Four in the morning

1. The AOL-Huffington Post deal is great, as long as you don't care much for journalism. LAT

2. If you have the data, the guvment will help you map it. IssueMap (via Nieman Lab)

3. Arianna Huffington trumpets the AOL-Huffington Post deal; Marc Cooper and others analyze the consequences for online and offline news operations in Southern California. WWLA?

4. Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. New Yorker

An eye on Chile

Journalist Marc Cooper has written a number of posts about the Chilean earthquake and its aftermath. Cooper has a long history with the country:

Since the moment the monster quake hit in Chile I sort of self-appointed myself as a translator/aggregator for Chile-related Twitter activity. You can find my long list of tweets here. I'm a former translator to Chilean president Salvador Allende and have been married into a Chilean family for 36 years so it's a place I know something about.

I won't link to all of the individuals posts, but his website is here.

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.

Four today

1. California's initiative process "has rendered our state government dysfunctional," Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George said Saturday. NYT

2. The LA Weekly has dumped staff writer Steve Mikulan and local media watchers are wondering why. LAO, Marc Cooper

3. Food critics Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly and Russ Parsons of the LA Times join KCRW's Evan Kleinman to discuss the legacy of the recently shuttered Gourmet magazine. KCRW

4. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists says it's $275,000 in debt and will shut down for the year unless donors come forward. Poynter

Cooper's California wake-up call

Reporter and USC prof Marc Cooper pens a cover story for The Nation about the undreaming of the golden dream. An exerpt:

California has always been as much a state of mind as a physical reality. The state's natural resources, along with its inhabitants' capacity to exploit them, made The Dream more likely than not. But now it's time to stop dreaming, says D.J. Waldie, who has the unique experience of living through this crisis as both an official of an LA suburb and a prizewinning author who plumbs the Golden State zeitgeist. "The middle class and the near middle class have been missing in action in paying for the sort of life they think California owes them," he said. "Instead, they believe that someone else should pay for the California Dream. Smokers. Drinkers. Gamblers. Millionaires. But not me.

"We have sold ourselves a vision of California, but we are not psychologically or emotionally prepared to make the hard choices. We prefer to point our finger at 'waste, fraud, immigrants.' Those are all straw men. It conveniently avoids the question of what we want and what we want to give up."

California has never been able to live up to its promise, but now seems ready to embrace its dysfunction.

Four in the morning*

1. Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina wasn't hiking the Appalachian Trail on Father's Day weekend, as his office staff claimed. Instead, he was caught in Atlanta by a reporter from The State getting off a plane from Argentina. Sanford told the reporter he'd wanted to do something "exotic." Needless to say, there's still plenty of skepticism about the governor's story. He's scheduled to hold a press conference at 2 p.m. Eastern today. The State

*Updated: In his presser, Sanford admits to having an affair with an Argentinian woman, says he'll resign as head of the Republican Governors Association. Calls for his resignation as governor will inevitably follow.

2. Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has some more bad news for Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Lopez writes:

I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but I've been gathering up the results of polling at the 10 schools that for the last year have been under the mayor's wing, and there's no way to sugarcoat this.

At eight of the 10 campuses, the mayor's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools got a resounding thumbs down from teachers.

3. First Lady Michelle Obama makes her first visit to California since becoming First Lady... again. LA Observed

4. Rainey vs. Stewart, round 3. LA Weekly (via LA Observed)

Four in the afternoon

When President Obama talks about transparency, the courts listen ... Marc Cooper pans CNN's Ed Henry for his self-serving windbaggery ... Snuggie sales must be plummeting ... Tensions mount at condemned Tucson Citizen

J-school starts news site

Students at USC's graduate school of journalism have started an online news and commentary site called Neon Tommy under the supervision of Marc Cooper, who's also digital news director at the school. Cooper told fishbowlLA that NeTo is "meant to compete with anybody and everybody on local and national news."

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.