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. God is dead... No, wait. The mainstream media is dead, and Andrew Breitbart is coming to collect the body (just as soon as that thing with James O'Keefe is taken care of). NPR

2. The Los Angeles Times shuffles a few editorial positions and hires former Daily News sports reporter Steve Dilbeck to blog about the Dodgers. LAO

3. The Twitter bullies are out. Nick Bilton at the New York Times is highly offended that New Yorker writer George Packer is leery of the new "information economy" that comes in the form of Tweets. NYT (Packer's original post)

4. The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has honored five journalists: Celeste Fremon of WitnessLA, Denise Nix of the Daily Breeze, Claudia Peschiutta of KNX 1070, Dave Lopez of CBS2/KCAL9, and Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times. SPJ

The corrections

A finger-pointing session broke out this week in the L.A. blogosphere.

Patterico claims James Rainey at the Los Angeles Times got only one side (the wrong one) in the ACORN saga ... Celeste Fremon at WitnessLA calls some of the coverage in the LA Weekly "cringe-makingly slanted" ... new LA Weekly blogger Dennis Romero points out a few mistakes in Neon Tommy's feature on the incoming editor ... and fishbowlLA slaps back at the Weekly for getting so defensive about Neon Tommy's take.

(And most of these links come via LA Observed)

Bad connection

A New York Times incorrectly linked a race-based riot at the California Institute for Men in Chino with a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that ordered prisons to stop segregating prison populations by race, according to a report on Witness LA.

Four in the morning

1. The corrections, NYT edition. Gawker

2. The LAPD, police union and mayor of LA rely on bad statistics and an erroneous study to prove that the early release of prisoners will launch a crime wave. Witness LA

3. The not-so-black-and-white of race relations and racial profiling in America. NYT

4. Is Ann Arbors new online only paper forward thinking? Or a convenient way to mask a major slash and burn job? Chicago Tribune

Breaking up isn't hard to do

A fed up Celeste Fremon of Witness LA kicks the Los Angeles Times off her curb:

I’ve subscribed faithfully to the LA Times for over 30 years and, with great regret, I just this minute cancelled my subscription.

-snip-

Unfortunately, the LA Times management seems to possess neither optimism—cautious or otherwise—nor a feel for anything resembling innovation (that awful Abrams man, most prominently included).

So I broke up with them.

Like most break-ups, it hurts.

But, while painful—as is always the case—finally doing the honest thing is a relief.

And now I can respect myself in the morning.