Interesting LA Times Paragraph of the Day

After serving as president and chief executive officer of Guitar Hero, as well as COO at Yahoo, Dan Rosensweig switched to the task of building out college textbook rental service and student network chegg.com. The Santa Clara headquartered firm now boasts over 500 employees and has warehouses in Pasadena, San Francisco, Utah, Oregon and Kentucky.

One of Rosensweig’s investors is Ashton Kutcher, front and center in a recent LA Times article by Andrea Chang about the increasing intersection of celebrities and tech startups. The chegg.com president and CEO explained how he interacts with the Two and a Half Men star:

Rosensweig said Kutcher occasionally visits the startup’s headquarters, recently meeting with the product team for four hours. One Friday afternoon, Kutcher sent an email saying he had spent a couple of hours on the site and had put together a lengthy “series of notes” on his ideas for improvements.

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With rapper Drake adorning the April 2012 cover of GQ, LA Times media critic James Rainey pegs it as the latest example of the glossy monthly magazine staple known as the date-as-interview. In these cases, the reporter acts as a surrogate for the respective gender side of a publication’s celebrity-adoring readership.

The author of the GQ cover story is Claire Hoffman, a one-time LA Times staffer. Here’s what she told Rainey about her latest, impressive celebrity “get:”

“It’s not brain-surgery hard, but it’s hard,” said Hoffman. “The conceit is always that you are going to get in there and discover them in some way they haven’t been discovered before.”

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During a week when the LA Times is being forced to absorb yet another Zell bankruptcy-fueled layoffs hit, the obituary for the paper’s Pulitzer Prize winning female trailblazer Dorothy Townsend feels especially bittersweet. Still, her accomplishments should not be overlooked.

Townsend, who passed away at age 88 on March 5 from cancer, worked for the Times from 1954 to 1986, sharing in a 1966 Pulitzer awarded for coverage of the Watts riots. From Valerie J. Nelson’s obit:

After insisting on being reassigned from “the women’s pages” in early 1964, Townsend became the first female staff writer to cover local news in a city room long populated only by men…

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The Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) laid off 30 employees in Los Angeles and New York Monday as the network faces another round of restructuring. This time around, the suits from Discovery Communications are coming in to help oversee operations.

The Los Angeles Times has the details:

The move comes as OWN continues to struggle to find its voice. Launched in January 2011, OWN has already cost Discovery more than $300 million. The channel’s performance has been so weak that there has even been speculation, denied by insiders at the network’s parent companies, that if the situation doesn’t improve soon the plug could be pulled.

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We’re suckers for any story about a remote outpost where residents are outnumbered by abandoned cars 3-to-1.

LA Times reporter Mike Anton‘s wonderful front page look today at the middle-of-nowhere desert town of Darwin, California is full of the kind of details that used to make Charles Kuralt tick. In this one-stop-sign hamlet, the three dozen or so residents are fine with just about every part of the peace and quiet, except for the crappy dial-up Internet access:

A survey last year of major cities worldwide found Algiers, the capital of Algeria, to have the slowest average Internet speed. Darwin’s is slower by half.

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Not sure who in the world scheduled this appearance, but racist, arbiter of public corruption and convicted felon Jack Abramoff was at Beverly Hills High yesterday to plug his new memoir Capitol Punishment. The LA Times’ Stephen Ceasar was at the event and penned this nausea-inducing graph:

[Abrmoff] spoke of his time as a powerful lobbyist with ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, commanding rates of as much as $150,000 a month from a single client, which drew “oohs” from the teenagers.

How was this asshole allowed to come anywhere near children wearing anything other than prison blues? Well, Abramoff is a Beverly Hills High grad, you see. And…he’s turned his life around…or something, and become, according to the Times, “an unlikely foe of the role and influence of special interests in Washington.”

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After many months of waiting, the Los Angeles Times was able to secure visa approval into Syria for reporter Alexandra Zavis. She was only allowed in for ten days; could not bring in any satellite equipment or laptops; and was accompanied everywhere by minders.

Zavis has now safely returned to Lebanon. As she tells colleague Emily Alpert, there were other obstacles to being able to cover an already tenuous and very dangerous corner of the world:

“Many people were afraid to be seen talking to us in case they would be questioned later. Conversations in shops and restaurants were often short and furtive. Meetings with opposition activists turned into cloak-and-dagger affairs. We would start out in one taxi, switch to another. An intermediary would meet us at a busy traffic circle. No eye contact would be made. We would then follow the person down winding alleys, keeping several paces behind so that it would not look like we were together.”

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Moviegoers scratching their heads over this year’s front runner for the Best Picture Oscar have a new heroine. Her name is Connie Sawyer, born when silent movies were all the rage.

She was the focus of a fun sidebar to the fantastic LA Times weekend look at the make-up of AMPAS voter ranks. Reporter Emily Rome caught up with Sawyer at the Motion Picture and Television Country House in Woodland Hills and got this super-senior AMPAS member’s thoughts on The Artist:

The movie was enjoyable enough, she says, but she frankly doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Hasn’t anybody seen old films?” Sawyer asked in exasperation. “They’re easy to make and easy to act. All you have to do is overact. I saw a lot of those films in my day.”

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Throughout his NBA and business career, Magic Johnson has always aspired to achieve great things. So it’s only logical that he would choose to call his new TV channel Aspire.

Per an LA Times article this morning by Meg James and Greg Braxton, Johnson’s channel is the first of several planned by Comcast TV as part of the company’s recent agreement with the FCC and Department of Justice to diversify. Aspire will offer a 24-hour mix of inspirational, family-friendly movies, comedy, music and more. From the article:

“This is so exciting for me, I’m pinching myself,” Johnson said in a phone interview. “This is big for myself, for the African-American community and the African-American creative community. I wanted a vehicle to show positive images and to have stories written, produced and directed by African-Americans for our community. Aspire — that’s how I’ve been leading my life.”

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Although there are several silver linings in the fourth quarter 2011 results released by content firm Demand Media, the bottom line is that the six-year-old outfit is still reeling from changes made last spring to Google’s search algorithms. The Silicon Valley giant’s much publicized adjustments, nicknamed “Panda,” chunked out 25 percent of Demand’s Web traffic and four-fifths of its stock price.

LA Times reporter Alex Pham chatted with Demand co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt (pictured) in the wake of these Q4 numbers. The executive outlined how the company hopes to continue rebounding:

Among Demand’s initiatives: a greater emphasis on videos and photos, as well as the type of content such as humor that’s more likely to be shared on social networks such as Facebook.

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