Layoffs in San Gabriel Valley

At least five, and as many as seven, newsroom employees have lost their jobs in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Layoff notices went to three from the copy desk, one photographer, and the city editor at the Pasadena Star-News.

The layoffs come as the papers' owner, Denver-based MediaNews Group, is being asked to up its offer for the Orange County Register.

The newspaper group includes the Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Whittier Daily News.

Tired of bad press, city of Vernon buys the good kind*

To ensure a long and lucrative life in political office, city officials Vernon reportedly handpicked their constituents. So, it comes as no surprise that these same officials, faced with mounting scrutiny over alleged self-dealing and outrageous salaries, would feel justified in handpicking their news coverage.

Which is what happened when former state attorney general John Van de Kamp was asked by Vernon City Administrator Mark Whitworth to talk to a local newspaper about proposed city reforms. Van de Kamp, who was hired by the city to improve its image, later discovered the reporter wasn't a reporter and the story wasn't a story. It was an "advertorial," better known as a paid advertisement.

The ad, which can be seen here, is made-up to look like a news story, complete with photos, columns and a byline. The ad ran in several Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) publications, including the Pasadena Star-News, Los Angeles Daily News, and Long Beach Press-Telegram.

From the LA Times:

Van de Kamp said the city arranged for him to be interviewed by a reporter. But officials did not tell him it was for a large, full-color advertisement touting the virtues of the embattled city. He said he didn't know about the ad until he saw it in Pasadena Star-News on Thursday morning. 

"I'm not here to…flak for the city," Van de Kamp said. "We're out here trying to do a straightforward, objective job. So that format is a problem for me."

This isn't a case where a government agency bought space from the paper and then created its own promotional ad. Instead, the newspaper's advertising department hired a writer to "report" on Vernon's supposed reform agenda and then ran the fake story in a way that misleads readers into thinking it went through the normal editorial process. Adding to the confusion, the byline belongs to Edward Barrera, a former editor and reporter in the LANG chain.

Asked about the confusion over the ad, Barrera told the Times that he never identified himself as a reporter to Van de Kamp. He elaborated in an email to me:

I get why the Times asked the question. Someone should have told Van de Kamp (including, probably, me). But it was a simple mistake. This was a generic and transparent promotional Q and A. It's why my name is on it.

Why would a newspaper even consider such an ethically fraught service? The money cannot be worth the negative publicity and newsroom hair pulling. And if Vernon is truly on the path of reform, a real reporter could do a real story about that. Thus far, LANG's newsrooms have done little reporting of any kind about Vernon, save an uncritical Star-News column about a state plan to disband the city.

(Full disclosure: I worked for the Star-News as a reporter and later served as an editor in the San Gabriel Valley alongside Edward Barrera.)

*I should note that this isn't my first experience with a LANG advertorial. In the early 2000s, while working at the Claremont Courier, I broke a story about mismanagement at the Three Valleys Municipal Water District. The Los Angeles Times followed up on the story and ended up funding a public records lawsuit. The LANG chain, represented by the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, largely ignored the story, even though a reporter there had the goods. However, Three Valleys did buy several promotional ads in LANG papers for tens of thousands of dollars.

Baeder steps down at SGVN

Ben Baeder has stepped down as deputy managing editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, which includes, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star-News and Whittier Daily News. Baeder decided to leave the paper shortly after last month's layoffs at the Tribune were announced. His final day is today.

Baeder took the editing job in May, 2008 after a hiatus from newspapers. He'd been a reporter at the Tribune before that. I'm told he's leaving the newspaper profession once again.

Rebecca Kimitch, a political reporter at the Tribune, is slated to take over some of Baeder's editing duties.

Allen goes to ProPublica*

Former Pasadena Star-News reporter Marshall Allen, whose work at the Las Vegas Sun has made him a finalist for the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, has taken a job with ProPublica. Allen will start at the nonprofit news outfit next week. He'll continue covering health care to start.

*In addition: Former Pasadena Star-News reporter Cindy Chang was promoted to special projects writer at the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Previously, she worked on the paper's city desk. In her new position, Chang "will be the lead author and coordinator" of the paper's investigative projects.

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

LANG likes Facebook, readers not so sure (updated)

Back in October, San Bernardino Sun editor Frank Pine sent around a memo saying the nine papers that make up the Los Angeles Newspaper Group chain would be dropping their Topix commenting system for one that interfaces with Facebook accounts. One of the primary reasons for the change was to chase off trolls, who, shielded by anonymity, often veered in racist invective and personal attack - even when stories had nothing to do with race or a particular person.

The new system requires readers to be logged into Facebook and comments are by default linked to the person's page. This transparency (Facebook's privacy critics might laugh at the word) is supposed to create an environment where comments follow a socially correct etiquette, the argument goes.

The changeover happened on Friday, Dec. 3, with all nine papers publishing an online story describing the system and soliciting feedback. So far, most of the responses have been negative, with readers decrying the loss of anonymity, which they say allows for more honest viewpoints, and criticizing the papers for putting "civility" ahead of free and open debate.

A few readers warned that trolls would simply create fake Facebook accounts and return with the same aggressive madness. Some readers worried about their own privacy, saying they didn't like that comments were automatically posted to their Facebook pages. A few readers said they liked the new system and hoped it would make for more civil discussions.

Change always comes hard in the daily newspaper world. Take away a comic strip and you're likely to swamp every department with cranky phone calls - the kind of reaction news editors would love to come in response to, say, actual news. Still, there are interesting questions surrounding anonymous posts and the question of when an opinion become unacceptable as well as the thought of newspapers aligning themselves with Facebook's private profit machine to promote a kind of civility.

Below, I've rounded up a few of the comments that came in over the weekend.

From an unhappy reader in the Whittier Daily News:

I feel the lack of anonymity restricts the truth, people are more inclined to say what they think when they're not being monitored by a moderator. Sure most of the remarks were rude and bigoted, but some stated hardcore facts and relevance to the post.

A dubious Pasadena Star-News reader:

The anonymous comments were the best part of this paper. 

Compared to the Glendale News Press which requires comments to be approved, Star News had a lively conversation.

1. Why do conversations about the news need to be "civil?"

2. Thanks for defining civility for us all.

Good luck with this.

 An aggressive rejection in the LA Daily News:

I will never participate in your comments again. "Civil" means repression in this context and I will stop reading your FUCKING SWILL. 

 The San Bernardino Sun had a few positive comments, like this one:

I think the new Facebook-based comment feature for The Sun, Daily Facts, and Daily Bulletin is great. The public comment feature on too many online news outlets have been overrun by immature, offensive, and asinine comments from users protected by anonymity.

One Inland Valley Daily Bulletin reader sees a conspiracy:

The Daily Bulletin sold out! This is just a move to protect corrupt politicians and their Shady developer Godfathers. Nothing is worse than when they steal from the tax payers, name libraries after themselves and then have to hear the negative comments of the victimized public. Although alot of mud slinging whent on in the old style of posting, at least it was an open public forum that people could use to express their true sentiments and beliefes , good or bad. This new method of traceable commenting and a lack of true public input will only mean that the cancer of corruption will choke up the wheels of justice and crush the common citizen. Good luck to us all.

J. Gold apologizes to Paula Deen

The announcement of a Tournament of Roses grand marshal often gets worldwide attention, even if it's not a particularly newsworthy event (person chosen to ride in car and wave at people). Tuesday, the announcement became newsworthy when Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold let fly with his unvarnished opinion of Paula Deen, the 2011 marshal, for her embrace of Twinkie-pie cuisine.

Today, Gold, apparently feeling somewhat badly about his reaction, penned an apology letter to Deen, saying he treated her as a brand rather than a person. From the letter:

But our mutual friends say that you are delightful. You clearly love food. And I know that if we were to sit down together, we would probably get along just fine - I suspect that you, like me, could talk for an hour about the finer points of grits, or country ham, or pie crust without beginning to exhaust the topic. I realize that your recipes reflect the way people actually do cook in the South, rather than the way they think they should cook; that they skew toward getting dinner on the table as opposed to an Olympian ideal.

Deen is as charming and good-natured as any Southerner could be. But having grown up myself in a home with Southern-influenced cooking that often relied on the horrible, refined ingredients offered by chain supermarkets, and having since been converted to be more adventurous with ethnic foods and fresher ingredients, I think Gold had a good point that he shouldn't let go of - even if he's sorry about the way he framed it. He'll be on tonight's "Which Way, LA?" to expand on his thoughts. Listen here starting at 7 p.m.

J. Gold-en quote

Paula Deen's Southern-fried cooking and Food Network sensibilities have not won over Pasadena foodie and LA Weekly columnist Jonathan Gold. When the Tournament of Roses announced Deen would be the parade's grand marshal in 2011, Gold offered this take to the Pasadena Star-News:

"Paula Deen? That's absolutely horrifying," Gold said in an e-mail Tuesday. "Julia Child grew up on Pasadena Avenue, just a few blocks from the start of the parade, and practically everything Ms. Deen has done both exploits and despoils the culinary movement Child did so much to prod into being.

"As a food person and as a Pasadenan, I should be proud that the committee is honoring somebody in my profession," Gold said, "but the news makes me cringe.

I hope the Star-News or Gold himself spin a feature or two out of this; to explore Child's culinary legacy and the cultural and political overtones of Gold's criticism.

San Francisco vs. Texas, Obama vs. the Tea Party, Gold vs. Deen. It's all coming together.

(found via LA Observed)

Another Star-Newser goes to AOL Patch

AOL's Patch site for Monrovia (yes, it's leafy, suburban and educated) went live today, with former Pasadena Star-News reporter Nathan McIntire at the helm. He's the second Star-News reporter to take a Patch job; former Star-News city hall reporter Dan Abendschein launched the Altadena Patch on Wednesday.

Rose Bowl renovation approved, stadium dominoes fall

It only took 10 years to get it done, but the Pasadena City Council on Monday approved a $152 million bond package to renovate the 88-year-old Rose Bowl stadium. From the LA Times:

The renovations include widened tunnels and added aisles for smoother entering and exiting. A modern version of a 1940s-style scoreboard will replace the existing one on the south end, and a video board will be installed on the north side. Premium seating will be bumped from 600 to 2,500 following the expansion of the press box building.

 The financing plan will have repercussions far beyond "smoother entering and exiting" through the vomitoria. For one, this all but locks out any future deal to bring the NFL to Pasadena, leaving Industry and the Coliseum as the two remaining bidders for a professional football team in L.A. Everyone knows the NFL does not like the Coliseum as its currently configured - too big, too old - and so the Rose Bowl renovations would seem to give the Industry bid a boost.

But the Rose Bowl deal also extends UCLA's lease there until 2043, robbing Industry of a potential tenant and much-needed source of revenue. This could make it harder for Industry's backers to finance a new stadium, unless they can convince the USC Trojans to break ties with the Coliseum. The Industry stadium's design has already been altered for soccer play as a way to attract off-season tenants, but here again they'll have to compete with the renovated Rose Bowl, which has a storied history of World Cup play.

All of which puts added pressure on the Coliseum to pay for upgrades and possible redesign. Public financing for such a project will be hard to come by in this economy and the NFL has no appetite to get behind an expensive deal when they dictate to Industry just what kind of comfy accommodations the league would prefer. Big downtown developers have shown no interest in a public-private partnership to improve the Coliseum, choosing instead to explore building a brand new stadium near Staples.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez catches foot-in-mouth

Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Garden Grove, told Univision that the "Vietnamese and the Republicans" are trying to steal her seat away to the detriment of the Latino community. Here's the story and here's the video.

Comings and goings

City Hall reporter Dan Abendschein has left the Pasadena Star-News to become editor of AOL's Patch site for Altadena. Abendschein wrote on his Facebook page that he was told to leave the newspaper a week earlier than planned because of an apparent conflict between his new job and his duties at the Star-News - the town of Altadena is in the Star-News coverage area.

Twenty-one years after the Exxon Valdez

Former Pasadena Star-News reporter Cindy Chang traveled to the small fishing village of Cordova, Alaska for the Times-Picayune to survey the lasting damage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Residents there, whose lives and livelihoods were torn apart by the disaster and who can still find pools of oil inches below the surface of the ground, had some grim advice for the people living along the Gulf Coast:

Despite the pain of dredging up the past, most Cordovans are willing to share their stories with visitors. They volunteer advice to their Gulf Coast counterparts, with "Don't trust BP" the most common admonition.

"Don't believe anything the oil company says. They have huge PR departments whose job it is to minimize the collateral damage," said Mike Lytle, a Cordova fisherman. "I hope you have better luck than we did with the oil companies." ...

"A lot of lives are going to be affected. It'll never be the same. It'll take years and years to work through it," said Bruce Robertson, who has fished local waters for close to 30 years. "Nice families will be broken apart. Businesses will be lost. It's not going to be pretty."

Four in the morning

1. David Brooks blames the message the messengers choose to deliver for Gen. Stanley McChrystal's downfall. NYT

2. Robert Rector eviscerates a Michigan lawmaker's cheeky proposal to license journalists. Robert Rector

3. Walter Shapiro says the Rolling Stone exposé of Gen. McChrystal means the end of fly-on-the-wall journalism for now (which will make David Brooks [see above] happy). Politics Daily

4. The Internet overlords want to give online pornography its own .xxx suffix. Reuters

Comings and goings

Pasadena Star-News reporter Emma Gallegos is leaving the paper for a job at the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Her final day is Monday.

With the men in black

For several weeks, former Pasadena Star-News reporter Todd Ruiz has been filing dispatches from the front lines of the sometimes violent anti-government protests in Thailand at his Reporter in Exile blog. His connections got him an exclusive look at the "men in black," a "secretive and heavily armed" band of fighters who used violence to bolster the officially "nonviolent" red shirt movement.

From the story:

'Not Terrorists Not Violent; Only Peaceful and Democracy,'' read a banner hanging outside the barrier of jumbled tires. Inside, it was an open secret who the gunmen were; no less secret were the perimeter bombs, connected by dirty gray cables, designed to inflict heavy casualties on any advancing government army soldiers.

Some of the men held their firearms tightly concealed under jackets. Just after sunset, oblong packages wrapped in black plastic were carried into tents in Lumpini Park from elsewhere in the camp. Running at a crouch, we were moved to a different tent nearer the memorial statue of Thai King Rama VI. The Ronin moved between tents often in this way to avoid detection from government snipers.

Twenty-seven men crouched in darkness inside the tent. Newspapers covered any illuminated displays from radios or other electronics, and we were asked to turn off our cell phones. One gunman suggested army snipers would kill them all at first light if they had the chance.

''Don't worry; safe. Thai-style,'' their combat medic said to us in English, gesturing to layers of tarps obscuring the ground from potential snipers where we were camped with them.

The story was published in Asia Times.

Violence in Thailand

As the violence worsens in Thailand, former Pasadena Star-News reporter Todd Ruiz is staying in the thick of it. His latest dispatches are here and here. An excerpt:

The crowd was cheering and clapping, making no threatening moves toward soldiers apart from the usual sling-shot silliness. This young soldier freaks out and opens up with his rifle. Right into civilians and reporters. I assume ammo is live and sure enough as we clear from center of road, I see old man take a headshot and go down face-first into the street. He was in death spasms by the time they pulled him into the gas station. French photog who was behind soldiers said young shooter got a verbal rebuke and soft cuff to the face from his CO.

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.

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.

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