Journos

Veronica De La Cruz, a reporter and former television anchor for CNN news, has written a story for the Huffington Post on her fight for health care reform, and why it is such a personal battle:

On July 4, 2009, I lost my brother and my only sibling Eric Alexander De La Cruz. He passed away while awaiting a heart transplant. Five years ago, he was diagnosed with severe dilated cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart that prevents it from pumping normally. Since then, we had tried to get Eric insurance coverage that would allow him to get the treatment he needed, but no private insurer would offer him insurance because of this preexisting condition.

Read the full story here.

Photo via CNN

This is our former colleague at FishbowlDC current POLITICO reporter Patrick Gavin boxing with Congressman Peter King. The congressman seems to land a couple on Gavin's face. This is every politicians wet dream.

Via FishbowlDC

Politico Pillages Mediabistro For Staff

Richard Rushfield quit his job as an editor at LAT to be a blogger. Not just any blog but Gawker. He's the West Coast editor. But its still a blog. Lateral move? Upgrade? Downshift?

He sat down with us for a little Q & A about his career move and his new book:

FBLA: So how is the switch from traditional media to new media?

RR: Ah yes. The switch is invigorating. This is where the conversation is.

FBLA: New media is where the conversation is?

RR: There were so many times when you'd write a wonderful article for the LATimes, or break some news and it would just be met by the sound of crickets. When you are at the LAT you're at a place where even the website isn't in the central flow of the nation's cultural conversation. But at Gawker one is very much in and a part of that conversation and as one who is writing, in part at least to communicate, that's where you want to be.

FBLA: Do you think the struggle is with reporters who enjoy the sound of crickets?

RR: Yes, I mean, you are writing not just for the fun of hearing your own voice - although that's at least 2/3 the thrill, but because you want to be read and to make some sort of impression...

FBLA: Way to make blogging sound sexy.

RR: I'll be considered a supermodel in 700 years.

FBLA: So you wrote this book...advising people to not follow you, as you are strangely, the first few in what is sure to be a larger trend in newspapers - reporters becoming pro-bloggers.

RR: Come again?

continued...

Pasadena, that super quaint 'burb home to that "little old lady" song muse, has their own magazine. For real. And it's not available on the Internet. It is, however, available at our dentist's office. And what better place to read about food than a den of dentistry?

Anyway, Jonathan Gold is now writing about food in Pasadena. Former LA Weekly staffer Linda Immediato now managing editor of Pasadena Magazine scored the Pulitzer winner.

Sounds like he's not bailing to New York anytime soon.

Previously on FBLA:

The New Yorker has a profile on our awesome local Pulitzer winner Jonathan Gold. So if you have a subscription you'll have to tell us all about it. We're sure it's great. He's great. We read his book.

Previously on FBLA:

Yesterday would have been Dominick Dunne's 84th birthday. Friends of the recently deceased journalist gathered last night at the at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate his remarkable life. Steven Mikulan was in attendance, and writes about the memorial on his blog L.A. Noir:

Thursday night's toast to Dunne was attended by a mix of the people he knew from Hollywood and the courts, and also by the street reporters he met and befriended during the first Phil Spector trial - Ciaran McEvoy, Peter Hong, Harriet Ryan and the court blogger Betsy Ross, aka "Sprocket."

Dunne's actor son, Griffin, recalling that as a child his parents would visit friends in this very same suite, related how Dominick gave his kids firecrackers to toss at the police down on Sunset Boulevard during the curfew riots of 1966.

Author Lawrence Schiller praised Dunne for raising social issues usually kept out of polite conversation, while former Los Angeles D.A. Ira Reiner spoke of Dunne's uncanny ability to attract sources of information during O.J. Simpson's first trial.

TMZ founder Harvey Levin recounted how Dunne's righteous indignation over the judicial miscarriage following the murder of his daughter, Dominique, inspired Levin, then a KNBC reporter, to relentlessly delve into the trial, while keynote speaker Linda Deutsch of Associated Press described Dunne's unshakable personal loyalty to colleagues.

Photo from William Morris Endeavor

It's the same reason I want to beat Elizabeth Wurtzel with an old shoe. They're part of the same cabal of disillusioned essayists making a woman's middle age sound like hell on earth. It has been clearly explained for me by 25-year-old Irina Aleksander in the New York Observer piece "The Cautionary Matrons":

Single 40-something women warn us about being too career-oriented and forgetting to factor in children; married women warn us that marriage is a union in which sex and fidelity are optional; and divorced women warn us to keep our weight down, our breasts up and our skin looking like Saran Wrap unless we want our husbands to later leave us for 23-year-olds.

Essays written by Cautionary Matrons are one of the few genres dominated by our gender; Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic and Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love, which landed on the cover of The Times' Book Review, also come to mind. Not that men are strangers to personal narratives, of course. (snip) But while men tend to be cheerfully self-deprecating, women are downright apologetic, asking themselves what they've done wrong and how to fix it.

Reports specify Mr. Nelson had pancreatic cancer.

From NYT:

Jack Nelson, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Washington bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times who brought finely honed investigative skills to his coverage of the civil rights movement and the Watergate scandal, died early Wednesday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 80.

Our condolences to his wife, journalist Barbara Matusow and the rest of his family.

(photo credit AP)

Keith Olbermann had on his program the "surviving" members of Monty Python this week. Olbermann said Terry Gilliam asked him about a statement Colin Powell made in 2007 about the "terror industrial complex," a phrase Powell used in an interview with GQ. Apparently the only reporter to ask Powell about those remarks were staffers at the Oklahoma Daily, OU's student paper. Score one for the little student guys.

Kevin Douglas Grant of Neon Tommy has written a piece about writer, editor and critic Steven Mikulan, who lost his job last week after 25 years at the LA Weekly:

Until his firing last week, Mikulan was a longstanding employee of the Weekly who had covered some of the biggest criminal trials of the last 10 years in Los Angeles: Robert Blake. Phil Spector. Anthony Pellicano. Anand Jon. He had reached his 25-year milestone and gained high esteem from friends and colleagues as a "superior writer" in the tradition of Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote.

However, as several of his colleagues have attested, Milkulan's talent was not being utilized under the Weekly's new management, which came into power after the merger of New Times Media, the Weekly's parent company, with Village Voice Media was finalized in 2006.

"This is all part of a long, downward spiral for the Weekly," said Robert Iafolla, now a staff writer at the LA Daily Journal, who covered some of the same trials that Mikulan did. Calls and e-mails to the Weekly were not returned.

Neon Tommy is a USC publication staffed almost entirely by journalism students, and we can't imagine running this story about a highly respected, award-winning journalist losing his job filled them with hope for their future careers. It certainly doesn't make us optimistic about ours. Or yours. Have a nice day.

Previously on FBLA:
Steven Mikulan Leaves LA Weekly