Four today

1. Historian D.J. Waldie dismisses Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf's I-Heart-New York critique of Los  Angeles County, saying to view the county as a tangled web of corrupt and confused jurisdictions is a simplistic misunderstanding of the region's history.

2. You know you're getting old when ... The new AP political editor is four years younger than you are. Romenesko

3. Speaking of AP, the business staff doesn't have much good to say about the AP business editor. Romenesko

4. As you might have heard, a group calling itself Lulzsec hacked the PBS website to show its displeasure at the Frontline report on Wikileaks. Boing Boing

Florida dislikes public broadcasting

Florida Governor Rick Scott has eliminated all state funding for public broadcasting, amounting to a $4.7 million, the St. Petersburg Times reports. From the story:

The GOP-dominated Florida legislature had already budgeted a 30 percent reduction in the funds provided to the state's 26 non-profit public radio and TV stations, forcing organizations scrambling to deal with a long-expected downturn in donations and memberships to conserve further. But Scott's veto zeroes out funding completely, ending a funding arrangement which has stood for 35 years, beginning with the start of the state's fiscal year on July 1.

McClatchy sells Miami Herald property to casino developer

A Malaysian casino company has bought the beachfront property that houses the Miami Herald for $236 million. McClatchy, which owns the Herald, said the newspaper will be moved to a new home sometime in the next two years. The developer plans to build a resort with retail and housing components.

NYSE says trading floor trademark protected

The New York Stock Exchange sent the editors of Talking Points Memo a cease-and-desist letter to stop the online publication from using wire photos of the trading floor. The NYSE argues that the floor is trademarked, so any images of the floor are a violation of NYSE's trademark rights. Which is nonsense. TPM republished the photo that triggered the threat letter, alongside a sassy blog post from TPM Editor Josh Marshall.

A return from the rapture

New duties at work have led to (an obvious) slowdown on the blog. Hopefully I'll find my rhythm again in a few weeks.Until then, here are some links to tide you over:

1. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg only eats the meat that he kills. He's taken to cutting goat and pig throats in a nod to sustainable farming. CNNMoney

2. NPR wants to know your platform preferences. NPR

3. "Long tails" in support of long tales online. Nieman Lab

4. AOL-Huffington Post announces a financial reporting team and a Canada-theme. Huffington Post (via LA Observed)

5. FishbowlLA co-editor Pandora Young said on Facebook that she got threats of legal retribution for reporting what people said about Finke. The "offending" post is here: FishbowlLA

6. Food writing, like all other forms of writing, is being changed by social media, Internet platforms, and dying newspapers. Poynter

7. You'll go broke going broke. Tribune Co. has paid $157 million to lawyers, bankers and advisers working on its bankruptcy case. WSJ

Four before the Apocalypse

1. Icahn has newz. Poynter

2. Google gives up on news print. Boston Phoenix

3. Ebersol is out at NBC. LA Times

4. Remember the time in Tora Bora when we almost got him (long before we did) Reporter in Exile

LA Observed website (was) down*, **

Culture and media blog LA Observed is down temporarily. The screen capture below is what's in place of the content, and the header up top says "account suspended." I'd visited the site just over an hour ago and saw no signs of trouble. Could be nothing more than a technical problem.

*Update: I'm told it is a tech issue and the editor, Kevin Roderick, is working on a fix.

**Update II: Voila. Site is back up as 12:47 p.m.

Four Monday

The Los Angeles Press Club nominees are set. Some categories look surprisingly uncompetitive, but maybe that's not new. LAPC (.pdf)

2. As public media go online, the line that used to separate public and private sometimes blurs. PBS viewers, for instance, will see 15 and 30 second commercials if they watch PBS shows online. This should worry people depend on public television and public radio to avoid the pressures private companies have as they compete for ad dollars. PBS has already gotten into trouble over commercials from Goldman Sachs. Romenesko and PBS Ombudsman

3. Joe Biden goes a courtin' in the White House press room. NY Magazine

4. Turning every experience into a digital pose. NPR

More furloughs for LANG

LANG employees will have to endure yet another round of furloughs. Fred Hamilton, CEO and publisher of the nine-newspaper chain, sent a memo today telling employees that they must take 5 unpaid furlough days between May 16 and July 2. LANGers will also stop accruing vacation between these dates.

For Hamilton to hastily order furloughs to be taken over such a short period of time indicates just how much pressure the company must be under to boost its bottom line before the end of the fiscal year (June 30). Indeed, Hamilton says in the same memo that LANG employees will be able to take an additional 5 paid holidays in the next fiscal year to make up for the short-term pain.

This leads me to wonder if this dramatic, last-minute action is related to a possible deal to buy the Orange County Register. LANG's parent company, MediaNews Group, is in a bidding war with the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, to buy the Register.

It's also likely the chain is simply trying avoid further layoffs, given the revenue demands of some of its investor owners, who agreed to swallow $765 million of debt as MediaNews emerged from bankruptcy last year. The furloughs and vacation freeze come a week after layoffs at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Hamilton said the latest actions should keep future pink slips to a trickle:

...today's action does not preclude other cost reduction measures including and not limited to reductions-in-force. At this time such actions will likely be limited and will continue to be an expense reduction alternative until the economy and our performance measurably improves.

As expressed in the past, we regret any inconvenience this action may cause you but until our financial challenges are clearly behind us, such actions are necessary.

The full memo is here.

(This post was edited)

Layoffs at the North County Times and Californian

The North County Times and The Californian have laid off twenty workers between them, according to the Press-Enterprise. The Lee-owned papers cover parts of San Diego and Riverside counties. The layoffs hit multiple departments; the story does not say how many newsroom employees got the axe. Said the dejected source who emailed me the article, "A few years ago people actually cared about stuff like this..."

Dakota to the Daily News

Dakota Smith, the editor at Curbed LA, has taken a job as general assignment reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News. Here's the announcement (via LA Observed).