Four Thursday

1. Science writer Thomas Maugh departed the Los Angeles Times in what is expected to be an unrelenting month of layoffs and buyouts at the paper. LAO

2. Alan Mutter remains bearish on the newspaper business, despite all the cutbacks. Mutter

3. The Onion wants a paywall, but the Washington Post wants to stay free (for now). Romenesko

4. Gannett's Florida Today laid off 25 percent of its newsroom, bringing the total number of employees to 57. Gannett Blog

Four Monday

1. The New Yorker has made more than $1.2 million on its iPad app. Apparently, some people still want to read. NYT

2. There's no future in pork bellies. NYT

3. How LA Times environmental writer Margot Roosevelt learned she was losing her job. LAO

4. Professional food journalists feeling pressure from the amateurs. Poynter

Layoffs at the LA Times

The pink slips were expected, but that doesn't make them any more welcome.

LA Observed reports that columnist Tim Rutten, environmental writer Margot Roosevelt and NBA writer Mark Heisler are among the staffers laid off by the Times. About a dozen newsroom layoffs are expected and poor ad revenues are said to be to blame.

Layoffs and leavings at the Daily News

The Los Angeles Daily News newsroom got a little smaller this week. Online content producer Cliff Redding and web producer/designer Tom Gapen received layoff notices. A third person, from circulation, also got a pink slip. The latter layoff was mentioned last week.

Additionally, the city editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, John Miller, is leaving the paper to teach high school English in Kuwait, according to a memo obtained by LA Observed.

(Corrections: Original post had Mr. Redding's and Mr. Gapen's titles wrong.)

Four Tuesday

1. News Corp.-owned MySpace is about to be sold for an astonishingly low $30 million and will probably devoured (half the staff could be laid off). No one is surprised. And no one has heard of the potential buyers. All Things D

2. The merging and consolidating at AOL-Huffington Post begins in earnest this summer. Many of the AOL landing sites will be folded into Huffington Post - Politics Daily gets rolled into HuffPost Politics, for example. As a result AOL's brands will drop from 53 to 20 and HuffPost will expand from 28 to 36 sections. TechCrunch

3. AOL's streamlining reminded me of a 2009 post I wrote. Maybe I was on to something. Reporter G

4. The New York Times Co. has partnered with USC to offer online extension courses. This is about branding and making money. Only one of the 40 courses has to do with journalism. Inside Higher Ed (found via LA Observed)

Four Wednesday

1. More layoffs at the Oregonian, though not on the news side. Willamette Week

2. Online journalism lets you feel the pleasures of being a rodent inside a plastic ball. Wired

3. Pandora Radio follows Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, GroupOn and Twitter into the tech bubble that's not a bubble. NYT Dealbook

4. LA>Forward goes dark because of cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. LA Observed

From hell

James O'Shea, who was fired in January 2008 as editor of the Los Angeles Times, has a new book out later this month called "The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers." A companion website is coming soon.

The book is a retelling of the history that led to a disastrous merger between the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the layoffs and bankruptcy that followed. I have a copy on my desk - it was delivered late Friday - but I haven't read it yet. The chapter titles give one a good sense of what's inside, as "Otis Chandler's Legacy" gets tarnished by "Market-Driven Journalism" and the inevitable march to "Zell Hell" begins.

"It would be easy to condemn the people who caused this modern tragedy as venal and evil," O'Shea writes in the preface. "Thousands of friends and colleagues the world over have lost jobs because of the way the industry has been managed. Some were venal, all right. But most of the people who led newspapers to this point in history were smart and thoughtful. They thought they were doing the right thing, and that's what makes the story of what happened so terrifying. It shows disaster could happen to anyone in any industry."

The book will be out June 28.

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.

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).

Possible layoffs in Orange County (updated*)

I'm told the Orange County Register laid off at least one newsroom employee, a photographer, yesterday and LA Observed has reported that buyouts and possible layoffs were brought up at the paper's staff meeting Thursday. I'm also told that bought-out employees are being asked to sign an agreement not to go work for competing media outlets. More when/if I get it.

*Update: Here's a posting on sportsjournalist.com that appears to explain what happened at the Register. Boiled down, nine laid off from the newsroom:

The ax dropped at The Orange County Register again on Thursday as nine associates in the newsroom were laid off. Another six from elsewhere in the building are expected to be let go in the near future. 

Sports was hammered, losing three -- two writers and one copy editor -- Curtis Zupke (Ducks, golf), Chris Tobolski (preps) and Alan Petersen (copy desk). 

The other six were a photog, news copy editor, advertorial writer, two Web editors and another desk editor who already announced his upcoming retirement. 

Layoffs were solely OCR, not Freedom-wide. Apparently there is a rumor that the OCR newsroom was the second largest in the state, behind only the L.A. Times and ahead of bigger papers in San Diego and the Bay Area. So corporate slashed based on that.

There's nothing said about a non-compete agreement.

Four today

1. Media companies making billions by convincing the masses to whitewash their fences - for free. NYT

2. Glenn Greenwald doesn't like Jim Rainey telling Anderson Cooper not to use the word "liar". Salon

3. Jimmy Orr, former internet strategist for President George W. Bush, was promoted to managing editor, online, at the Los Angeles Times. LAO

4. Huffington Post writer Jason Linkins says he gets a paycheck and has deadlines, so there's no need to pay the bloggers. HuffPo

Four today

1. It's about to get more crowded on Gmail. Searchengineland (via Nieman Lab)

2. I'm a little late on this... but Times food writer Mark Bittman is making his exit. NYT

3. The NYT public editor responds to LAT environmental editor Geoff Mohan over a story that questions the latter paper's mojo. Poynter

4. The man who bought a newspaper company with other people's money, and then ended up in bankruptcy court, doesn't want to be "the media's bitch anymore". LA Observed

Four in the morning

1. The Pearl Project has completed its investigation into the murder of Daniel Pearl. Key finding: "Twenty-seven men were allegedly involved in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl, but only four have been charged and convicted." The rest of the report is here: Pearl Project (found via LA Observed)

2. 25 essential writing tips you may or may not agree with. Guardian

3. NPR and its 1.4 million Facebook fans. Nieman Journalism Lab

4. The USC j-school news site Neon Tommy is having an open house "today from 3-4 p.m. in the West Lobby of the Annenberg School. All are welcome."

New Yorker profiles AOL and Patch

New Yorker media writer Ken Auletta has written a profile of AOL and its effort to become a major online content provider (i.e., online news operation) - including the recent explosion Patch sites around the country. Auletta's assessment isn't kind, saying the content is "piffle."

Here's how PaidContent summarizes Auletta's view of Patch (New Yorker story is subscription only):

Patch, which Auletta puts at 700 outlets and has 750-plus now, is too much like “digital Yellow Pages” plus has tension between journalism and boosterism—and probably costs too much to last at an estimated $30 million a quarter.

The hectic effort to get Patch to the 750 number before the close of 2010 certainly had an effect on quality - something the managers of Patch admitted internally. Whether AOL has a strategy to turn this around, now that it has numbers, remains the central question. Auletta doesn't think it will. Again, from PaidContent:

AOL gets points for hiring hundreds of journalists for Patch and hiring some talented journalists overall, but loses some for failing to hire an editor in chief. It also loses some for losing reporters. AOL refugee Jeff Bercovici told Auletta one reason he switched to Forbes.com was to get his calls returned but also cited the pressure to reverse a downward trend. And this was written when FanHouse was an AOL brand; late last week Armstrong announced plans to outsource most of sports, health and real estate. Auletta’s take: AOL does not seem to be saving journalism, and journalism does yet seem to be saving AOL.” He carefully leaves the door ajar for that possibility but clearly doesn’t expect it.

 The New York Times had a story yesterday that gives us a glimpse of the Patch metrics (found via LA Observed):

Traffic on individual sites is low; former editors say that the average post attracts just 100 views and that they considered 500 page views a wild success. But the overall traffic is growing quickly.

In December, Patch had just over three million unique visitors, 80 times that of a year earlier, according to comScore.

Yet over the years, a number of so-called hyperlocal news sites have failed, and the idea is largely unproved financially.

Four today

1. Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma") and Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") will join KCRW's Evan Kleiman on February 9 at USC to talk about the way we feed ourselves. LA Weekly

2. KOCE has rebranded itself PBS SoCal and plans to expand its staff in Los Angeles as it becomes the main PBS affiliate in Southern California, taking over from the PBS divorcee KCET. Franklin Avenue (via LA Observed)

3. When ordered to turn over information about several users in connection with the federal investigation of Wikipedia, Twitter successfully challenged the court's gag order and told the subjects of the investigation what had happened. Wired

4. Media organizations need to update their codes of ethics to keep up with the times. Poynter

Four in the morning

1. A welcome respite from the Larry King love fest: "As refreshing as it has been that King generally checked his politics at the door, it also happens that he sometimes left his brain there too." LAT (via LA Observed)

2. The deal that gave the Tribune Co. to Sam Zell, and landed the company in bankruptcy, also made many executive rich(er). The Chicago Reader got a list - and points out that the bankruptcy court might claw back some or all of it. Chicago Reader

3. The whitewashed wall at MOCA that the LA Downtown News first reported on is finally starting to get the attention it deserves. fishbowlLA

4. The Rolling Stone website is no longer a complete mess. fishbowlLA

Four in the morning

1. The Caltech men's basketball team looks to break an epic streak before hitting 300. NYT

2. Still more AOL Patch sites launch. LA Observed

3. The NY Times rolls out its census map just in time for the new census data. NYT

4. Writing ad copy for Oswald's coffin. Pasadena Star-News

Four in the morning

1. The MOCA whitewash story is waiting to break nationally. fishbowlLA

2. The battle over the Hollywood farmer's market. Which Way, LA?

3. AOL's Patch opens another shop in Long Beach. LA Observed

4. Huffington Post says it will turn a profit. Bloomberg