A Morales' tale

Press-Telegram boxing-beat writer Robert Morales, who used to stop by the Pasadena Star-News offices fairly regularly, is one of the nicest reporters I ever worked with - proving that former gang members are generally less uptight than most journalists. The P-T has a nice profile of Morales in today's paper. The story leads with the rough stuff.

Here's a snippet:

"I'm so lucky to be alive," says Morales, a 53-year-old Long Beach Press-Telegram sportswriter whose popular weekly boxing column appears in this newspaper and seven other MediaNews Group ones in Southern California.

Boxing is a sport rife with tough guys with mean backgrounds. But I doubt any of those men Morales has been chronicling for the past 16 years lived a more self-destructive existence than he once did when he engaged not only in gang-banging but also in frightening levels of alcoholic consumption.

At 15, Morales was one of the founders of an outfit called West Covina Trese, and routinely began getting into rumbles with rivals from nearby cities.

More popups, comments coming to LA Times.com

Readers will soon be able to comment on selected stories and photos at the Los Angeles Times website, according to a memo from Editor Russ Stanton to staff. In addition, the paper plans to embed advertising links (those pesky green links that often bring up a pop-up window for some product or other) in the text of non-news stories as a way to make money. LA Observed has the full here.

Small gains in the SGV

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Whittier Daily News reported small circulation gains in the last six months, according to the latest ABC numbers. The Tribune, which didn't report on last year's circulation losses, carried a story yesterday about the increases:

[The] Whittier Daily News posted a total paid daily circulation of 14,129 in March, up 3.5 percent from 13,645 a year earlier, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune's daily circulation rose 0.5 percent to 36,041 compared with 35,867 in March of last year.

The third paper in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, the Pasadena Star-News, saw circulation slip 0.3 percent to 25,410.

Police search Gizmodo editor's home*

In the ongoing investigation into how Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog got hold of a prototype of Apple's next generation iPhone, police in Fremont, California, raided the home of editor Jason Chen and seized computers, cellphones, digital cameras, an iPad and other gadgets.

Business Insider has Chen's firsthand account of the raid here.

*Updated: New York Times gets a response from Gawker:

Gawker’s chief operating officer, Gaby Darbyshire, said it expected the immediate return of the computers and servers.

“Under both state and federal law, a search warrant may not be validly issued to confiscate the property of a journalist,” she wrote in a letter to San Mateo County authorities on Saturday. “Jason is a journalist who works full time for our company,” she continued, adding that he works from home, his “de facto newsroom.”

OC Register shrinks again

According to the SportsJournalists.com message board, the Orange County Register eliminated 30 positions this month, including 10 from the content side. Of those, seven were open positions that were eliminated. Three people were fired, including UCLA sports reporter Al Balderas.

From poster "playthrough":

This comes shortly after the fourth-quarter economic targets were achieved and everybody received bonuses. But in 2009, there was a one-week furlough and a 5 percent pay cut. And, currently, the entire floor of the building that houses the Content staff is undergoing a significant remodeling projected rumored to be in the $500,000 range.

Also, Freedom's bankruptcy, which previously had received court approval, is supposed to be finalized next week.

Keep in mind that the posted information comes from an anonymous source. I decided to link to it since the message thread includes a memo from OC Register editor Ken Brusic that mentions furloughs and possible layoffs. If I get any further information or corrections, I will post them prominently.

Four in the morning

1. In the new media world, everyone loves "collaboration" - but is it really worth the hassle? Nieman Journalism Lab

2. L.A. writer Nicky Loomis offers an updated take on dating etiquette, in the era of pervasive online sharing and TMI texting. Pasadena Star-News

3. Pasadena-expat Todd Ruiz tracks the rise of the anti-government Reds in Thailand. Reporter in Exile

4. Finding an audience for "hyperlocal" in Chicago. TechCrunch

In your face

The managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier used his column and his Pulitzer Prize win to settle old and new scores with the Washington Post. (via Romenesko)

The Goldman Sachs connection

Gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman trade charges over their connections to Goldman Sachs, which is being sued for fraud by the SEC. Whitman had direct financial ties, Brown had a somewhat tangential relationship via his time as mayor of Oakland. The Los Angeles Times looks at Whitman; California Watch looks at Brown.

Circulation drop*, **

The average weekday circulation for the daily newspapers fell 8.7 percent over the last six months, according to the most recent ABC report.

Of the big papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and Dallas Morning News did the worst, dropping 22.6 percent and 21.4 percent, respectively. The Washington Post and USA Today also saw double-digit declines, with the Post down 13.1 percent and USA Today dropping 13.6 percent. The New York Times beat the average, but only slightly, with a drop of 5.1 percent.

The Wall Street Journal was the only major newspaper to see a bump in circulation, though by less than 1 percent. Most of the increase was attributed to a boost in the paper's online subscription base.

*Added from LA Observed: [The] San Diego Union-Tribune ... saw its circulation plunge 23%**. The Los Angeles Times lost 14.7% to reach 616,606 daily (down 7.6% Sunday to 941,914.)

**CORRECTION: As a reader correctly pointed out, the numbers for the Union-Tribune are wrong. The San Diego daily saw its circulation drop 8.7 percent

Bangkok explosions

At least five explosion hit Bangkok, killing one and wounding 75 others, according to the New York Times.

Reporter in Exile blogger Todd Ruiz, former Pasadena Star-News reporter turned expat, is providing updates here.

The "like" revolution

Facebook users probably have noticed the recent explosion of "like" buttons on various Facebook pages, and now a new "like" plugin is popping up on other media sites. When clicked, the reader's interest in whatever he's reading or seeing will be automatically posted to his personal Facebook page.

From Time:

Facebook wants every page on the Web to have a "like" button, which they released at the conference. Each time you indicate you like something, that information is fed back to Facebook and then to the website you're on. Enough of your friends like the same restaurant on Yelp? You'll see that on Yelp.com and when you login to Facebook. Like this article? Click the like button on it and your friends may see your recommendation when they come to time.com.

What you "like" will also be shared with other databases, giving the web a way to read your preferences. This, of course, raises concerns about privacy. From the Atlantic:

Facebook will allow website developers to collect and use our information when we connect to a site. When I press the "like" button, that goes into a social clearinghouse of information. Other sites can see the articles I like on CNN, the music I like on Pandora, the food I like on Yelp ... and that's in addition to any information I make public on my Facebook profile. The Facebook team calls this application "Open Graph." You can call it the future of marketing.

Given Facebook's preeminent popularity online, this web within the Web could have Google-like implications for how information is shared and online ad dollars flow.

And since every website wants to be liked, expect to be inundated with overtures to share your attention and approval... Like this one I just got in my email box from ABC News: "Like ABCNews.com? Like Facebook? Check out our new integration: http://bit.ly/bEmqQ8"

All the world is a popularity contest.

Four in the morning

1. It's Earth Day: Buying green won't buy you absolution. Newsweek

2. How social pressure through social media closed the gap between "Web site" and "website". Bloggasm

3. The Journalism Shop is expanding its roster beyond former Los Angeles Times reporters and editors. Journalism Shop (via LA Observed)

4. Sometimes it takes an institution (the Boston Globe) to take on an institution (the Catholic Church). Nieman Journalism Lab

Shhh, it's not relevant if it's happening to us

The privately held Newshouse newspapers have suffered a steady drip of downsizing through buyouts over the last couple years, but the chain has tried to keep the news out of its own pages. Most recently, a columnist at the Birmingham News decided to write about the 20 or so reporters who walked out the paper's door and the effect it has had on morale and quality, only to have the column spiked by the editor for being too "funereal."

Such an information lock down is a double blow to newsrooms, which pride themselves on holding every institution accountable, including their own. And almost inevitably, information about buyouts and layoffs eventually gets out through other sources.

In this case, the Birmingham News column escaped the surly bonds of the internal news system and was published on Facebook, as well as other places. And now the whole controversy is the subject of a column at Poynter.

Airing the newz

Local television news is largely devoid of news in the first place. Now, KCBS has come up with a way to present non-news as news and get paid for it.

According to Jim Rainey at the LA Times, the station has begun running paid ads from the City of Hope Medical Center but presenting them with logos and branding that makes the ads look like they're a part of the newscast.

Rainey writes:

In other words, the line between editorial and advertising had been obscured again — with the hospital getting a nice chance to showcase a couple of its top people in a format that looked like news but was actually paid advertising.

Rainey says the blurry lines are nothing new to television news and its advertising plans:

When TV advertising managers go out to sell 30-second spots to potential clients, they sometimes offer a valuable added incentive: a news story. Buy an ad and suddenly you and your company can make the real news.

They call it "added value" advertising. The advertiser gets the "added value" of seeing its company flattered on programs that, at least nominally, are supposed to feature the most important events of the day. It's easy, it's synergistic, it's win-win … at least for the television station and the advertiser.

California country

Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation will host a Zócalo panel on Thursday, April 22 at the Autry National Center to discuss whether California would be better off as a country. The speakers are political consultant Darry Sragow, PoliPoint Press editor Peter Richardson and "Global California" author Abraham Lowenthal.

Cocoons or public squares?

A new study, summarized by David Brooks at the New York Times, challenges the notion that the Internet is driving us into ideological cocoons and might actually encourage us to take in a diversity of opinions. However, it might also be a convenient tool to help us reinforce our prejudices by navigating a fractious set of media and social sites.

Four in the morning

1. Wisconsin is set to pass a journalists' shield law. State Journal

2. "Revenue promiscuity" is the new buzz phrase for investigative journalism - but doesn't the number of partners you have, as in other types of promiscuous behavior, increase the risk of something going wrong? Nieman Journalism Lab

3. The Supreme Court overturns a law banning animal cruelty videos on free speech grounds. Wa Po

4. Forbes makes an offer many people can and should refuse. Gawker

Schiller on public radio's future

The team at Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Vivian Scihller, head of National Public Radio, about the nonprofit's "public media platform." Here's her description of it:

So the idea is: What if it wasn’t just NPR content, but a vast amount of public media content and data that could be available in a large — you know, sort of an API on steroids, a public media platform. Think about NPR content: all the content from the public radio stations, all the content from the other radio producers and distributors like PRI and APM and PRX, all the content from PBS. Now imagine all the content from the other new media players, all the new not-for-profits, like the ProPublicas of the world, and all the local, online journalism startups. And then you can go on and imagine data.

The full interview is here.

The newspaper death tax

Alan Mutter tried to buy obituary space in the San Francisco Chronicle and learned that it would cost $450 "for the one-day run of a crappy-looking, 182-word death notice." This kind of gouging is a disservice to the community and to the paper, he writes:

This practice is not only exploitive, but also strategically tone deaf, because it misses a terrific opportunity to cement reader loyalty to a newspaper.

Every country editor knows that names make news. Birth announcements, wedding announcements and death notices are the only ways most people ever get their names in the newspaper, an event that remains a big deal to all but the most jaded individuals. ...

While metros can’t fill their shrinking news holes with every birth, wedding or funeral, they can offer people a free place on their websites to self-chronicle the comings and goings of their families.

The full post is here.

The real Daryl Gates

In a guest post on LA Observed, former Los Angeles Times reporter David Cay Johnston remembers the secret intelligence unit the late Daryl Gates ran while chief of the LA Police Department. The Public Disorder Intelligence Division gathered information on elected leaders, liberals, civil rights activists and a whole host of people the department consider undesirable.

From the post:

Locally, people of interest had their homes, offices and cars burglarized. Some were tailed, sometimes quite openly to intimidate them, to make sure they knew they were being watched. None of that is in the generally solid obituary of Gates in the L.A. Times today. But there was much more to the story.

There were no limits to what Gates would do to feed his insatiable need for secret information.

There were undercover officers assigned to sleep with women to gather political information that went to Gates, who spent 45 minutes to several hours each week on his spy files. That last detail Gates admitted to under oath and was reported by an L.A. Times colleague and me in late 1982.

The full post is here.

I got a peek into this world when one of Gates' former lieutenants, Thomas Scheidecker, was hired as police chief for the city of Claremont. I worked as a reporter there at the time. When his past as an operative for the PDID was revealed, the city quickly rescinded the job offer.

The AP bows to the public will

From the AP Style Book Twitter feed:

Responding to reader input, we are changing Web site to website. This appears on Stylebook Online today and in the 2010 book next month.

Managed inspiration

Los Angeles Daily Journal Editor David Houston has once again admonished his editorial staff about showing up late to work. LA Observed has his latest memo telling reporters to get to work no later than 9 a.m. and then to email their editors with a summary of whatever they're working on by 9:15:

This daily email is not an option and your failure to send an email on time, or at all, is being noted.

In my experience, reporters react poorly to these sorts of arbitrary guidelines. But Houston says the reason he wants the early email updates - rather than have reporters walk over to their editors and talk in person - is to "spur deeper reporting."

I gave the email program two weeks when LAO first wrote of the morning deadlines. Shall we go for a month?

Blowing up the whistleblowers

The Obama administration has announced that it will prosecute a former NSA official for leaking sensitive information about wiretapping to a reporter. Glenn Greenwald at Salon makes a convincing argument that the decision to prosecute Thomas Drake for exposing "serious wrongdoing" to Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman, the administration has shown its priorities to be completely out of whack:

In other words, Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country.

Think about to whose interests the Obama DOJ is devoted given that -- while they protect the most profound Bush crimes based on the Presidential decree of "Look Forward, Not Backward" -- they chose this whistle-blower to prosecute[.]

Four in the morning

1. A grand jury has indicted a former National Security Agency executive for leaking classified information to a newspaper - neither the newspaper nor the subject of the leak is listed in the indictment. Could it be related to the NSA wiretapping story broken by the New York Times?* WaPo

2. The Los Angeles Times missed the final score of the LA Dodgers game because of earlier deadlines. LAO

3. Salon and McSweeney's partner up. Salon

4. 1965 was a different time: "The journalist enjoys good standing in his community. He is even likely to be held in awe." Pitch

*Probably not that story. Scott Shane of the New York Times says it sounds like a story written by former Baltimore Sun writer Siobhan Gorman.

Political list makers

The Capitol Weekly newspapers in Sacramento has listed the bottom half of the top 100 most influential people in California politics. At number 90, Charles Munger of Berkshire Hathaway. Here's the entry:

Perhaps nobody is causing more heartache for Speaker Nancy Pelosi than Charles Munger. The Stanford scientist and son of the Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway has made it his mission to take drawing Congressional districts out of the hands of the Legislature. He has dedicated millions to qualifying a measure for the November ballot to do just that. Congressional Democrats, fearing their incumbency threatened, have responded in kind with millions of their own.

Munger is also an owner of the Los Angeles/San Francisco Daily Journal, the state's leading legal newspaper (and a former employer of mine).

L.A. developer and mayoral aspirant Rick Caruso makes the list at number 57.

Journalists making a difference

Winning a Pulitzer Prize just wasn't enough for photograph Kim Komenich.

From the Chronicle:

On Monday, as Komenich was at a Wells Fargo Bank in downtown San Jose, he saw a teller being robbed and the suspect reaching for his pockets. Komenich walked up behind the suspect and held him in a bear hug until police arrived.

"Between classes, I go out there and do what I can do to make the world a little better for people," Komenich, 53, of Mill Valley quipped.

He can photograph a tall buildings in a single bound.

(photo from San Jose Police Department via SF Chronicle)

Tax day for Tea Parties

As tea party rallies spontaneously spring up around the state to protest tax day, the New York Times provides details about who supports the movement:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. ...

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

In addition, they're generally more angry than the average Republican, they support Medicare and Social Security even though they want to shrink the federal government, and a plurality think Sarah Palin is unqualified to be president.

The full story is here.

ABC News pollster Gary Langer has more on the Tea Party movement and why polls differ in gauging their support for the still fuzzy goals of the movement.

In related news, Politico's Ken Vogel found a link between Sacramento-based Russo Marsh + Rogers, a Republican political consultancy firm, and the Tea Party Express. The story confirms that some GOP operatives see the tea parties as a cash cow.

Making those dollars

The top 10 businesses on the Fortune 500 list are:

Wal-Mart
Exxon Mobil
Chevron
General Electric
Bank of America Corp.
ConocoPhillips
AT&T
Ford Motor
J.P Morgan Chase & Co.
Hewlett-Packard

As you ponder the billions of dollars they've made during the Great Recession, also consider this:

In 2009, the Fortune 500 shed 821,000 jobs, the biggest loss in its history -- almost 3.2% of its payroll.

And this:

The star of 2009 is undoubtedly health care. The sector's earnings jumped to an all-time high of $92 billion, placing it second behind tech at $94 billion.

Four today

1. Former LA Times reporter Bill Boyarsky lauds USC's online news site, Neon Tommy, as the future of IF Stoneian journalism (although I thought the name referred to something completely different). Truthdig

2. CNN's website expands - becomes even less relevant to me. Business Insider

3. Former Boston Globe reporter comes up with an unfortunate name to describe gripping stories. JLocal

4. Voice of San Diego wants to turn people into civic activists. Nieman Lab

2010 Pulitzer Prize winners

The Pulitzer committee has announced the winners for 2010. The Bristol Herald Courier in Virginia won the coveted public service award and the Seattle Times won for breaking news reporting. The investigative reporting prize went to two winners: the online nonprofit ProPublica working in collaboration with the New York Times Magazine, and the Philadelphia Daily News. The Washington Post won four awards, including best commentary, feature writing and international reporting. The New York Times won three awards, including for national reporting.

The full list is here.

Getting your Twitter on better

Twitter has launced the "Twitter Media" site to help journalists make better use of the social-media tool. TechCrunch

Fear of the fact-checker

The Sunday morning news show "This Week" on ABC has teamed with PolitiFact to do a post-interview fact-check of whatever claims are made by guests during the course of the program.

"Meet the Press" host David Gregory was asked if he'd support a similar arrangement on his show. He said he'd rather leave it up to the viewers to sort fact from fiction.

Which sounds like a weak way to rationalize that MTP didn't think of the fact-check idea first. But the question remains: What harm could come from providing viewers with additional information with which to sort things out? For one, it would make high-profile spinners uncomfortable and the host look woefully unprepared. Is that the real reason why Gregory balked?

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly questions Gregory's strained logic:

Gregory's comments suggest a more traditional approach: let viewers figure things out "on their own terms." Why separate fact from fiction for news consumers when they can do that on their own?

Perhaps because they aren't well equipped to do this on their own, and rely on professional news outlets to provide them with reliable information.

(found via Romenesko)

Judge sues papers after her anonymous postings are revealed

From NPR:

The judge presiding over a high-profile serial killer case in Cleveland is now herself under scrutiny after her e-mail address was linked to dozens of comments on the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Web site.

Some comments were about ongoing cases she's hearing, including that of Anthony Sowell, who's suspected of killing 11 women. Now, Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold is suing the newspaper for $50 million, saying it violated her privacy.

Read the story here.

Protests in Thailand turn violent

A cameraman for Reuters is among the 15 people killed as anti-government protesters and army troops clashes in Bangkok. AP has the latest. Todd Ruiz is following the action over at Reporter in Exile.

The secret lives of private jets

ProPublica got its hands on a list of privately owned corporate jets that were kept off the government's air-traffic tracking system and so could not be tracked by the public. The list includes jets owned by several newspaper companies:

Owners of newspapers that have fought for access to public records, including Journal Enterprises, owner of the Albuquerque Journal, and Sam Zell, chairman of the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Journal Enterprises told ProPublica it would take its plane off the list. Sam Zell's Tribune Co. declined to comment.

Gannett, which owns USA Today, also owns a blocked jet. USA Today ran a version of the ProPublica story and included this fact in the article.

(found via Romenesko)

Four in the morning

1. Ezra Klein consider the success of NPR and the Economist. WaPo

2. Tribune Co. takes a step closer to finishing bankruptcy proceedings. Chi Trib

3. Will the iPad deliver another blow to journalistic standards? Newspaper Death Watch

4. Over at Bitter Lemons, there's a lot of chattering/rationalizing/explaining/parsing going on about getting a story completely wrong. fishbowlLA and Bitter Lemons

AG to investigate Palin's speaker fees

Attorney General Jerry Brown has agreed to investigate whether Cal State University, Stanislaus must turn over records that reveal how much former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is being paid to speak at the Turlock campus.

The university claims the fee does not have to be disclosed because the money is coming out of a foundation funds rather than from the school. Open-government advocates argue that the public university cannot use a foundation to hide what should be public records, since the school is funded through taxpayer money. Also, University President Hamid Shirvani serves as president of the foundation.

The full story is at California Watch.

The rise of online ad dollars

Internet ads accounted for 8 percent of total ad revenue in in 2005. The number jumped to17 percent in 2009. Ken Doctor reports:

...digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines. TV ($26.2 billion) and newspapers ($24.6 billion) are still ahead of Internet, but cable (at $20.4 billion) and TV networks (at $15.5 billion) are below. Radio pulls in $14 billion, while consumer magazines take in $10 billion and trades $7.5 billion.

Journalism making a difference

In response to an April 2 New York Times story about the growth of unpaid internships, and the legal gray area surrounding them, Atlantic Media, which owns The Atlantic magazine, decided to pay its interns retroactively to last year:

Thinking about the internship program through the lens of Saturday's New York Times story, we found ourselves revisiting the concept. We had thought this was the way to structure unpaid internships but if it sits near a grey zone, it's not for us.

Trend setters? Doubtful.

(From Daily Finance via Romenesko)

Dead trees still rule

Most newspaper readers still prefer paper over computer screens. Martin Langeveld updates a study he completed last year and finds that of the total time people spend reading papers, 95.4 percent of it takes place with the paper in hand and 4.6 percent is online.

From his post at Nieman Journalism Lab:

U.S. newspapers have not pushed much of their audience to their websites, nor have they followed the migration of their readership to the web. Their combined print and online readership metrics, whether measured in pageviews or in time spent, show that there’s been significant attrition since last year in the total audience for newspaper content, and that the fraction of that audience consuming newspaper content online remains in the low-to-mid single digits.

The bad news is that people are spending less time with newspapers. Langeveld calculates that readers are spending about one-fifth less time with a paper this year compared to two years ago.

The Sarah Palin show

David Carr at the New York Times takes his turn trying to figure out why Sarah Palin's popularity continues to grow as she morphs into the mainstream media's anti-mainstream media darling. NYT

Journalism's top ten

NYU's journalism institute has listed its ten favorite stories of the decade. The New York Times' coverage of the 9/11 attack comes in first. The Times also makes the list for its reporting on the Afghanistan war and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx is the second pick.

This American Life's explanation of the subprime mortgage crisis, "The Giant Pool of Money," is in fourth place, with Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" in sixth. The Times-Picayune gets eight place for its detailed coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

The full list is here.

Easter earthquake*

A long, rolling temblor felt here in Los Angeles but centered in Baja, Mexico, south of Mexicali. Hit about 3:40 p.m. Pacific. Initial measurements put it at magnitude 6.9.

*Update: The USGS has revised the earthquake to a magnitude 7.2 centered 38 miles south of Mexicali. Two relatively big aftershocks, one 5.4 and the other 5.1, hit nearby. Imperial, California, also got rattled by a 5.1-magnitude temblor at 4:15 p.m.

Chron writer arrested in Weed

Tom Stienstra, the "outdoors" writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was arrested along with his wife on charges of possessing marijuana for sale.

From the Chronicle:

Siskiyou County sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Gravenkamp said deputies found "a sophisticated marijuana cultivation operation in the barn" at Stienstra's home in Weed, a small town 30 miles south of Yreka, when they searched it March 25.

Authorities seized 60 marijuana plants, 11.1 pounds of processed marijuana, scales, packaging materials and other paraphernalia from the barn and the home, Gravenkamp said.

They also found medical-marijuana recommendation papers for Stienstra, his wife, Stephani Cruickshank, and Cruickshank's son, who also lives at the home, Gravenkamp said.

Mantle's silver anniversary

KPCC's Larry Mantle celebrates the 25th anniversary of AirTalk today. Don Barrett has a writeup of the show and the man behind the mic. LA Radio

Four today

1. KCET's Ophelia Chong tries her hand at satire after reading Daniel Hernandez's bitch slap of The Entryway project (all found via LA Observed). KCET

2. As far as bitch slaps go, former Republican strategist Tony Quinn goes after Steve Poizner's increasingly embarrassing gubernatorial campaign: "Facing political collapse, he has resorted to the historic tactic of a political scoundrel, race baiting, in this case making immigrant bashing the central theme of his faltering campaign." Fox and Hounds

3. Online April Fool's hijinks, as catalogued by TechCrunch (found via Andrew Sullivan). TechCrunch

4. Everyone wants an iPad app. Nieman Lab