LA Times goes back to school

Graduate students at USC's journalism school will become contributors to the newly revived homicide blog at the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper announced today. From the Times:

Under the partnership, students from USC will write dispatches for the Homicide Report. Among the goals is to provide more content for the blog and to offer crime-reporting experience to student journalists from Neon Tommy, the publication of Annenberg Digital News.

Marc Cooper and Alan Mittelstaedt will be heading up the effort on USC's side.

This is the second time the Times and USC have worked together on news coverage. Last year, the Times enlisted the USC College of Letters and Sciences to help conduct a series of polls on attitudes in California.

Cooper the Prosector

Marc Cooper details what's gone wrong at the L.A. Weekly. Some of it might sound familiar to other Southland journalists.

A short excerpt:

Perhaps the most iconic moment in the Weekly’s descent was the forced move last year from its birthplace town of Hollywood to a sterile warehouse-like building next to a 405 off-ramp in Culver City. This would be tantamount to moving the New York Times across the river to Hoboken. I'm no softie on the counter-culture, but the uprooting of the paper from its nest on Sunset Boulevard was a clear sign from management that it had absolutely no interest in the ethos, tradition or soul of the paper. It had become nothing more than a widget.

The results of all this? Fairly catastrophic, I would say. And that’s with the full-on debacle yet to come. The L.A. Weekly press run is currently down about 30% or more from its peak of 210,000. That means they can't even give away as many copies as in the past. The weekly number of printed pages has fallen to just above 100 when in the past it hovered at and beyond 200 (once even touching 352 pages). Even special editions, ones that carry years of tradition and loyalty, like the recent restaurant edition, are but shadows of the past. One of the most savvy of long-time New Times watchers once told me -- years ago-- "the guys who run these newspapers run them like they already know the shut-down date." It seems they now might finally get their wish.

Berthelsen lands at the DJ*, **

Just three weeks after Alan Mittelstaedt quit his job as associate editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal over differences with the new boss, the paper has named his replacement.

Christian Berthelsen, recently laid off from the Los Angeles Times' Orange County bureau, will take the editing reins at the legal journal. Berthelsen distinguished himself as an investigative reporter at the Times and even did a stint in the paper's Baghdad bureau, but this will be his first gig as an editor. Berthelsen worked at the San Francisco Chronicle before coming to the Times.

*UPDATE: A 1996 story from AJR says Berthelsen worked at City News Services, which apparently is where he met DJ Managing Editor David Houston. It also mentions Berthelsen's father, John Berthelsen, who covered Vietnam for Newsweek and did reporting for the Sacramento Bee.

**UPDATE II: A bit more background on Berthelsen... He actually did two stints in the LAT's Baghdad bureau... Before heading to the Chronicle he did a fair bit of reporting for local publications, working for CNS, the Santa Monica Outlook and the Glendale News-Press. He also freelanced for the New York Times and, in 2002, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Mittelstaedt out at DJ

Alan Mittelstaedt has quit his job as associate editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. He gave notice this morning.

Mittelstaedt's sudden departure caps a tumultuous few weeks at the legal paper, starting with the ouster of Editor Marty Berg. It was Berg who hired Mittelstaedt back in August, with the hope that he'd bring with him the muckraking journalism he'd practiced at LA CityBeat and the LA Weekly.

From all accounts Mittelstaedt was popular with the reporting staff, but he decided to move on after a change in editorial leadership.

Comings and goings

Alan Mittelstaedt joins the Daily Journal as associate editor (via LA Observed).