A crazy end to a crazy story.

Yesterday evening, not long after doing a brief Skype interview with LA-based What’s Trending host Shira Lazar about his recent suspension without pay from the Colorado Springs Gazette, reporter Barrett Tryon tweeted that his job had been reinstated. And… that he was no longer interested in resuming employment with the paper, after being suspended for linking on Facebook to an LA Times article about a change in his outlet’s ownership.

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Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Barrett Tryon has been receiving grief from his employers for posting an LA Times story on his personal Facebook page. According to Carmen Boles, content director of the Gazette, the Facebook post violated the social media policy of Freedom Co. Tryon refused to remove the post. He tells Jim Romenesko he’s meeting with his employers  at 11:30 this morning to discuss the issue, and that he expects to be fired.

Beyond the absurdity of attempted censorship by a newspaper, traditionally an institution that promotes free speech, is the issue of employee rights. A story on Poynter notes that these kinds of overreaching attempts by employers to place restrictions on worker’s social media have drawn the ire of the National Labor Relations Board:

In at least six recent cases, according to a memo from the general counsel, the independent federal agency that investigates unfair labor practices has found provisions of employer social media policies to be unlawful.

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Two notable things occurred this weekend when OC Weekly blogger Josh Dulaney decided to check out the opening of a new Church of Scientology facility in downtown Santa Ana – without the benefit of an official media invite.

Firstly, after he was denied entrance, the Church took advantage of the opportunity to beef up their local reporter intel:

I was told that a representative would speak with me, which turned out to be their thinly disguised effort to finally put a photo of me on their files. While I spoke with a lady who didn’t want her name in the story, a portly f*ck-of-a-man decided to stand several feet away and snap photos of the most handsome reporter in Santa Ana. I smoked my cigarette and stared directly into the lens.

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At this weekend’s Associated Press Television and Radio Association (APTRA) awards gala in Pasadena, the 2012 Stan Chambers Award for Extraordinary Achievement will be presented to retired TV reporter Hank Plante.

One of the first openly gay TV journalists in the country, Plante blazed a trail in more than a half-dozen markets. As political editor for San Francisco’s CBS affiliate Channel 5, where he retired in the spring of 2010, he made a penultimate splash in the fall of 2009 with his interview of Gavin Newsom. At the end of the conversation, the mayor uttered his “off the record” disgust.

Plante continues to contribute to examiner.com, the Desert Sun and calbuzz.com. In this great career highlights reel, he poses at one point as a Secret Service agent escorting a Nancy Reagan lookalike down Rodeo Drive:

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To mark the arrival of her newest memoir When We Were Outlaws, storied lesbian writer and activist Jeanne Cordova chatted with Windy City Times reporter Sarah Toce about some of the book’s highlights. What a long and remarkable life’s journey it has been.

On the journalism front, it all started in 1971 with the launch of groundbreaking LA magazine The Lesbian Tide. Most of the time, the publication was powered by donated, like-minded labor. During this time, Cordova also became the human-rights editor at progressive newspaper the LA Free Press:

“I was first hired as The Freep’s token ‘Chicana, feminist, lesbian’ columnist. My weekly essays became know as ‘that dyke column’ by the largely straight readership, but it got people listening to my voice as I covered the [1973] Battle of the Sexes, the famous tennis match between female (and closeted lesbian) tennis player Billie Jean King and male tennis star, Charlie Riggs,” said Cordova.

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This weekend’s 60 Minutes looks like it’s going to be a good one. Byron Pitts reports on the story of  20-year-old Times-Tribune reporter Adam Sulfridge, who was forced to arm himself while working his beat after receiving death threats from the corrupt Sheriff Lawrence Hodge. His editor was packing too.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency almost killed a UC San Diego college student by abandoning him in a prison cell for 5 days without food or water.

Daniel Chong was imprisoned on April 21 when DEA agents raided the home of a friend he was visiting. Chong was detained for questioning but not arrested, not charged with a crime, and should have been released. Instead, agents locked him in a cell and forgot all about him.

Chong was forced to drink his own urine to survive. There were no restroom facilities in the 5-by-10-foot cell, but oddly enough, there was methamphetamine, which agents admit was left there accidentally. Chong descended into psychosis, eating glass from his own broken eyeglasses. When he was finally discovered, he was suffering severe dehydration, a perforated esophagus and kidney failure.

The DEA only issued an apology to Chong today, two full days after the press began reporting on the incident, and a week after he was discovered near death in his cell.

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Before flying to Los Angeles this weekend with her partner and four children to attend the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards, Ohio mom Jennifer Tyrrell had never boarded a commercial airliner. Her appearance Saturday night at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel led to eight minutes of the best kind of teary awards speechifying – a dedicated mom thanking GLAAD for their support of her efforts to right a Boy Scouts of America wrong.

FishbowlLA’s favorite part the Tyrrell speech comes at around the seven-minute mark. That’s when she urged people in the audience to sign her change.org petition, which asks that she be reinstated as a Boy Scout den mother in Bridgeport:

“I’m going to ask each of you right now to take your phone, go to change.org/scouts. It will take you right to the petition. Go ahead, everyone. Take out your phone. It’s OK… Then share it with everyone you know. Together, we can make a difference.”

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Although the latest ratings have KFI AM 640 awash in market-dominating numbers, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) is not giving up its fight against weekday personalities Rush Limbaugh, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou.

In a recent telephone interview with rbr.com, organization president Alex Nogales called once more for Clear Channel to sack the hosts of “The John and Ken Show.” The NHMC has also shared a new video to support its ongoing efforts:

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When Bill Boyarsky worked for the LA Times, he covered both the riots sparked by Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson. In his latest column for truthdig.com, he considers the Trayvon Martin shooting and recent hate crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma within the 20th anniversary context of the 1992 riots.

His conclusions are not happy ones. Although he acknowledges there are differences between the decades-separated incidents, he argues that the U.S. racial divide remains as bad as ever. Boyarsky quotes some interesting data from Rand, Gallup and Loyola Marymount, while also pointing the finger at a layer that was absent during his LA Times days:

We thought communications were fast, but compared with today, news traveled slowly and rabble-rousing nuts didn’t have the Internet to spew their venom… With racist gunslingers inspired by their Facebook and Twitter “friends,” emboldened by permissive gun laws and hating the increasing racial diversity of America, nothing has changed.

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