Archives: August 2011

The Venice outfit that made a name for itself with animated political parodies is extending its reach into a most unlikely domain: the children’s book world. Sort of like The Onion publishing cookbooks.

Be that as it may, the initial iPad product options from JibJab Jr. are The Biggest Pizza Ever, about a kid who causes major pizza pie problems in his hometown, and The Alphabet Wrangler, which charts the attempts of a youngster to round up letters that have escaped from a book. And here’s the really cool part:

With a few taps and swipes, parents can easily create a JibJab Jr. book with their child’s face, name, gender and skin color, then drop them into the center of the action of a beautifully illustrated and animated tale.

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A recent study claimed to show that surfing the internet improves worker productivity. Today’s Twitter trend makes us wonder if that’s entirely true…

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It wasn’t just ticket holders feeling burned by the Sunset Junction Street Fair’s cancellation. The LA Weekly reports that musical acts and local businesses are smarting from lost revenue. And the festival’s would-be vendors are feeling downright shafted:

Carols Guillen, who was planning to sell smoothies at the festival, says Sunset Junction owes him $1400 for the cost of his booth and a deposit. That comes in addition to the $1000 he spent on supplies.

“I got a voicemail the day before the festival letting us know it was cancelled,” Guillen says, adding that this would have been the first year his family-run Lacuma Smoothies had a stand at Sunset Junction. “I trusted the festival because they’ve been around for over thirty years. We still haven’t heard anything about getting our money back.”

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BlogHer.com, the female-focused aggregator launched in 2005 by a trio of women, has become an Internet force to be reckoned with. The site’s most recent stats peg monthly uniques at upwards of 26 million (!) and investors include GE/NBC’s Peacock Equity Fund.

Today, the Belmont, California based company announced it has hired author and former Redbook magazine editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison to head up BlogHerMoms.com, a spinoff that will focus on “what moms are thinking, saying and doing on the web.” The site launched with a major sponsor, County Crock, already in place. From today’s press release:

“This is a thrilling conversation to join and shape, in the best women’s community on the web,” says Morrison. “Women bloggers have always led the way with their funny, frank, honest and brave voices, and I’m so thrilled to work with BlogHer in a space dedicated to so much of what BlogHer has always stood for: self-discovery, community and helping women continually define and reach for their best vision of who they can be.”

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How much incentive do you need to do your job? A living wage and a strong work ethic is enough for most of us. Not Tribune Co. management, who apparently need millions of dollars, in addition to their huge salaries.

Tribune executives have asked the bankruptcy court to approve continuation of their management incentive plan, which could pay up to $42.5 million in bonuses to 640 employees. This comes just weeks after another round of newsroom layoffs at the Tribune-owned LA Times. Further layoffs in the paper’s Operations departments are coming any day now.

The company told the court that the plan is “critically important to maintain proper incentives for the management team.” Because simply doing a good job for a good salary isn’t motive enough?

Via Reuters, Bloomberg

Here’s something you don’t read every month: a daily newspaper journalist refusing to assign blame to Craisglist, the Internet or the Great Recession for the current state of their industry.

In an essay published in UC Berkeley newspaper The Daily Californian entitled “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” senior staff writer Mihir Zaveri (pictured) suggests that he and his fellow Fifth Fourth Estate colleagues must accept a large part of the responsibility for the upside-down state of the U.S. newspaper industry. Writes the recent San Francisco Chronicle and The Oregonian intern:

We got complacent, and we stopped evolving, and soon the concept of a news article became far removed from what you, as a person, valued. Now we find ourselves in an awkward position where an indispensable component of democracy is slipping away, and we’re scrambling…

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Just a day after announcing the mag is expanding internationally into Greece, Out has hired William Van Meter as its new features editor. Van Meter comes to Out from Esquire, where he most recently edited that mag’s “Spring 2011 Big Black Book.” He has written for The New York Times, New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Interview.

Previously on FishbowlLA:
Here Media Expands Into Greece

The August 31 LA Groupon deal dangles a $940 discount for a trio of “Venus Freeze skin tightening treatments.” Each procedure requires between 25 and 40 minutes at the Beverly Hills offices of Advance Lipo.

And just in case an 84% reduction in price is not enough to entice email deal subscribers, the folks at Groupon have stirred the cosmetic pot with a bizarre analogy. They compare the potential discounted end results not to a Kardashian or an Arabian stallion, but rather a non-descript automobile:

Much like an automobile, the human body requires proper care to stay healthy and good-looking for calendar photos. Maintain your natural mode of transportation with today’s offer… Firmer body bark emerges… Touting minimal side effects such as redness, heat, and temporary flame tattoos around treated areas, patients are free to return to their regularly scheduled lives soon after the treatment.

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Murray Seeger, who spent 14 years with the LA Times from 1967 to 1981, passed away on Monday from pneumonia at the age of 82. Seeger was perhaps best known locally for helming the Times‘ Moscow bureau from 1972 to 1974. He famously got the last interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn before the dissident author was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.

According to the Times‘ obit, Seeger endeared himself to the Soviet Union so much, a KGB colonel once called him “the most disliked American correspondent since Harrison Salisbury.”

After leaving the Times, Seeger went on to become the information director for the AFL-CIO. They could certainly use the likes of him these days.

RIP.

Launched August 19 via Twitter, the self-proclaimed Anonymous hacker group offshoot Hollywood Leaks has so far busted into Julianne Hough‘s cell phone, the email account of a cast member of the upcoming Tom Cruise movie Rock of Ages and, most notably over the weekend, the cell phone of rapper Kreayshawn.

Considering that this gang is in the business of sharing the same kind of illicit celebrity materials as TMZ and Radar Online, without occasionally having to negotiate a purchase price or pay a licensing fee, it would be interesting to read a tweet from Harvey Levin about Hollywood Leaks or get some kind of POV from the National Enquirer adjacent Radar reporters. But so far, no such luck.

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