Maywood's mysterious city manager

As Assistant City Manager in the city of Bell, Angela Spaccia made $376,000 a year. She also serves as interim city manager for the neighboring city of Maywood and was integral in the deal last month that turned over city administrative services to Bell after Maywood collapsed under the weight of its excessive financial obligations.

Last week, Spaccia was forced to resign her post in Bell, along with the city manager and police chief, over public outrage at the insanely high salaries the three administrators were pulling down.

Spaccia, however, continues to work as interim city manager for Maywood. In fact, the Maywood City Council seems quite pleased with her, according to the city spokeswoman. And because Spaccia's resignation from Bell does not become effective until September, she is expected to continue on as Maywood interim manager. But who will be paying her salary?

Also, is the Maywood City Council concerned at all the top administrators of the town that's taken over Maywood's services were forced out amid scandal?

Apparently not. The Maywood City Council is scheduled to have a meeting on Monday when these subjects could come up. The city agenda I saw online mentions nothing about her job, however.

Bell and the Brown Act

It's unlikely that anyone in the city of Bell wants to see the City Council reconsider its decision slash the exorbitant salaries of its four highest paid members by 90 percent. But someone probably could.

That's because the Bell City Council almost certainly violated the state's open-meetings law at least twice - and probably three times - in the course of Monday's raucous meeting (hear more about the meeting here).

First, the council headed into closed session to discuss several potential lawsuits stemming from the salary scandal without first allowing the public to speak. Then, the council voted to make the salary cuts without first letting the public speak. Finally, agenda item that was supposed to alert the public that council salaries might be slashed made no mention that a vote would be taken.

 All of these are potential violations of the state's open-meetings law, known as the Brown Act, which requires, among other things, that the public be allowed to speak before any final decision is made. Bell's own agenda spells this out (the .pdf version is here): "Pursuant to the Ralph M. Brown Act, public comments may be received on these items prior to the time action is taken by the City Council."

Even a court agreed the violations occurred, the punishment would hardly fit the crime: A judge would probably be forced to rescind the vote and restore the salaries until the council acted in the right way.

But even technical violations of the law should be pointed out to ensure the public learns it's rights. Also, it was clear the hundreds of people who attended Monday's meeting wanted the council members to hear their displeasure before any action was taken. Indeed, most speakers wanted the council members to resign.

Is anyone going to sue to force the council to redo the vote? Doubtful. But this does serve as evidence that the council, whatever it is paid, still doesn't understand it's role as a representative government.

Francke advice about Bell

In the last few decades, First Amendment attorney and government-watchdog Terry Francke has done more to make small-town newspaper reporters better journalists than just about anyone else I can think of. He has generously offered his expertise to anyone who has his number, me included, and that has enabled reporters digging at the edges of local corruption to get inside scandals using tools like the public records to pressure obstinate city officials.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Francke sees the Bell corruption scandal as a direct result of the disappearance of small-town newspapers. Here he is in the Voice of OC:

...the Bell spectacle is what happens to communities without their own old-fashioned diligent news coverage by veteran newspaper reporters, or at least smart reporters led by veteran newspaper editors. The result need not be on paper, but it must be done with the community memory and professional savvy almost unique to newspaper-trained journalists with experience watching small-town politics.

 Francke argues that laws such as the Brown Act, which requires city agencies to discuss their business in public, do little to protect against the excesses of a Bell city council unless someone trained in its workings is on hand to act as a watchdog:

...the long absence of a community newspaper covering the city closely left Bell not a perfect storm but a perfect swamp. The Brown Act, cultivated over more than a half century by the newspaper industry, virtually assumes that newspaper reporters will be on hand to use it in scrutinizing government behavior. But even reporters require a bit of periodic training to help them decode agendas and read between the lines of official meeting bureaucratese that the Brown Act is just vague enough to permit as barriers to ordinary citizens.

What's needed by Bell -- or any newspaperless town that wants to avoid becoming another Bell -- is steady, consistent coverage by competent observers with journalistic talents and instincts (whatever their publication medium or platform) and some rules better than what the Brown Act now provides.

While Francke would like to see some reforms in open-meeting laws to boost transparency, he thinks it's unlikely they'd get by the government lobbies in Sacramento. The best solution, he says, is for Bell residents to turn their anger into organization:

The nice thing about small towns like Bell is that getting enough signatures to put such a reform on the ballot is a smaller task as well. If even half the people who have been storming Bell council meetings in recent days to protest the revealed abuses were to organize into a sunshine ordinance drafting and circulation committee, they could literally write (and pass) their own ticket to a transparent city hall.

*Update: City and state officials are gathering in Sacramento to talk about ways to make the pay of city officials more transparent. At this point, it feels more like a distraction from the stalled budget debate than a real effort at reform.

The Kinsley test

Michael Kinsley at the Atlantic says the New York Times story about Silver Lake's "walking man" is the most boring article ever published in a newspaper. Atlantic

Gifts better left ungiven*

Among the things you should not do on the wedding day of an ex-lover is write a column like this:

The great love of my life marries today and I am not the groom. I had my chance, a few years ago, but did not realize until too late how fleeting my moment with her was meant to be. Whether it was my fault or hers, and, let's face it, it was probably mine, I will wonder always about the life I might have had with the most loving and loveable woman I have ever known. Sometimes, I finally now understand, love, even crazy love, is not enough. Sometimes, as the romance novelists know, timing is everything.

-snip-

The present I humbly send her today is this column; this public note, this irrevocable display of affection and support and gratitude; this worldly absolution from any guilt or sadness she felt between the time she said no to me and the time she said yes to him. No one ought to have to carry that with them into a marriage. I showered her with as much love as I could muster when we were together. I still love her and always will. So I am only too happy to offer my toast to her now, one more time, before she takes her vows.

Offering absolution to someone who moved on and calling it a humble gift? Yipes. This reads like a drunk dial in column form.


*Update: In keeping with the journalistic mission of this blog, here's a relevant comment on the Washington City Paper site: "Where were his editors?! Editors: You have the power to stop this kind of self-destructive catharsis-by-column."

The Bell City Council and me

Might as well self-promote...

Bell's City Council voted to cut its pay by 90 percent last night, but residents still want heads to roll. As a recall effort gets underway, state and local prosecutors are investigating possible crimes and local officials are calling for an outside audit. On tonight's "Which Way, LA?" we talk to Bell residents, a representative of the police officers' union and political expert Raphe Sonenshein. Your blogger (and the show's producer) makes an appearance, too. Shudder. Here's the link.

Possible fraud in Tribune takeover, court examiner says

A court-appointed examiner in the Tribune Co. bankruptcy case has concluded that "the company's 2007 leveraged buyout was 'marred' by the 'dishonesty and lack of candor' of its then-senior management and that the deal rendered the media conglomerate insolvent from the moment the two-step transaction closed," the Chicago Tribune reports.

In response, Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels issued a memo that asks all company employees to "stay focused" and to "try not to be distracted by the media attention it may receive."

The Wikileaks leak

Has the Wikileaks, an online source of confidential documents, changed the nature of news by releasing 92,000 pages of secret U.S. military logs about the war in Afganistan to the New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian? Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic explores the question and pulls this from NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen:

Rosen calls WikiLeaks the first "stateless news organization" in an excellent post on this episode."In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it," Rosen writes. "But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new."

Rooting out the "undermedia"

Media watchers have produced one-week-after reflections on the two Big Stories that surfaced out of the conservative's activist media: Andrew Breitbart's take down of a USDA employee on a bogus charge of reverse racism and Tucker Carlson's attempt to expose a liberal media cabal by publishing the musing of self-identified liberal commentators.

David Carr describes the stories as "provocateur" journalism, a radicalized form of the advocacy journalism practiced by more traditional media:

As content providers increasingly hack their own route to an audience, it’s becoming clear that many are less interested in covering the game than tilting the field.

Carr's colleague at the New York Times, Brian Stelter, writes about an "undermedia" (a Breitbart term) that pushes stories meant to reinforce and amplify a set of beliefs, or fears, rather than to test conventional wisdom. Thus, Breitbart runs a false story because he sees his job as constructing a conservative narrative, not chasing down facts.

Breitbart told Stelter:

"It’s my business model to craft strategies to make sure that the mainstream media is forced to reckon with stories that it would love to ignore because it doesn’t fit their narrative."

Breitbart and Carlson desperately want us to treat news as a series of competing partisan narratives. It is an effective way of neutering facts that contradict one's own views and emboldens like-minded thinkers to ignore any argument that support the other side. It tells readers that they have a choice of ideologies, and that they must identify with one or the other, and in doing so deprives them of the facts they need to evaluate these partisan narratives for what they are: the tools of the entrenched to manipulate votes. Breitbart's folly, a result of giddy over-eagerness, hopefully pulls back the curtain.

The anchorless newscast and other imagineering

Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michaels has a vision for his bankrupt newspaper and television empire, and it looks a lot like the empires of MediaNews Group and Gannett - meaning a constant focus on findings ways to cut staff (centralizing and shrinking copy and news desks, sharing stories to fill pages or on-air time) and a nearly erotic attachment to the idea of consolidation.

Here are some key quotes from an interview Michaels did with the Wall Street Journal:

"Stories [are] laid out in modules — standard sizes with collections of headlines, content, images [reducing the need for layout and copy editors]. If you pick up the Allentown [Pa.] Morning Call, the foreign news was written in Los Angeles and the national news was written in either Chicago or Washington. It's probably higher quality journalism than a local paper that size is going to be able to afford."

"We are about to launch a TV newscast in Houston that has no anchors, that has great pictures and great writing, but doesn't involve a set or a desk or anyone standing in the way of the picture. Now is it going to work? We're going to find out."


"On the TV side, this is an industry ready to consolidate. I believe my experience in helping people look rationally at opportunities to grow their business by intelligently consolidating regionally will be very helpful."

Veteran newsman Daniel Schorr dead at 93

Veteran broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr, an NPR political analyst and original member of Edward R. Murrow's CBS news team, has died. He was 93. The NPR obituary is here. NPR president Vivian Schiller had this to say in a note to his colleagues:

It’s impossible to overestimate Dan’s impact on journalism – from his early days working with Edward R. Murrow, to the founding of CNN, to the last 25 years as NPR’s news analyst, a familiar and beloved voice to millions of listeners. Every one of us who happened to see Dan coming in to work -- walking a little more slowly with time but with a razor-sharp wit and warmth that never dimmed – learned a lesson in the dedication, determination, and integrity that it takes to be the best. He was.

Building up a defense *Updated

Los Angeles Councilman Richard Alarcón has rasied about $9,000 to defend himself against possible charges that he's been living outside of his council district, Neon Tommy reports.

*Update: Paresh Dave at Neon Tommy reports that a person claiming to be a member of the L.A. County grand jury investigating Alarcón has posted on Craigslist to say the councilman will be indicted. Divulging grand jury deliberations is a criminal offense, so if this is true, the juror could be in trouble - and so could the integrity of case against Alarcón.

How to create talking points for right-wing media critics

The moment then-American Spectator writer Ezra Klein created the semi-private Journolist listserv for liberal journalists and thinkers, a ticking political time bomb was created. No matter what the rationale for this closed online discussion group, no matter that contributors were mostly columnists and bloggers who self-identified as liberal commentators, the contents were bound to become fodder for those who claim the mainstream media holds a liberal bias. And so it came to pass, when the Daily Caller, an online outfit started by conservative-pundit Tucker Carlson, began publishing comments made to the list during the 2008 presidential campaign. The fact that liberal opinion-makers expressed liberal opinions doesn't seem all that newsworthy, but to those news operations that wish to blend opinion and news, this incident should serve as a cautionary tale.

On that note, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that today's Daily Caller post mentions KCRW. Since I work for the station, I'll hand it off to LA Observed to lay out what happened, which you can read here.

Four in the morning

1. The Los Angeles food truck economy is blowing up - these days, any outdoor event that doesn't include a food truck is probably lame. Atlantic

2. KQED in San Francisco is boosting its ranks to boost its newscasts. SF Chronicle (via LA Observed)

3. Playboy is now safe for work (i.e., boring; i.e., what more proof do we need that the Internet is an online distraction zone?). fishbowlLA

4. Politico needs a corrections policy. Regret the Error (via Romenesko)

Reveal your sources for unknown riches

If you ever do a story about Viacom/CBS boss Sumner Redstone with an unnamed source, you just might get a call from the man himself: Gawker

Of mosques and salary abuses

On tonight's "Which Way, LA?" we'll talk about the dust-up over a planned mosque in the Temecula Valley, with Pastor Bill Rench and Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the political conditions that led to the city of Bell's salary scandal, with Cristina Garcia of the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse and Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies. Program starts at 7 p.m. on 89.9 KCRW, or stream it at kcrw.com/whichwayla.

Late breaking news*, **

There is something unsettling about the City of Bell stories in the Los Angeles Times - beyond the obvious fact that the city manager and City Council dug their hands elbow deep into the trough of local tax revenues to enrich each other at the public expense.

The something unsettling is the fact that we have reporters and the public arriving late to a scandal that was years in the making. Unless the council members violated open meeting law - and nothing I've seen indicates that they did - the outrageous salaries they pay themselves and their top staff were set at public meetings. In other words, all of this was done out in the open. But with no one was there to watch, the council had no reason to hide its shameful acts. The only reason any of this came to light is that the city of Maywood, another under-covered city (but not as under-covered as Bell) went bankrupt and asked Bell to take over its city services.

On the surface, the Bell scandal is one of outrageous salaries. City council members are taking home nearly $100,000 a year, with benefits, and the city manager is pulling in a salary that would make the president blush. From the Times story:

In addition to the $787,637 salary of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, Bell pays Police Chief Randy Adams $457,000 a year, about 50% more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck or Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and more than double New York City's police commissioner. Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia makes $376,288 annually, more than most city managers.

The city manager's salary started to get out of hand in the early- to mid-2000s. In five years, he's seen his earnings more than double, from about $300,000 in 2005 to $787,637 and climbing. This for a poor city of roughly 37,000 people. This is a story that could have been written in 2005, or 2006, or 2007, or...

The contraction in the news industry, especially in newspapers, is partly to blame for why poor Southern California cities get almost none of the coverage they deserve. The fact that they're poor cities full of immigrants who are unlikely to subscribe to an English-language newspaper doesn't help. The Times is the only newspaper now covering the salary scandal now, with some assistance from AP and Bloomberg. Hopefully editors at all of the area's newspapers - and online start-ups and citizen-journalism revolutionaries - are asking themselves how to do a responsible job covering all of Southern California's cities so the next big scoop isn't a Big Story simply because we let it slip past us for years.

*Here's a New York Times story on the Maywood take over that mentions nothing about the troubles in Bell.

**Times media columnist James Rainey laments the failure of the media (including the Times) to catch the Bell salary scandal before it grew to cartoonish proportions, and he owns up to the fact that the Times itself doesn't deploy the resources needed to watchdog cities in its own front yard. He also says the paper will investigate other cities in the area to see if they're similarly corrupt - they might start in neighboring Bell Gardens, where I'm told the city manager makes more $400,000 or more a year. UPDATE: A survey done by another publication put the city manager of Bell Gardens salary at $242,000.

Four today

1. The daily freakouts that constitute online breaking news coverage do, surprisingly, take a toll on reporters. NYT

2. A fractured media environment and a manufactured-populist backlash against the "lamestream" media give conservative political candidates a rationale for not talking to the media - knowing that they, like Sarah Palin, will get plenty of coverage anyway. Howard Kurtz

3. The acting intelligence chief pushes back against the Washington Post's series on America's bloated intelligence complex. Politico

4. Reality TV continues to shame us all - and with equal opportunity. fishbowlLA

Gearing up for good reporting*

An upcoming series on Defense Department contractors by the Washington Post's Dana Priest has the national intelligence division in full spin mode: Marc Ambinder

*Update: Here's the first installment of the three-part series, which is written by Priest and William Arkin: link

MPB: Terry Gross is gross

Mississippi Public Broadcasting's executive director issued a statement to explain why the station dropped "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross: Apparently Terry is just too damned filthy.

Here's the statement (via Gawker):

Mississippi Public Broadcasting strives to deliver educational, informative, and meaningful content to its listeners. After careful consideration and review we have determined that Fresh Air does not meet this goal over time. Too often Fresh Air's interviews include gratuitous discussions on issues of an explicit sexual nature. We believe that most of these discussions do not contribute to or meaningfully enhance serious-minded public discourse on sexual issues. Our listeners who wish to hear Fresh Air may find it online.

Local radio stations can choose to broadcast whatever shows they want, but one has to be slightly deranged (or willfully ignorant) to describe "Fresh Air" as "too often" including "gratuitous discussions of an explicit sexual nature." Indeed, once seems to be "too often" enough for MPB. It was a portion of an interview with comedian Louise CK that seems to have triggered the whole hullabaloo. Here's the exchange (again, via Gawker):

Louis CK: But if I'm with a woman and she wants to be with me, she must like me. I definitely have sex with my T-shirt on, always. I haven't had sex without a shirt on, God, since I was about 23."

Terry Gross: Is that true?

Louis CK: Yeah, I just don't think that's fair. I mean, you know, let her think she's with somebody decent, you know? ... I do have sex sometimes on the show, and there's a rule that I have to be on my back.

Terry Gross: Why, because your stomach flattens?

Louis CK: Well, no, God, no. I'm not laying back in that bed thinking, "I look awesome right now." It's because I think I should always be the victim of the sex. I don't think anyone wants to see me looming over her. I think that's an upsetting image. And then also, the mother-dog stomach that I get when I'm ... you get the point.

Get me the smelling salts!

The wonders of freelancing

What the bosses really think of all you freelancers out there: link

Times makes blogger a deputy editor

As Kevin Roderick at LA Obsvered noted earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times has hired “Top of the Ticket” contributor Jimmy Orr as deputy editor for online, which involves coordinating “online news and features efforts.” 

Orr has solid experience in this realm, having worked as online editor at the Christian Science Monitor. He also has a history as a strict Republican partisan, serving as an internet strategist for both Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and President George W. Bush (Orr is to blame for those “Barney Cam” videos, apparently). 

Orr’s conservative past does not disqualify him for the job of deputy online editor. However, it is odd that the Times asked him to write partisan opinion in/on its own pages before promoting him to an ostensibly impartial editing job - it seems a disservice to him and to the reporters under him. Is this the kind of thing the Times has done before?

Mississippi public radio doesn't like Fresh Air

The station director at Mississippi Public Broadcasting has dropped "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross from its lineup, citing "recurring inappropriate content.” It's a given the content is recurring, but inappropriate? A blogger called A Unitarian Universalist Minister In The South thinks recent programs dealing with homosexuality might be the cause:

Couldn’t possibly be the interview with Colin Firth regarding his role in “A Single Man.”  He plays the part of a gay man grieving the loss of his partner. The story line of grieving the death of a loved one is as old as the story of David and Jonathan in First Samuel of the Hebrew Scriptures. And it certainly could not be the movie review of Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are Alright.” That story line of parents dealing with their rebellious teens goes all the way back to Adam and Eve.  Oh wait, the parents are both lesbians. Nah, it couldn’t be that.

(found via Romenesko)

Comings and goings

Gabriel Kahn, Los Angeles bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, is leaving for a job at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, according to Gorkana. The paper has yet to name a replacement.

Four in the afternoon

1. Two from fishbowlLA: Los Angeles Times reporters warned to watch what they're tweeting (link); and Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm is told to remove a link to the donation page of Sarah Palin's political action committee and, in doing so, takes the opportunity to once again promote Sarah Palin's political action committee (link and link).

2. ProPublica has video of the police detaining one of the news site's photographers while he was working on a story about BP. The video also shows police giving the photog's personal information to a BP security guard - apparently refineries are a special arm of government. ProPublica

3. Let the outsourcing begin: Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, plans to design papers out of five strategically located hubs. No word yet on whether this means laying off local designers and copy editors. Gannett Blog

4. Track the Gulf Oil spill with AP's spillmeter. AP

Court calls bulls#*t on FCC expletive rule

A federal appeals court has thrown out a Federal Communications Commission rule that allowed the government to levy huge fines on broadcasters when even a single expletive was uttered on a live show. The court said the 2004 policy was unconstitutionally vague.

 From the AP:

"By prohibiting all 'patently offensive' references to sex, sexual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what 'patently offensive' means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive," the appeals court wrote.

"To place any discussion of these vast topics at the broadcaster's peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship of valuable material which should be completely protected under the First Amendment," it added.

The FCC policy was put in place after a January 2003 NBC broadcast of the Golden Globes awards show, in which U2 lead singer Bono uttered the phrase "f------ brilliant." The FCC said the F-word in any context "inherently has a sexual connotation" and can lead to enforcement.

Man on the street

Over a seven-year span, Tom Graham, a journalism professor at City College of San Francisco, walked every street in San Francisco. He writes about the experience here.

Ask them if they want to buy an ad while you're at it...

Some media critics have never liked the idea that newspapers insulate their newsrooms from the business side of the operation. In the critic's mind, this unnatural division has created rooms full of dreamy, soft-headed writers and editors who, in their veal-like state, simply don't get the pressures real people (such as publishers and ad managers) face in the real world - as though prohibiting reporters from taking story ideas from the advertising staff makes them unable to comprehend where the money for paychecks come from.

Of course, journalists are no more ignorant about, or insensitive to, financial issues than anyone else who doesn't make enough money to have a mortgage or a diversified stock portfolio. It's not the line drawn around advertising that keeps journalists in the dark, it's insufficient salaries. If journalists aren't watching the market, it's because they can't afford to be in it.

But even that is a stereotype - one that holds truer for younger reporters; not so much for veterans who cover complicated financial matters, from area real estate and business deals to government budgets and pension funds.

Which is why the argument, made by some media watchers, that removing the wall separating business and news we will create an entrepreneurial journalists better able to hopscotch through the fractured mediascape, and keep their own publications thriving, is complete nonsense. Unemployment and shifting opportunities will inspire the so-called "entrepreneurial" journalist. But no reporter benefits from learning how to tie stories to big ad buys, or write compelling advertorials, or keep the "important people" happy. This isn't going to remake journalism more authentic or more valuable.

One way newspapers are accelerating the business-editorial mashup is to employ editor-publisher hybrids. Already big in MediaNews Group's LANG chain, the role seems to be catching on and is likely to trickle own the management ladder.

Michael Sigman at Huffington Post writes about some of the predictable consequences when business and editorial freely mix. His examples, including the recent Los Angeles Times' "Despicable" ad wrap and a firing at the Chicago Reader, drive home the point that when the wall is removed, only one side compromise and only one side benefits.

If publications want to blow up the boxes and rewrite the standards by which they operate, then by all means experiment - honestly and transparently - and see how readers react. But don't rationalize that it's going to lead to better coverage. Shifting/blurring the line is simply shifty/blurry ethics.

Reporters, editors down; audience development managers up

A survey of newspaper industry salaries done by the Inland Press Association found that, on average, workers made 1.42 percent less in 2010 than in 2009. Salaries could have dropped even further had newspapers not laid so many workers off.

The priorities of newspaper publishers become evident when the numbers are analyzed further. Editors, for example, saw their salaries drop 4.6 percent. Reporters lost between 1 and 2 percent. Even publishers lost out, dropping 2.1 percent from the year before.

The increases came on the sales side. Audience development managers, who presumably study ways to boost circulation and web hits, saw their salaries rise an average of 10 percent while national advertising managers saw a 12 percent gain.

The actor as the artist at MOCA

The New Yorker writes about actor James Franco's recent trip to the Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue, where he played a deranged artist on "General Hospital" who used an installation at the MOCA facility to lure a fake hitman to Los Angeles.

Four in the morning

1. The Great Recession means good skating in busted boom towns like Fresno. California is a place

2. The rich are different from you and me. They're deadbeats. NYT

3. Post-McChrystal era: The Defense Department clamps down hard on press coverage of the military. Stars and Stripes

4. "Despicable" ad in the LA Times. LAO

Waiting for the bad

LA Observed's Kevin Roderick anticipates bad things in tomorrow's Los Angeles Times. LAO

Tracking down the "Grim Sleeper"

LA Weekly crime reporter Christine Pelisek will be on tonight's "Which Way, LA?" to talk about how "familial DNA" led to the arrest of Lonnie David Franklin Jr. in the case of the "Grim Sleeper" serial killer. Pelisek was the first to report that the killer was still on the loose in South Los Angeles two decades after the first murder. Show starts at 7 p.m. on 89.9 KCRW. WWLA

Keeping us safe from a free press

Today's "To The Point" is about the new "safety zone" established by the Coast Guard that blocks reporters and photographers from getting close enough to the Gulf spill zone to do their job effectively. The show was produced by Katie Cooper. TTP

5.4-magnitude earthquake hits So Cal

A magnitude 5.4 earthquake hit at 4:53 p.m. Pacific about 30 miles south of Palm Springs. The temblor shook Silver Lake pretty good.

Beverly Hills Courier is anti-LAT

Somehow I don't think the Beverly Hills Courier is a destination paper even for laid-off Los Angeles Times reporters. But just in case, the Courier has made clear in its online help-wanted ad that former full-time staffers "need not apply." Interestingly, the small daily pays better than many of the larger MediaNews Group newspapers in Los Angeles. fishbowlLA

Building walls around Time

Online readers will now only see abridged articles on the Time magazine website, unless they have a subscription of the iPad app, Peter Kafka at All Things Digital reports. Kafka doesn't think much of the paywall strategy:

Nearly every magazine publisher with a substantial Web site swears that their online audience is different than their print readers. And their sites are certainly designed that way: They’re supposed to attract twitchy Web surfers who want to read about something that happened today, not seven days ago.


So if that’s the case, what the’s real downside in keeping the magazine stuff free? Maybe that online/offline split isn’t as real as we’ve been told.

Four today

1. Dan Gillmor says the press needed to say "torture" more. Salon

2. Paywalls won't pay, according to Clay Shirky. Guardian

3. Public radio on the web. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. The L.A. Times goes app happy. Press release

Agenda journalism

In an earlier post, I stated my opinion that the Dave Weigel affair is less interesting for what it says about Weigel and the Washington Post than what it says about the inevitable celebrification of bloggers. But Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Lab points out that, in this case, it may be more about the role raw partisan agendas increasingly play in America's newsrooms.

Benton read through Weigel's account of his firing from the Post and picked up on the fact that Weigel is part of a class of reporters who entered journalism through internships paid by ideological groups - in Weigel's case, the Collegiate Network.

Benton writes:

I was familiar with the Collegiate Network from my own college days; it funded a conservative publication on campus, and that’s what I thought the extent of their work was. But I didn’t realize that it also pays for journalists to work at mainstream news organizations.

-snip-


The Collegiate Network describes these jobs as year-long fellowships, with stipends of $24,000 to $30,000 paid by CN, and along with USA Today lists Roll Call among outlets where it’s placed journalists. Their Wikipedia page also lists a wide variety of conservative publications and outlets, but also US News & World Report. The application form also lists the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the News & Observer, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and my old paper The Dallas Morning News — although that form doesn’t differentiate between summer internships and the year-long fellowships. And based on this post, fellows aren’t just on the editorial board — they’re also writing news stories.

Lonely (maybe) , but not alone

The Economist photoshopped a picture of President Obama to make him look like a lonely man on an oil-tainted beach.

BP means "blocking photographers"

ProPublica reports that one of its photographers, working on an investigative story in Texas City, Texas, was detained by local police and British Petroleum security guards after taking pictures near a BP refinery. BP, of course, is responsible for the Deepwater Horizon well that blew on April 20, killing 11 people and subsequently spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf.

From the story:

The photographer, Lance Rosenfield, said that shortly after arriving in town, he was confronted by a BP security officer, local police and a man who identified himself as an agent of the Department of Homeland Security. He was released after the police reviewed the pictures he had taken on Friday and recorded his date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information.

The police officer then turned that information over to the BP security guard under what he said was standard procedure, according to Rosenfield.

No charges were filed.

Rosenfield, an experienced freelance photographer, said he was detained shortly after shooting a photograph of a Texas City sign on a public roadway. Rosenfield said he was followed by a BP employee in a truck after taking the picture and blocked by two police cars when he pulled into a gas station.

According to Rosenfield, the officers said they had a right to look at photos taken near secured areas of the refinery, even if they were shot from public property. Rosenfield said he was told he would be "taken in" if he declined to comply.

This kind of bullshit has been going on since the Gulf oil spill began.

Four in the morning

1. The bathroom at the Santa Monica Pier is a finalist in the "America's Best Restroom" contest (and, yes, there's a blog). Cintas Corporation

2. Pomona City Hall is all about public service. A Pomona Councilwoman resigned her seat only to get reappointed to it by her colleagues, all part of a stunt to boost her public retirement pay. Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

3. Slake editor Laurie Ochoa, formerly of the LA Weekly, talks about the effort to put out a high-quality, printed literary magazine in the age of the Internet. WWLA?

4. Texas journalism is getting smaller, as Hearst makes the first moves toward consolidation at its Houston and San Antonio papers. Poynter

LA Times attacks its own image*

The Los Angeles Times has, once again, sold an ad that's designed to look like a real story. Charles Apple, LAO

*Update: The five members of the County Board of Supervisors signed a letter to Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell to protest the ad.

Al Qaeda prefers print

The Al Qaeda terrorist network has launched a new English-language magazine called "Inspire" that includes such varied content as "The Cartoon Crusade," "From Usama to Obama," and "Open Source Jihad." There's also a how-to section that promises to show readers how to "make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom." Marc Ambinder has some pages posted here.