dish, dirt and grousing, behind a firewall open only to other guild members....
• The contents page in Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine had a posed photograph of a faux prisoner in a faux cell, to illustrate a cover story on the Three Strikes law....
OK, we recently noted an L.A. hot dog website. Now we've been pointed to Hamburger LA. They evalute by price, meat and patty, buns, fixings, extras and style and service....
• 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...
LAist excerpts an interview about the beauty and other qualities of Los Angeles with author and New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, a Valley boy from Van Nuys who spoke with...
David Shaw's Media Matters column in yesterday's Times was all about George Wolfe and his news satire site, the LALA Times. Wolfe, 40, is an ex-playwright from Virginia and now...
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....
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 creators of that cartoon parody sweeping through the Web — a Shockwave clip of Bush and Kerry singing to the tune of "This Land is Your Land" — are...
For what it's worth, the folks at Snopes.com have declared false the notion that writer Anne Jacobsen encountered a band of rehearsing terrorists on her Northwest flight into L.A. last...
In his cinematic essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, filmmaker and Cal Arts professor Thom Andersen tries to correct the false images of the city he says are created by L.A....
Yes, Microsoft is talking about selling the online magazine to the Washington Post, the New York Times or a handful of other potential buyers, the Post's Howard Kurtz reports. Microsoft...
Salon's resident airline pilot Patrick Smith reacts to that woman's account last week of her uncomfortable flight on Northwest Airlines with a bunch of Arabs who she feels in her...
Writer Annie Jacobsen at Women'sWallStreet.com goes into detail about her nerve-wracking flight from Detroit to Los Angeles in June with 14 suspicious-acting (to her) Middle Eastern men aboard. She writes...
Lawyers for Cameron Diaz want the Gawker Media websites to stop reporting on and having fun with that for-sale video showing the actress topless in S&M scenarios when she was...
• LAist, the SoCal version of New York's Gothamist, goes public Tuesday. Earlier: Gothamist going bicoastal. • We're number one: The feds seize more contraband cigarettes at the ports of Long Beach...
The local knockoff of the New York website will be called LAist when it launches next week. Tom Berman will do the writing. Franklin Avenue got the word from publisher...
Long Beach Press-Telegram columnist Doug Krikorian said on his radio show on KSPN this afternoon that Lakers owner Jerry Buss met face-to-face with Miami Heat president (and ex-Lakers coach) Pat...
CNET reports on why popular news websites were down on Tuesday morning....
Sunday's L.A. Times Magazine has a cover piece on Craig Newmark, the former IBM programmer and computer security geek who started and still runs Craigslist. Craig Newmark was the kid...
The Westmar Sun is "a Web-based journal of news and opinion about Mar Vista and the Westdales," small L.A. neighborhoods on the border of Santa Monica. Journalist George Garrigues runs...
Editor & Publisher, the print newspaper trade mag, and Mediaweek today handed out the 2004 EPpy awards to honor "the best new media work by media companies." "California Connected," the...
Someone emails to ask if it's a little ironic or something that the Writers Guild of America, West negotiations website has posted the full text of stories from Variety, the...
SWAT teams summoned. Only in the spoof world of George Wolfe's LALATimes. Also in the new issue: "Bush Declares California Disaster Area - In General" and "Celebrities Who Look Like...
Toby Young, the Brit journalist who used to write for Vanity Fair, is writing the Slate Diary this week about living in L.A. for three months while he works on...
Former E! Online columnist Andy Jones today begins a new weekly gig for FilmStew.com about party life. It's called SWAG: See Where Andy Goes. In the first installment, he writes...
Chill Out LA is a website and weekly newsletter "devoted to helping you become a happier, healthier, more centered Angeleno."...
In some depth, by Mack Reed of LAVoice.org (who didn't get the job to be the site's editor). The site - almost two years in the making with heavy investment...
PaidContent.org, which authoritatively tracks media efforts to make money on the web, is now listed among my links on the left side as a Los Angeles website. Founder and editor...
Garrison Frost writes in The Aesthetic (The South Bay's Journal of Arts and Ideas) of attending a memorial service last week for Cy Zoerner, a contributor to his site who...
Online city guide LA.com formally launches this week, two years after Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group bought the domain name from Las Vegas Internet entrepreneurs. The L.A. Business Journal says the...
The "Article of the Week" in The Simon is a mostly favorable take on Kevin Phillips, the disgruntled ex-Republican (and LAT Opinion contributor) whose new book American Dynasty rakes over...
Beverly Hills' own smut publisher Larry Flynt is interviewed about porn, civil liberties and the Internet by Xeni Jardin today at Wired News. Wilshire Boulevard trivia question: why is there...
At LAVoice.org, Mack Reed posts about the increasing number of political protest signs hung above and alongside the freeways. He links to FreewayBlogger.com, an antiwar site that encourages the guerrilla...
You can't say Joe Shea doesn't take the road less traveled. Two years ago, the editor in chief of the online newspaper American Reporter ran for office in the Hollywood...
In the parallel universe of George Wolfe's LaLaTimes, that is. Doesn't he know you don't joke about water in Los Angeles?...
The actor, writer, economist and Republican activist wrote "Monday Night at Morton's" for E! Online for seven or eight years. He cites his changed worldview -- and a new reverence...
LAVoice.org is a new community site made up of, says the FAQs, "ultra-local newsgatherers, pundits and outspoken writers whose collective knowledge of their neighborhoods and the city at large far...
Cathy Seipp pokes fun at Pitzer College president Laura Skandera Trombley -- and the school's decision to stop using the SAT -- in a piece today at National Review Online....
Lead story in the LaLaTimes (not to be confused with any other Times)....
Film critic Henry Sheehan, a regular on KPCC's "Film Week" segment, has added audio interviews to his website at HenrySheehan.com. The first is a lengthy (more than an hour) conversation...
The website Sports By Brooks says that during last night's Lakers game, Nicole Richie (the non-Hilton half of "The Simple Life" duo) was interviewed on Fox Sports Net and said...
The once-pioneering JenniCam is closing down December 31 after seven years online, and Terry Teachout at ArtsJournal.com writes that Jenni Ringley deserves credit as the Milton Berle of the Web:...
Snappy new look to the website for The Planning Report by David Abel and friends, and an interesting list of L.A. stories this month: Steve Soboroff on Playa Vista, Antonio...
Movie City News has unveiled the MCN 100, a panel of critics, reviewers and film watchers who will vote periodically for Best Picture and other awards. The voters listed include...
Nerve.com's resident guinea pig Grant Stoddard takes on the assignment: get three L.A. women to pose naked for his digital camera. Continuing my assimilation into California culture, I joined a...
Low Culture finds a certain similarity in the archives of writing about Phil Spector -- who, if you didn't know, was a millionaire before......
Most in the media know the basic Jim Romenesko story -- news guy starts "MediaGossip.com" on his own, moves to Poynter, gets a paycheck, drops gossip from the name, eventually...
Ben Stein revels in the cushy life where Hollywood meets Fox News Channel. His gig for E! Online website must be the easiest column in town....
The spoofy LALATimes, slogan "everything absurd under the sun," is looking for "a bone fide publisher and investors to guide and support it through its upcoming expansion," says a press...
Matt Welch clicks on LA.com, the new city guide beta site from Gannett and Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, and finds it lacking. The team includes Lynda Keeler, a venture capital...
Courthouse News, the Pasadena-based legal website, has a blog by journalist Matthew Heller. His latest item is about a lawsuit against L.A. Focus magazine by community activist Najee Ali, who...
Richard Horgan makes a persuasive case that the London-based World Entertainment News Network is commandeering celebrity news and gossip without crediting the right sources, and he argues in his weekly...
The volume of stories and Hollywood reactions to the loss of free screener movies has officially surpassed L.A. Observed's ability to keep up. (Kind of like with the recall.) Movie...
RestaurantWatch.com is a new site that lets you check the health inspection grade of L.A. restaurants by zip code. With registration, you can create a watch list, see inspection details...
The Los Angeles-based Theme Park Insider is all over the latest Disneyland accident in which a man was killed on the Big Thunder Mountain roller coaster. Clearly, a dangerous pattern...
After the birth of her second baby, she no longer feels like the woman who would seek out erotic adventures and tell all online, in books and in magazine articles....
Another Los Angeles-based online culture mag just found me. The Simon began about five years ago as a give-away quarterly and went Web-only last year, Tim Grierson says. He and...
The headlines: Special Investigation: Hollywood Marred by Nepotism Arnold Vows to Move State Capital to Vancouver C-SPAN Takes Reality TV to Higher Plane Dateline: Hollwood, the newest satirical site to...
The L.A.-based movie reviews and showbiz news website was struck by a mass-mailing virus that flooded subscriber in-boxes with infected attachments last night and today. In an email to subscribers,...
Writing at FilmStew.com, columnist Richard Horgan goes for the contrarian take on Bob Hope and talks with Arthur Marx, author of an unauthorized biography a decade ago that detailed numerous...
Eric Umansky took the place of the late Angeleno Scott Shuger doing the popular Today's Papers feature for Slate. He's 30, has never worked at a newspaper, and though he...
The lead story in The LALA Times -- "all the news that's fit to be tied."...
New at LA Observed
Clinton fundraises in LA

Brown declares disaster area

Performing arts with cheer
