Archives: July 2005

In a long interview with the NY Observer, Dean Baquet discusses the state of the LAT. He says he intends to “[try] to get a firmer handle on what makes us different from the other three or four great American newspapers, or half a dozen, whatever the list is that we compete against.” Will be interesting to see what this means in practice– will the LAT be increasingly California-ized under Baquet? I hope so. The skeptics in town fear that Baquet is too recent an LA arrival and too steeped in NYT-ness from his time at the (other) Times to give the LAT a distinctive LA-ish stamp. But FishbowlLA says, give the man a chance, you nativists!

Baquet also weighs in on the LAT-NYT rivalry, penis jokes, and, of course, budget woes. Meanwhile, John Carroll vents a little to Newsweek:

Carroll told NEWSWEEK that “the ongoing debate over resources” with the Tribune Co. bosses was one of a variety of factors contributing to his decision to leave the paper. When asked if Chicago adequately appreciated the Times’s journalistic accomplishments during his tenure, he replied, “I want to be candid with you, but I’m going to have to duck on that one.”

According to Forbes, our fair sprawlopolis is the seventh-best city in the country in which to be single. That’s down one notch from #6 last year, which makes sense because, personally, I would say I’m about 14% lonelier than I was in 2004.

Forbes uses a pretty suspicious set of metrics to determine these rankings. (Are we really supposed to believe that LA is only the eleventh-coolest city, behind, excuse me as I cough, Philadelphia?) An interviewee, a 27-year old ticket-taker at the Roxy named Michael Genadry, says that LA “is a hub for everything that is interesting or psychotic. No matter how strange your interests are, you can find someone who can share your desires.” (Genadry doesn’t have a Friendster page, so I have no idea what his ‘strange interests’ are, besides being interviewed for silly magazine articles.)

Apparently the cast of ‘Windfall’, the mid-season show which NBC picked up last week after Fox passed on the pilot, were caught by surprise at having to talk to journalists at the Television Critics Association confab. Or at least that’s the impression one gets from reading the TCA coverage. From LAT television columnist Paul Brownfield’s online TCA diary:

Can you see now how hard it is to maintain a sense of hopefulness at this thing? Currently I’m in the press room, where they have transcripts from all the sessions. Randomly I flip to a page and record this quote from Jason Gedrick, star of the midseason NBC drama “Windfall,” about the post-windfall lives of 20 lottery winners, to give you a flavor of what it means to attend a panel: “I was going to say I think something else that’s really interesting about the possibilities of this show is the fact that, you know, initially if you win something and you want to suddenly reap the benefits in some sort of material way, characters can go through a sort of genesis as to, you know, OK, initially I was just greedy and I wanted to fill myself up with, you know, a car and a new house or whatever and then come to terms with that and say, ‘You know what, I don’t need this. What can I do? And you know, Jackie’s character — she’s a nurse. She may want to open up a clinic and donate some money. I mean everyone has a great opportunity here to go through stages of being, you know, more self-involved and then perhaps a little more ethical and moral, and I think that the possibilities are endless.”

And then here’s something from Melanie McFarland at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Read more

“Uh, this is a question for Doctor Drew. Is it true that working in public radio can cause impotence?”

Congratulations to winner S.B. who prefers to remain anonymous.

Zut, alors! Michael Kinsley has announced he will step down as editorial page editor at the LAT, though he says he will remain involved with the department in a not-yet-defined new role. I hope it’s not running the Xerox machine.

This comes about a week after the announcement which coincided with John Carroll’s retirement that the LAT editorial page would heretofore report not to the editor of the paper, but to the publisher, which nobody knew what to make of. It’s all so mysterious!

UPDATE: Well, that’s what I get for reading the New York Times in the morning before I look at L.A. Observed, where there’s a teaser for Nikki Finke’s soon-to-be posted column about Kinsley’s departure in which, she is expected to argue, the editorial-page-reporting-to-the-publisher thing has a central role. L.A. Observed also finds that the Boston Globe and the NYT editorial pages also report to the papers’ publishers, so maybe it’s not as weird as it sounds.

I honestly don’t know if anyone in Los Angeles besides me reads it, but each week Edward Jay Epstein’s Slate column, ‘The Hollywood Economist,’ quietly illuminates the inner economic workings of the entertainment industry. Today, in part one of a two-fer he’s calling ‘Hollywood’s Death Spiral’, Epstein delves into the semi-secret financial data shared by the major studios:

Even though the studios do not provide a road map for outsiders to the precise sources of their wealth, the real numbers are available in Hollywood. Indeed, every 90 days, each major studio sends a precise breakdown of all its revenue from all its worldwide sources, including movie theaters, video distributors, and television stations, to a secretive unit of the Motion Picture Association called Worldwide Market Research, located in Encino, Calif. The unit combines the data into an All Media Revenue Report and sends it to a limited number of top executives… in the best Hollywood tradition of keeping audiences in the dark, the report is not made available to newspapers, industry newsletters, or Wall Street analysts.

Epstein has even posted a page from this report (albeit not one that reveals revenue from any particular studio) on his personal website, and goes on to mine the data in all sorts of interesting ways. I have no snarky Fishbowl-y comment on Epstein’s work other than, gosh, it’s worth reading. So read it!

Full disclosure: I am a boy. So I was bemused by Booth Moore’s careful parsing of the Melrose Avenue shopping scene in Saturday’s LAT. You see, Melrose Heights (Melrose between Fairfax and La Cienega) has “emerged as L.A.’s hottest retail thoroughfare by flying under the radar.” And that’s a complete contrast from the Robertson or Rodeo shopping scenes, not to mention the Melrose east-of-Fairfax melange. For Melrose Heights is a unique syncretization of the “one-of-a-kind vintage look of the Eastside [and] the designer chic of Beverly Hills.”

Like so much of L.A., Melrose Heights has a behind-the-scenes aura that suggests the person behind that pair of oversized sunglasses could be famous. The appeal of shopping here is not the overt hustle and bustle but the possibility of discovery – that Kirsten Dunst could walk into Miss Sixty trailed by a phalanx of paparazzi, that Johnny Depp might drop into his office above the Kate Somerville salon or that a wardrobe stylist could pop into Marni exclaiming that she’s there to pull clothes for a shoot with Kate Hudson.

Well, it certainly sounds more enticing than the Ross Dress For Less on Hollywood and Western where, believe it or not, you can find cute tops (in both senses of the term: nice shirts and cruising hustlers). I’ll check it out.

By sheer coincidence, Al Gore’s nascent cable channel shares its name with the Sunday LAT Opinion section. ‘Current’ must be in the air. Current TV, which will be available to Angeleno DirecTV subscribers, will be aimed at 18-34s and feature tiny little segments, some of which will be audience-provided. It’s a wikinetwork! Explains the NYT:

Instead of packaging its programming in 30- and 60-minute blocks, Current plans to show segments 3 to 10 minutes in length – the better to hold the attention of channel-surfing multitaskers – that are to be shuffled throughout the day like songs on a radio station. Some will be minidocumentaries, produced in-house or by outsiders; others will be feature-oriented, on subjects like spirituality and relationships.

Virtually the only structure is to be provided by three-minute “Google Current” segments at the top and bottom of each hour, in which the most popular Google searches of the day are to be mined for evidence of what is on people’s minds.

Disaster? Innovation? Both? Since that network is based in San Francisco and there’s no FishbowlSF, I’ll be handling the Current beat. Stay tuned…

In yesterday’s LAT Opin- excuse me, Current section- Michael Kinsley remarks on the rudeness prevalent on the internet:

Why is the tone of conversation on the Internet, especially about politics, so much lower than in the material world? E-mail can be a fabulous medium for serious discussion, combining as it does the spontaneity of talking with the opportunity for reflection inherent in writing it down.

But most of the e-mail I get doesn’t realize this potential. For the last few weeks, my in-box has been clogged almost to the point of unusability, with nearly identical e-mails from people who disagree with my interpretation of the notorious Downing Street memos. (Don’t know what the DSM are? Lucky you.) As an attempt to change your mind, one e-mail may be a sincere appeal to reason and evidence, but 500 e-mails is a blunt instrument.

And nasty? Oh my goodness. Give me those scary old pre-e-mail letters that journalists used to get – written in purple or red crayon on mysteriously stained stationery from the Bates Motel – any day.

As Fishbowl readers know, I’m an unrepentant Michael Kinsley fan. I’d like each one of you to send him a cheery “U R DOIN A GOOD JOB!! ’ email to balance out the bile in his inbox. It’s michael.kinsley@latimes.com.

She doesn’t live here yet (our sources say) but she’s starting to act like an Angeleno. The NYT reports that the winter 2006 ReganBooks catalog features a cover model. And who is this cover model? Why, it’s Judith Regan!

The winter 2006 catalog for ReganBooks features a cover illustration of a curvaceous brunette who bears more than a passing resemblance to Ms. Regan, wearing a white dress shirt and little else while stretched across a pile of books bearing titles published by ReganBooks.

And there’s more:

In that spirit, the fold-out cover of the new catalog also features “ripped from the headlines” clips about one of Ms. Regan’s favorite subjects: her impending move to Los Angeles.

In announcing the relocation in April, Ms. Regan spoke of her idea to create a sort of literary salon in Hollywood, where television and film executives would meet with authors over cappuccino while Ms. Regan conducted her radio talk show nearby.

One artist’s imaginings about just such a salon is the subject of the catalog’s inside cover, where Ms. Regan has reproduced an editorial cartoon by R. J. Matson that ran in The New York Observer. It shows a considerably more doughy Ms. Regan holding court with denizens of the steroids-and-silicone set.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m already brushing up on my literary salon chatter skills- reading the Cliff Notes to ‘A Million Little Pieces,’ practicing my pronunciation of ‘Jhumpa Lahiri’, etc.