Approximately 300 union members, activists, and Los Angeles Times readers rallied downtown yesterday to protest the potential sale of the paper to right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

The protest was held at noon outside the downtown office of the investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, which holds the largest share of the Tribune Co. Musician Ry Cooder performed for the crowd, singing “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” with special anti-Koch lyrics added.

From the LA Times coverage:

The protesters targeted Oaktree because the firm manages pension investments on behalf of unionized government employees, including those in the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

“We don’t want that kind of thing going on with our money,” said Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “That’s like us selling you a car so you can run us over.”

The rumor of a Tribune Co. sale to Koch Industries has already inspired multiple online petitions and vocal opposition from unions and politicians.

The LA Weekly also covered the protest, and took some great photos.

Earlier this year, actress Angelina Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy after genetic testing revealed she had a high probability of developing breast cancer.

The actress candidly discussed the elective procedure in a column for today’s New York Times titled “My Medical Choice.” Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of breast cancer in 2007 at the age of 56 after battling the disease for nearly a decade. The loss of her mother strongly influenced her decision to have the procedure.

Husband Brad Pitt was there “for every minute of the surgeries,” Jolie notes, and said the experience has brought the couple closer together.

Jolie’s role as a sex symbol lends the narrative a special resonance, given how devastating the procedure can be for women’s self-image. “I do not feel any less of a woman,” she writes. “I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.”

Jolie opted for reconstructive surgeries and implants following the mastectomies. “There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.”

Jolie says she was able to carry on with her work during the three months of medical procedures. She’ll next be appearing on the big screen as the title character in Disney’s Maleficent. The film is set for a summer release in 2014.

Whenever OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano sets Orange County Register savior Aaron Kushner  in his “Navel Gazing” sights, it feels a lot like a conversation between a pair of unlikely suburban neighbors. Check out my manicured lawn, says the one. I turned down my music for this, wonders the other?

This afternoon, Arellano has shared a letter sent by Register senior vp of sales and marketing Michael H. Burns to an unspecified group of newspaper advertisers. Gustavo says the recipients are of a kind that used to favor boxed drawings of a man in a Panama hat ogling a young woman:

Though Burns doesn’t name the business category affected, sources say the only such advertisers to receive the [termination] letters were in the adult section of the paper. The paper will enact its ban May 31.

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How do you entice more people to subscribe to a metro newspaper daily print edition? Well, one way that sounds pretty logical to FishbowlLA is to zero in on affluent zip codes and expand the local-section insert from once a week to every weekday.

That’s what the Orange County Register will do starting this Monday, May 6 for the regions of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. Instead of just Fridays, The Current section will now appear in local editions Monday through Friday. From the recent announcement:

“The essence of a truly indispensible community newspaper is its ability to be interesting first, then relevant, finding its way to important and ultimately becoming an essential part of people’s daily lives,” said Eric Spitz, owner and president at Freedom Communications. “The investments we’re making into The Current not only provide significantly more value to subscribers in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, but we hope it will redefine expectations of what a vibrant hometown newspaper should look like and accomplish in the communities it serves.”

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The latest figures released by non-profit the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) rank the LA Times as the fourth most read U.S. daily print newspaper and the Orange County Register at #14. But for SoCal media watchers, the biggest news is actually the publication sitting at #23.

After falling out of the Top 25 average daily print circulation rankings, U-T San Diego is back on the list with a circulation of 192,782, or an 8.7% increase from the same period last year. However, one area scholar cautions in a KPBS report that a recent acquisition likely accounts for a large part if not all of this circulation bump:

“It would be interesting to know where all of those increases come from,” said Dean Nelson, director of Point Loma Nazarene University’s journalism program. “Was it exclusively from the North County Times readership? Or, did the increase come from other parts of the region?”

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As A1 page editor for the Seattle Times, David Birdwell (pictured) had a hand in two separate recent Pulitzer Prize-winning efforts. The first, honored in the Breaking News category in 2010, involved the paper’s coverage of the shooting deaths of four Lakewood, WA police officers. The second series, cited in 2012 for Investigative Reporting, recognized the work of reporters Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong in exposing corruption associated with the prescription of methadone at state-subsidized health care facilities.

This all bodes extremely well for the second, additional page of the Orange County Register’s “Focus” news section launching next Monday (the first was added to the paper last fall). Wire editor Birdwell will work closely with visual specialist Charles Apple to creatively frame the burning issue(s) of the day. From this week’s announcement:

Birdwell will contribute story ideas and some of the state, national and international wire packages for this second Focus page. Graphics editor Cindy O’Dell and team leader Gene Harbrecht will be part of the collaborative process that will result in thoughtful, visually compelling pages.

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According to a report by Amita Sharma and Ryann Grochowski for KPBS/inewsource Investigations Desk, it appears that U-T San Diego may have played favorites during last fall’s campaign for city mayor.

Some frustration and general befuddlement from the side of Democratic candidate Tom Filner over the sheer number of attack ads that appeared in print during the campaign has now given way to some apparent public-records confirmation. And that, in turn and if further corroborated, could really get the newspaper in trouble:

“It’s clearly not appropriate for a news organization to make that kind of contribution without reporting it,” said Dan Schnur, former chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, now director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the USC.

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Ken Doctor, a media expert often quoted in other people’s articles, has gone long-form this week at Nieman Lab about the topic of the Orange County Register‘s ongoing bold experiment. His article is a worthwhile read for anyone closely following the paper’s fortunes.

Next Tuesday, some of the fans sitting inside Angel Stadium of Anaheim for the mighty team’s home opener will be doing so for free, courtesy of the paper’s seven-day subscriber membership rewards program. In this particular case, all at the behest of newspaper president Eric Spitz and CEO Aaron Kushner:

The Register approached the Angels, located 10 minutes away, with the idea of better using the empty seats the Angels couldn’t sell. The Angels found themselves sitting on almost 600,000 empty seats last year over 81 games. Put another 7,000 butts in those seats each night, even without getting paid for the ticket, and the club is pulling in another 10 bucks or so on Chronic Tacos, garlic fries and overpriced Corona.

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Via Q&A with PR Week, Jimmy Orr says the discussion about metered online content is “healthy” (and – we assume – sure to get “healthier” in these parts once the Orange County Register joins the paywall club later this month):

“Our thought is that no one can cover Los Angeles and Southern California better than we can. That’s our niche. Our journalism is strong enough, and quality sells.”

“The important thing we do is participate [in the debate] and see if the business model works. Too often, people get caught up in the fact that the business model in this industry has not yet been fully realized. That’s true, but that is also okay, because it will be. But if you don’t participate, you’re not going to learn.”

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Next week, the Orange County Register is launching three new weekly six-page insert sections dedicated to area universities. The UC Irvine one debuts April 1; Chapman University April 2; and Cal State Fullerton April 3.

Ahead of those debuts, LA Times reporter Kim Christensen questions the wisdom of the paper respectively partnering with each institution for the sections on a $275,000, one-year contractual basis. For that money, each university gets a half-page ad in 45 issues. From Christensen’s piece:

Some Register staffers have expressed concerns — most of them privately for fear of alienating their bosses — that the collaborative effort and the schools’ paid sponsorship of it will undermine the newspaper’s credibility and blur the line between advertising copy and news stories…

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