With the men in black

For several weeks, former Pasadena Star-News reporter Todd Ruiz has been filing dispatches from the front lines of the sometimes violent anti-government protests in Thailand at his Reporter in Exile blog. His connections got him an exclusive look at the "men in black," a "secretive and heavily armed" band of fighters who used violence to bolster the officially "nonviolent" red shirt movement.

From the story:

'Not Terrorists Not Violent; Only Peaceful and Democracy,'' read a banner hanging outside the barrier of jumbled tires. Inside, it was an open secret who the gunmen were; no less secret were the perimeter bombs, connected by dirty gray cables, designed to inflict heavy casualties on any advancing government army soldiers.

Some of the men held their firearms tightly concealed under jackets. Just after sunset, oblong packages wrapped in black plastic were carried into tents in Lumpini Park from elsewhere in the camp. Running at a crouch, we were moved to a different tent nearer the memorial statue of Thai King Rama VI. The Ronin moved between tents often in this way to avoid detection from government snipers.

Twenty-seven men crouched in darkness inside the tent. Newspapers covered any illuminated displays from radios or other electronics, and we were asked to turn off our cell phones. One gunman suggested army snipers would kill them all at first light if they had the chance.

''Don't worry; safe. Thai-style,'' their combat medic said to us in English, gesturing to layers of tarps obscuring the ground from potential snipers where we were camped with them.

The story was published in Asia Times.

If it washes up on a beach and no one's there to see it...

Newsweek reports on complaints from news photographers that British Petroleum, with the aid of local and federal officials, is blocking access to areas hardest hit by the Gulf oil spill.

From the story:

Last week, a CBS TV crew was threatened with arrest when attempting to film an oil-covered beach. On Monday, Mother Jones published this firsthand account of one reporter’s repeated attempts to gain access to clean-up operations on oil-soaked beaches, and the telling response of local law enforcement. The latest instance of denied press access comes from Belle Chasse, La.-based Southern Seaplane Inc., which was scheduled to take a New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer for a flyover on Tuesday afternoon, and says it was denied permission once BP officials learned that a member of the press would be on board.

This morning, scientists said the Deepwater Horizon leak had probably surpassed the Exxon Valdez as the worst oil spill in U.S. history.

Wyoming judge embraces prior restraint*

From the AP:

In a rare move, a Wyoming judge has blocked two newspapers from publishing stories on an internal report about a college president's trip to Costa Rica, saying the report was improperly taken and that releasing details could prompt the federal government to cut college grant money.

Said the college newspapers' attorney:

"If we're going to argue that the Pentagon Papers should be allowed to be published, then I'm unclear how a document of this nature — which basically is a report about a president's performance at a community college in Wyoming — is even sensible."

(found via Romenesko)

*Updated, 5/26: The judge has realized the error of his ways and reversed the order.

FBI linguist gets jail for leaking to blogger

An FBI linguist will serve 20 months in prison for passing confidential information to a blogger, Politico reports.

From the story:

The sentence for Shamai Leibowitz is likely to become the longest ever served by a government employee accused of passing national security secrets to a member of the media. His case represents only the third known conviction in U.S. history for a government official or contractor providing classified information to the press.

And it reflects a surprising development: President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has taken a hard line against leakers, and Obama himself has expressed anger about disclosures of national security deliberations in the press.

This follows last month's indictment of Thomas Drake for allegedly leaking information about mismanagement at the NSA to a Baltimore Sun reporter and a subpoena of New York Times reporter James Risen over a book he wrote exposing a CIA program against Iran.

Haakenson opts out

Long Beach Press-Telegram sports editor Joe Haakenson has decided to quit his job rather than take a pay cut and be moved out to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, two sources say. Haakenson, a long-time Angels beat writer for LANG before taking the editor's post in 2006, apparently would have lost his title in the move and forced another person out of a job.

Keeping up with...

Flagging revenues and tighter newsroom budgets make the decision to spend money to cover the president as he travels the country and the world increasingly difficult, the New York Observer reports.

Four in the morning

1. How to use the dreaded semicolon The Oatmeal

2. An Oregonian reported got fired for going outside of the network Willamette Week

3. Los Angeles City Hall reporters don't like the new access rules. LAT

4. Differences in what social media covers versus the mainstream press. PEJ

The NFL just isn't that into L.A.

As Ed Roski and the city of Industry continue their courtship dance with the National Football League, Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times recounts the many, many broken hearts the league has left across Southern California:

The NFL's goal has been to extract the most favorable deal for itself, regardless of the public costs. It has been offered public land for free or at a cut rate, tax abatements, concessions — in the latest round, the Legislature even abrogated a major state law to facilitate a stadium that isn't built to host a team that we don't have and to meet a deadline that doesn't exist.

Can't anyone here learn a lesson? For all that the NFL says it really wants to be back in the Los Angeles market, it finds it quite advantageous to leave this market wide open. Why? Because it's a permanent threat to every other NFL community that dares to think about driving a hard bargain with its pro team.

Thai army assault on anti-government protesters

On May 19, hundreds of Thai soldiers moved in to clear anti-government protesters from downtown Bangkok. Reporter in Exile blogger Todd Ruiz filmed the operation, which left at least 15 people dead:

Dawn-to-dusk footage from the Bangkok crackdown from reporterinexile.com on Vimeo.

To get out of bankruptcy, ignore how you got in

Charges that Sam Zell knew his highly leveraged deal to takeover of Tribune Co. would force the company into bankruptcy, known as a "fraudulent conveyance," could be wiped clean by another deal to get the company out of bankruptcy.

From Bloomberg:

Tribune Co. will ask creditors to vote to settle allegations Chairman Sam Zell and company lenders violated bankruptcy law and left it insolvent when they organized a 2007 buyout that took the publisher private.

As part of its effort to exit bankruptcy, Tribune will send its reorganization proposal to creditors for a vote. The reorganization is built on a proposal to settle claims by lower- ranking creditors that the buyout was a fraudulent transfer because it increased Tribune’s debt by about $8.3 billion and only benefitted Zell and company shareholders.

“We feel pretty good about what will happen at the ballot box,” Tribune attorney James Conlan said in court today.

The rest of the story is here.

Four in the morning

1. Republicans Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner have spent nearly $100 million between them in an increasingly bizarre primary contest. The headline for Dan Morain's latest column in the Sacramento Bee says it all: "Never before has so much been spent for so little" SacBee

2. Alan Mutter says local television stations could go the way of the newspaper (would that really be so bad?) Mutter

3. Reporters at Tribune Co.'s WGN Channel 9 are asked to shill for L.L. Bean. ChiTrib (found via Romenesko)

4. The Los Angeles Times has yet to close its printing press in Orange County. The new deadline is June 15, but the change in ownership at the Orange County Register could win the plant a reprieve. LA Pressmens' blog

Tennessee twits

The Tennessee Legislature took a step back from complete stupidity on Monday, when lawmakers rejected a vengeful measure that would have banned a single Associated Press photographer from the Capitol because he photographed the House speaker collapse on the floor from low blood sugar. From knoxnews.com:

The resolution said Schelzig hindered "emergency medical personnel from providing necessary medical care" to Williams.

But video footage from a local television station showed Schelzig was actually behind a glass barrier where reporters are required to work.

Hmm.

Ruiz on KPCC*

Reporter in Exile blogger Todd Ruiz will be on KPCC's "Air Talk" with Larry Mantle at 11 a.m. today to talk about the rising violence in Thailand.

*Ruiz got bumped.

Four in the morning

1. The Washington Post hearts the Huffington Post's content model. Nieman Journalism Lab

2. NBC 4 in LA has launched a new web project called "Prop Zero" that bills itself as the Ground Zero for change in California politics. Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation is a contributor. Prop Zero

3. The danger of plagiarism in the reTweet. Good

4. A lengthy piece in the New York Times Magazine about the emerging business models for online news... It looks like the lifestyle of a starving actor trying to break into the movies: lots of work for low (or no) pay and, in the end, the audience gets to decide who's talented enough to rise to the top. NYT Magazine

Poizner, the anti-pornographer*

Insurance Commissioner and Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has launched an attack ad accusing his opponent, Meg Whitman, of profiting from pornography.



*UPDATE: Whitman gets the Dick Cheney endorsement. Cheney rips Poizner for having given money to the Gore-Lieberman campaign in 2000.

Who's dying in L.A.

National Public Radio recently did a feature on the Los Angeles Times' homicide blog. Reporter Jill Leovy explains why she started the blog back in 2007 and the truth she hoped to capture:

"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America.

"The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right."

-snip-

"As a middle-aged white lady, my death rate is probably 1 or 2 per 100,000 — maximum," Leovy says. "These young men are dying at 140. They're in a war zone, and the rest of us are living in a different country."

Freedom of the press*

President Barack Obama today is expected to sign the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act. From AP:

President Barack Obama plans to sign a law Monday intended to provide more protections for a free press around the world.

The law, known as the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act, expands efforts to identify countries where press freedom is being violated. The law is named after Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002.

*UPDATE: After he signed the bill, Obama said the press was free to ask questions and that he was free to ignore them.

Violence in Thailand

As the violence worsens in Thailand, former Pasadena Star-News reporter Todd Ruiz is staying in the thick of it. His latest dispatches are here and here. An excerpt:

The crowd was cheering and clapping, making no threatening moves toward soldiers apart from the usual sling-shot silliness. This young soldier freaks out and opens up with his rifle. Right into civilians and reporters. I assume ammo is live and sure enough as we clear from center of road, I see old man take a headshot and go down face-first into the street. He was in death spasms by the time they pulled him into the gas station. French photog who was behind soldiers said young shooter got a verbal rebuke and soft cuff to the face from his CO.

Judge makes public document public

A San Mateo judge decided the time was right to unseal an affidavit used as the basis to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's home. Police were looking for information about his connection to a man alleged to have stole a next-generation Apple iPhone. Here's the summary:

Suspect Brian Hogan found or stole a prototype iPhone 4G that was accidentally left at a restaurant by Apple employee Rober "Gray" Powell. Hogan identified the owner of the phone as Apple Engineer Gray Powell through the contents of the phone and through Internet searches. Rather than return the prototype phone to Powell and/or Apple, Hogan subsequently sold the iPhone [to] Jason Chen in Fremont for $5,000. Upon receiving the stolen property, Chen disassembled the iPhone, thereby causing it to be damaged. Chen created copies of the iPhone prototype in the form of digital images and video, which were subsequently published on the Internet based magazine Gizmodo.com

This search warrant seeks authorization to search the residence of Jason Chen for evidence related to the purchase of the iPhone prototype, copying (photographic images and video), and publishing of the iPhone prototype by Jason Chen...

Four in the morning

1. The Tribune Co. bankruptcy saw another complication as senior creditors filed an objection to the latest plan. The company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December, 2008 and was hoping to get by mid-August. Chicago Tribune

2. The Tennessee House speaker collapsed during a public session in the Capitol building and an Associated Press photographer had the temerity to think the public might care about that. Lawmakers, however, knew better and had security escort the photographer out. Knoxnews.com

3. Personal advertorial: The five things one male journalist thinks every woman should know about dating a male journalist - "And yes, ladies, I’m single." rockmycar.net (found via LA Observed)

4. New York Times Editor Bill Keller said the paper will begin charging for access to stories on its website in January. WSJ

More moves in LANGland

Frank Pine has been named the new general manager of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Pine already served as executive editor of the Bulletin, a role he'll continue, and is executive editor of the Bulletin's sister paper, the San Bernardino Sun.

Pine replaces Peggy Del Torro, who took over as general manager of the Redlands Daily Facts.

New masthead in Redlands

The Redlands Daily Facts, which is part of Dean Singleton's LANG chain, announced a new general manager and managing editor. From the story:

Peggy del Toro was named general manager of the Facts, and Christina Brock was named managing editor.

"I'm very proud of this team," said Fred Hamilton, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which includes the Facts. "Peggy del Toro's broad experience in local newspapers and passion for community news is a perfect fit for Redlands. Chris Brock is incredibly talented and a native of the East Valley. I'm confident these two will achieve great things in Redlands."

Del Toro most recently served as president and general manager of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the Facts' sister newspaper in Ontario. Del Toro was general manager of the Facts prior to her assignment in Ontario, where she spent most of her career.

Brock has held positions at the Bulletin and The Sun, most recently serving as business editor for both newspapers.

Judges needed

And I quote:

The Southern California Journalism Education Association (SCJEA) is looking for judges for the state write-offs on Saturday, May 22 at Fullerton College, 11:30 - 3.

Categories include: news, feature, sports, editorial, critical review, editorial cartooning, photography and page design. Area students attend mock press conferences and then have 1 hour to write their pieces, draw a cartoon, take photos or design a page.

Lunch is provided.

If interested, please contact Julie Braun @jbraunlh@aol.com.

Thank you for your support of scholastic journalism!

Mining money from niches

By pursuing donations from business leaders and working a little social-media magic, the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles appears to have found a way to weather the hard economic times, according to James Rainey at the Los Angeles Times.

From the story:

The Journal, its related website and a nascent monthly magazine recently nailed down a critical $800,000 donation that should rejuvenate the organization and guarantee its viability for the foreseeable future.

The money came from four philanthropists — Westfield mall Chief Executive Peter Lowy, Internet executive and venture capitalist Art Bilger, cooking oil maker and long-time Journal board member Irwin Field and a fourth, anonymous, donor.

-snip-

While Jewish news outlets in Las Vegas and other communities had been folding, the Jewish Journal made enough improvements, despite the brutal economic downturn, that it showed promise. Its expanded Web offerings, including a social networking/dating site, everyjew.com. The online audience has grown to 350,000 unique visitors a month.

Parish president wants names*

The interim president of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans has sued to force the Times-Picayune to turn over the names of 11 people who posted comment anonymously on the paper's website. The comments seem pretty tame, but interim president Steve Theriot says they were were "made with malice, and a blatant, intentional disregard for the truth, and with the intent that such statements damage plaintiffs."

The full story is here.

*UPDATE: Turns out Theriot isn't trying to intimidate anyone - he just wants to help! From the T-P:

Jefferson Parish interim President Steve Theriot told the Parish Council today that the lawsuit he filed against anonymous users of www.NOLA.com is aimed at addressing the concerns they raise -- not to block criticism of the government.

"This is in no way to shut up anyone regarding their concerns about the operation of the government," Theriot said.

Ethics not wanted

A Bay Area-based online business site has a job listing for journalists willing to write high-quality copy at $155 per story. Only one catch: If you're interested in ethics, they're not interested in you. From the ad:

Seeking a group of 2-3 former or current journalists who are willing to write high-quality freelance pieces for our Web site.

Important: This is not "traditional" journalism in the sense that the articles you will be assigned will be partially advertorial. You will be given potential leads to call and information on how the story should be written. We understand if you desire to maintain journalism ethics, but this gig would not be for you.

Witness LA teams with Spot.us

Spot.us and Witness LA have entered into a deal to produce stories on social justice issues, such as prison reform to homelessness. Matthew Fleischer, who blogs at fishbowlLA, will write one of the first stories and journalist Anh Do will oversee the project, which is being called LA Justice Report. The stories will run on Celeste Fremon's Witness LA blog.

From the press release:

LA is the gang capital of the world. And we have more homeless here than anywhere else in the U.S. And LA County has more parolees released back into its communities than any other place in the country. And our school system is among the nation's largest, most complicated--and most troubled. And America's biggest mental health hospital is the Los Angeles County jail system. And LA has the biggest foster care system. And LA is central to the nation's the immigration conversation. And...

You get the picture.

Yet with the ongoing transformation in the world of legacy media, many of the most important stories in the arena of social justice are underreported at best. Often they are not reported at all.

To help fill that gap, Spot.Us and WitnessLA.com have formed a partnership we are calling the LA Justice Report.

Four in the morning

1. Should we protect the journalist or acts of journalism? Scott Rosenberg

2. The Texas Tribune gets a six-month checkup. Texas Tribune

3. Henry hearts Danzig. fishbowlLA

4. The LA Times misses another Dodgers game. LA Observed

Journalizm

Vice President Joe Biden said last month that the latest employment report would show 200,000 jobs would be created in April. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm called bullshit, saying it was more happy talk from a White House that hardly anyone believe. On Friday, the Aprils jobs report came out: 290,000 were created in April. The liberal blog Media Matters wants an apology.

(found via fishbowlLA)

Power protecting power

In a classic case of bad decision-making, the Obama Justice Department has subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about leaks he used to tell the story of President Bush's domestic surveillance program.

From Howard Kurtz:

In the Risen case, Attorney General Eric Holder had to approve the subpoena under Justice Department procedures. The subpoena, disclosed Thursday by the Times, comes two weeks after the administration obtained an indictment of a former top National Security Agency official, Thomas Drake, for allegedly providing classified information to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

Law enforcement officials, who declined to be identified discussing pending investigations, said the close timing of the two cases was coincidental and that the administration is not mounting an intensified effort to crack down on leakers. "As a general matter, we have consistently said that leaks of classified information are something we take extremely seriously,'' said Matthew Miller, chief Justice spokesman, who declined further comment.

The grammar Nazis

Never leave a participle dangling:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Ferro on the future of KCRW

Newly anointed KCRW General Manager Jennifer Ferro talks about her vision for the public radio station:

... one of the challenges that all radio faces is this idea of relevance. There are so many other ways that people get information. And there are a lot of people (especially young people) that don’t really listen to the radio anymore. They listen to other devices. So one of our goals is just trying to get our programming where people are – mobile interests, being online, on social media. But the other thing is that – if you want to stay relevant, you just have to keep delivering great programming, whether that’s on the air, online, in-person, or through these really great events that we do.

We have this idea of this “independent producer lab.” In public radio, there are people who put together these amazing pieces. They’re like journalists, who are telling amazing stories &…they’re struggling to make a living. Like this one guy Joe Richman (who I love), did this thing called “Prison Diaries,” where he got prisoners to carry around these tape recorders. And everyday, they’d just talk into them, tell these stories and talk about their lives. And he edited them together and made these really powerful vignettes of people incarcerated that you’d never hear otherwise. He spends a lot of his time trying to raise the money to be able to do that. And I think that’s just a shame. We should be doing that. So that’s what we want to do at KCRW – be the distribution partner, go out and raise the money, support these people and commission them to go do stories about Los Angeles.

I just want us to continue to act as a sort of community center. I really love this idea of membership. We have members who contribute anywhere from $5 a month or $5000 a year. But it’s sort of this pledge that says “I’m down with what you guys do.” And we have 52,000 people who do that. I want it to be like 100,000 people. That’s my big goal. It’s a huge goal but were working on reducing all the barriers to being a member – whatever donation you can give…makes you a member. Just being able to say that there are 100,000 people, who want to be a part of it…would be really amazing.

SFW

Since so many people do their web surfing during the day, while at work, Playboy has decided to launch several new sites, including TheSmokingJacket.com, which will have content that is safe to browse in the workplace. The strategy is part of Playboy's attempt to find new revenue, after a round of layoffs last year:

After noting that Playboy has cut over 100 positions since last year, its headcount is likely to shrink further from its current 573 employees.

It's your wedding, too

Los Angeles Times magazine author and assistant editor Allison Kornberg wants you to be her wedding planner. She's used her blog to ask readers for suggestions:

I am letting my readers decide on Everything, including date (they already picked May), where (readers chose by the beach), my dress, my bridesmaids dresses, flowers, cakes, music, honeymoon, and the wedding list goes on and on.

So where should she go for her honeymoon?

(found via fishbowlLA)

Out to make friends, or to dominate the grid?

The Facebook/Twitter social divide, as explained by Gene Weingarten, of the Washington Post:

Twitter is about competition. It is about one-upsmanship. It is about an endless race to accumulate devotees, or followers. Note the term, "followers," not "friends." On Facebook, the people who read what you write are your "friends," and they are the same people whom you read. Not on Twitter. On Twitter, there are two distinct groups: Your followers, and people you follow. Some Twitter people (me, for example) have thousands of followers, but follow only a few dozen. The more clever you are, the greater this disparity...

As I long ago pointed out in a tweet, Twitter assigns a Human Worth Value to every participant; this is never actually stated, but it's there for all to see: All you have to do is to subtract the number of people you follow from the number of people who follow you. The higher the number, the greater your Human Worth. If the number is negative, you are pathetic.

Daily Journal loses editors to fellowships

Having each been awarded prestigious journalism fellowships, Los Angeles Daily Journal editors Christian Berthelsen and Evelyn Larrubia will be leaving the paper temporarily - possibly permanently. Kevin Roderick at LA Observerd has the various memos here.

Four today

1. On Facebook, just like everywhere else, sex sells. Social Media Scientist

2. Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly wins the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Reviews award from the James Beard Foundation. Eater

3. How the Hoiles family lost the Orange County Register. OC Register

4. The Arizona Republic goes front page with an editorial against the state's new immigration law. AP

A less perfect Union-Tribune

In the anything for a buck age, the San Diego Union-Tribune turned back time - and dropped the "Union" from its name - as part of a promotional wraparound advertisement for Wells Fargo Bank. Clever.

Turns out, they turned the clock back a little too far. From San Diego Citybeat:

The ad is made to looks like an old-timey edition from April 30, 1852, suggesting what the newspaper might’ve looked like before the San Diego Tribune merged with the San Diego Union. ...

How’s this for an anachronism: The San Diego Tribune wasn’t founded until 1895.

Is accuracy an anachronism, too?

Tying the Intertubes

The Thai government has turned to online censorship in its effort to quell an anti-government uprising. Todd Ruiz at Reporter in Exile has the scoop - here's an excerpt:

Blocking URLs to prevent the flow of information is like trying to dam a river with your hands. You just get wet and look stupid. Especially since any of the thousands of proxy servers so easily circumvents your finest efforts.

That hasn't stopped the censorship-loving Thai government, which steers all TCP/UDP port 80 traffic through its Ministry of Information and Communication Technology, from dropping the ban hammer on thousands of websites, YouTube videos and news sites since the red crisis began mid-March.

All in the name of protecting those delicate, vulnerable Thai minds from the weighty burden of critical thought.

The complete post is here.