User-created content is all the rage!

Heinz, as in ketchup and Mrs. Kerry, is looking for amateur ad types, but it’s expensive to wade through crap. And they should know.

ABC offers I-Caught, a magazine show using video captured by the unwashed and massaged into stories by those trained professionals at ABC News. David Sloan is the EP.

CNN already has I-Report up and running.

Topix gets some daily 40,000 posts since adding discussion groups and comments and local “editors”. The Los Angeles news is still 3 days old, alas.

And then there’s the downside: one nasty worm in a MySpace page can infect a million users.

Digg started taking down posts that broke the DMR encryption code for HD-DVD movies. Those users generated revolt; Digg backed off.

(Illustration from Wild Women Jewels.)

The annual P.T. Barnum Awards, which honor Tufts
University alumni in the arts & entertainment industries, are going to producer Steve Tisch, CAA’s video game guru Seamus Blackley and man of the hour, Ben Silverman. At next week’s ceremony at CAA, they’ll receive bronze statues of P.T. Barnum’s famous Jumbo the Elephant.

Silverman gets Jumbo all to himself, but he has to share his new NBC co-chair title with Marc Graboff. Grab-on, more likely.

From the annals of “All News Is Local” come some of the top stories to hit our inbox. Well, the top stories that aren’t about 11-year-old boys shooting giant pigs:

NPR: Day to Day interviews Mia Farrow about Bush’s sanctions against Sudan. Your guess is as good as ours.

CNN: A Venezuelan TV station has been accused of trying to incite a hit on Hugo Chavez. And the Venezuelan government is none too pleased with CNN, either.

Tabloid Baby: Someone at this site is clearly in lust with someone at X17, cuz why else would they run a story like this?

Bob Sipchen, another LAT veteran, is joining the Sierra Club, as was predicted when the buyouts were announced. Sipchen, who’s won everything worth winning, will be Editor in Chief of Sierra magazine and Deputy National Communications Director.

Sipchen won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize and Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award for editorial writing (with Alex Raksin) for a series about people with mental illness and addictions living on
America’s streets. Sipchen also shared in the paper’s Pulitzer for its team coverage of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

His outdoor creds are equally strong.

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Our friends at ERSnews.com have a back-to-work-after-the-long-weekend treat for you all (albeit a geeky investigative-reporter-type treat). The State Controller’s office has a dandy unclaimed property search tool online. You can punch in any one’s name and see what’s owed them and by whom (we, unfortunately, are owed nothing).

ERS found a few missing shekels for George Clooney and other people who probably don’t rummage between their seat cushions too often. But you don’t have to limit the search to celebrities: Search yourself! Search your boss! Search your ex!

You could spend the entire day just searching for debts owed to your friends and co-workers. Happy short week, everyone!

The Force Is/Are Strong With This One: Good for Geoff Boucher for knowing that the plural of “Jedi” is, in fact, “Jedi.”

War Correspondants Watch TV, Too: So weird to see a TV review by San Diego bureau chief Tony Perry (who has most recently covered Afghanistan), even if it is a show about the Iraq War.

Unlimited Sequels Ho! And Josh Friedman explains why.

FBLA’s anonymous tip turned out to be true: NBC is trying to ditch Kevin Reilly, and right before prom, too.

News of Reilly’s replacement by Ben Silverman of Reveille Entertainment was emailed around town. Reilly himself found out via email. According to Nikki Finke, she knew before he did. (Think he’s not a Blackberry obsessive? Bet he is now.)

Is Jeff Zucker going to shell out for Reveille? Or just make Silverman’s package suitable big? Official announcement expected today.

Al Martinez is getting more attention for being forced to take the Trib’s buyout than for writing his columns. Rallying to the veteran writer’s defense are Kenani, Bill Boyarski, Joan Leonard (on the same page, Marsha Armstrong of Dr. Phil, Gia Gittleson of Los Angeles magazine (who could hire him) and assorted others. Ken Reich weighs in, as well.

Martinez will be on Patt Morrison’s show today.

We’re guessing that one thing Martinez won’t be doing in forced retirement is

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John Glionna, an LA Times writer who wrote the book on style, or rather an essay on same for Bob Baker’s Newsthinking, revisits Haight-Asbury, 40 years on.

Of course, the Times has an actual in-house expert, Charles Perry, whose Haight-Asbury: A History is back in print. Perry’s been approached by the Today Show to do a tour of the neighborhood.

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For some unknown reason, the LA Times editors think a story about NYC-TV, the city gov’t channel, is a Politics:National story. Writing about Kelly Choi, the hottie host of Secrets of New York, Erika Hayasaki claims:

Choi has become a New York icon, with bloggers obsessed with finding hidden messages in her jewelry. (Playing to her fans, producers once scanned a code from “The Matrix” onto one of her chokers.)

There’s no evidence that many bloggers are obsessed with Choi or her jewelry, outside of a few Gothamist commenters a year ago. Jill Gardner, whose NY Sun piece must have been handy background, was a little less dramatic:

Her spiky high-heeled boots, cinched black coat, and regularly rotating jewelry are so carefully watched by fans that the producers had a code from “The Matrix” scanned onto one of her chokers.

Maybe the Times editors were sending a secret message of their own to the dismal local channel, LA36, which brings new meaning to the word unwatchable.