The 2012 Shorenstein Journalism Award that LA Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick will accept at Stanford early next year comes with a very impressive descriptor. She is being honored, says the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, for “her innovative and extraordinarily sensitive reporting on Northeast Asia over the past decade.”

Demick has been with the LA Times since 2001 and the paper’s Beijing bureau chief since 2008. She has also earned many accolades for her fall 2010 book Nothing to Envy, about the lives and experiences of a select group of North Korean defectors. In a recent Q&A with thebeijinger.com, here’s how she answered when asked to recount her most shocking or heartbreaking story about the DPRK:

“There is a story in my book that the doctor told me. She had a friend, another woman doctor, whose husband and son died of starvation. When she expressed her condolences, the friend said it was good that they were gone because she didn’t have the extra people to feed. That story stuck with me more than any others.”

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From her 2012 World Wide Web stronghold, Nikki Finke circles back at newsweekmemories.org to the early 1980s halcyon days of print. Back then, she didn’t call the shots quite the way she does now.

‘I’d specifically told the Newsweek powers-that-be that I didn’t want Washington,’ she writes. ‘So of course they put me in DC.’

Finke goes on to recall a tumultuous four days that began with her flying on Air Force One to the Augusta National golf course and then quickly returning to the White House beat because of some overseas events in Beirut. The real drama however kicked off a few days later, after that week’s issue was put to bed late:

I slept all day Monday. On Tuesday, October 25, I woke up, put on a very slick St John’s skirt suit, broke up at lunch with a married lover (who famously divorced his wife soon afterwards) and prepared to grab the DC-NY air shuttle for a quick dinner in Manhattan when I swung by the Newsweek bureau just to check in. Big Mistake.

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A funny thing happened on the way to tonight’s flurry of items about the retirement of local PBS/KCET icon Huell Howser. A San Diego community newspaper website had the skinny last week.

Posted a couple of days before Thanksgiving, the scoopsandiego.com item slipped under the turkey radar. Which really is kind of apt given that it concerns a man whose entire M.O. is about eschewing the big flourish. From a 2009 LA Times profile that Robert Lloyd pulled from for today’s mini-appreciation:

“I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a manager, I don’t have a press agent, I don’t have a wardrobe guy, a makeup guy, a parking space, a dressing room. It’s basically me and a cameraman and an editor and a couple of guys in the office. I can go out between now and noon and do a full 30-minute show just talking to people on the street and have it on the air tonight. It’s an economic model that’s a production model, but it’s a model that I believe in philosophically as far as what the viewer should see…”

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In the October issue of Interview magazine, Joaquin Phoenix made headlines when he told film curator and journalist Elvis Mitchell that the awards season is “total, utter bullsh*t.”

However, that statement was the least interesting part of the interview according to Mitchell.

“There is a pretty lengthy part of the conversation that is about race, which I thought was as worthy if not more so as to what he was saying about awards season,” Mitchell said in the latest installment of Mediabistro’s So What Do You Do series.

“That he walked away from a movie because he wasn’t happy with the way it was being handled, and he thought there was this inertia that plays on this really antiquated attitude towards people of color in the movies. And so far as I can see, almost nobody picked that up. I thought that would have been the thing that had people really jumping.”

Read more in So What Do You Do, Elvis Mitchell, Film Critic and Host of KCRW’s “The Treatment”?

So how’s it going over at BuzzFeed’s brand new LA outpost? Well, for starters, bureau chief Richard Rushfield and chief correspondent Kate Aurthur have each earned some nice right-hand margin badges: New User, 1,000 Views, 10,000 Views.

This week, Rushfield makes the argument that Skyfall is the first true James Bond blockbuster, while Aurthur got no response (surprise!) from a TMZ rep when she tried to find out if the outlet had paid cash for some 2010 email correspondence between Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash and his now recanted accuser. Meanwhile, via Twitter, David Poland took the media to task for jumping on the TMZ bandwagon and got into it a little bit with Aurthur over her piece:

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Every Tuesday, veteran journalist and aspiring novelist Katharine Blossom Lowrie chronicles the offbeat side of Redondo Beach and environs for her local Patch site, under the column heading “Blossom Chronicles.” Today, her focus is 78-year-old retired fellow reporter Mary Ann Keating.

It’s a fun read, starting out with the recollection of how Jack Benny held Keating’s hand during an interview and moving on to some early 1960s Colorado Springs Gazette reminiscences involving Walt Disney and John Glenn (pictured):

“One Saturday afternoon, I got a call from a mechanic at one of the garages, and he was whispering, ‘John Glenn’s here! John Glenn’s here!’” she recalled.

It turned out Glenn’s car had broken down, said Keating, who had worked to develop sources all over town. “Here he had gone around the globe, but he got to Colorado Springs and his car broke down.”

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Madeleine Brand hasn’t said much publicly since her abrupt departure from KPCC last September. And that hasn’t changed despite participating in an LA Times profile. Although reporter Deborah Vankin did glean some interesting nuggets from her about what went wrong.

Martinez is indisputably “easy on the ear,” Brand acknowledges, but she met him only twice before he was brought on. “One little tryout and … a get-to-know-ya coffee,” she says.

Brand had input early in the long process of interviewing potential co-hosts — and was excited about certain candidates, including OC Weekly editor in chief Gustavo Arellano and CNN’s Nick Valencia — but was “surprised” when she found out in an email that the station had hired Martinez, who is known as the voice of ESPN Radio‘s “Lakers Line” and “Dodger Talk” on AM 710 but came into the job with little hard-news experience.

“I had no idea what his capabilities were,” she says.

Also interesting: crosstown NPR affiliate KCRW has its eye on Brand. “When she became available, it was the clear and obvious conversation to have,” general manager Jennifer Ferro told the Times. “Madeleine’s really talented and definitely belongs on the radio in Los Angeles — we’re gonna try to make that happen.”

We’ve read a number of solid, solemn eulogies for the print edition of Newsweek. We’ve also shared a couple of more frivolous POVs here.

But as far as a life dramatically impacted by this particular print-to-Web arc, it’s hard to beat the essay by veteran San Francisco journalist Benjamin Pimentel (pictured). Before helping the San Francisco Chronicle move to the Web in the mid-1990s and working as a columnist for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Pimentel looked forward while growing up in his native Filipino Quezon City to a motorcycle-delivered weekly copy of Newsweek:

Newsweek was how I learned more about the latest Cold War skirmishes between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, about the fight against apartheid in South Africa, about China’s bid to modernize its economy and even the death of John Lennon…

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A study and infographic released last week by 4th Estate reveals a lack of diversity among newspaper reporters covering politics. The study analyzed election coverge on the front pages of 38 major news outlets between January 1 through October 12, and found that 93% of stories were written by white reporters. According to the U.S. census, the overall population is only 63.4% white*.

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Tina Dupuy, a FishbowlLA alumnus, syndicated columnist and The Contributor editor-in-chief, will be appearing tonight — in just a minute, really — on Current TV’s Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer to talk politics. John Fugelsang will guest host.

This isn’t the first time Dupuy has made a television appearance, and it certainly won’t be the last, but we get excited every time. Show starts at 5 pm PT, and we’ll be tuning in.

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