If you look at the masthead for BuzzFeed Entertainment, there’s a rather conspicuous name missing. That’s because LA bureau chief Richard Rushfield is no longer part of the operation.

“Indeed, I have parted ways from BuzzFeed,” Rushfield told FishbowlLA via email Saturday night after a long day at Anaheim’s WonderCon. “Wasn’t the right fit in the end, but I wish them all the best.”

The exit comes exactly five months after Rushfield joined BuzzFeed last fall to launch a west coast bureau. He leaves behind chief correspondent Kate Aurthur, senior film reporter Adam B. Vary, reporter Tessa Stuart, correspondent-at-large Michael Hastings and associate editors Louis Peitzman and Erin La Rosa.

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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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From a PR standpoint, it’s been a strange week for PMC.

On Tuesday, Jay Penske’s operation rolled out a new weekly edition of Variety. But for a variety of reasons (pun intended, sorry), the launch yielded not nearly the boffo media splash it should have.

Now, at the end of a Passover/Good Friday week’s close, there is news of the settlement of a contentious IP theft lawsuit filed by PMC against Hollywood Reporter parent-parent company Prometheus Global Media. In this case, perhaps PMC was readying a big Cesar Chavez Day press release. But instead, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz this afternoon got to the court documents first, followed by TheWrap’s Lucas Shaw:

When PMC filed the suit, it was seeking more than $5 million in damages, accusing THR of lifting source code from PMC’s site TVLine.com. The two parties settled on $162,500 as well as some other pieces that have not been made public, according to an individual with knowledge of the suit.

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The tweet, sent out late this afternoon via @LAIreland, transcends the realm of professional sports:

And on this Good Friday, the news waiting at the above shortened link is indeed very Good for all those who, like us, didn’t in fact already know. Leasa Ireland, wife of ESPN AM 710 host and Lakers radio play-by-play man John, is cancer-free after an arduous, year-plus-long battle. She writes:

I was overwhelmed and blessed with amazing support from family and friends near and far. I am also extremely fortunate to have a good healthcare plan (well, pretty good), and to live in a city where great doctors and quality care are readily available.

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The slick one-page write-up about Josh Levs appears in Modern Luxury’s The Atlantan magazine. But thanks to the magic of resourceful editors and far-flung freelancers, it was in fact written by Laguna Beach-based vet Wendy Bowman.

Bowman does a nice job of framing Levs multi-tasking talents. They are of a kind upon which Jeff Zucker can build a whole new foundation.

We wish there was a little bit more info about that novel the 40-year-old Levs is writing. But his subsequent explanation of how the whole pink-ties thing started more than makes up for this.

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Following the LA Times‘ lead, the Orange County Register will put its online content behind a paywall starting next month, according to a letter to the paper’s subscribers obtained by OC Weekly. Unlike the Times, however, which allows full online access to Sunday paper subscribers, the Register paywall will be more restrictive.

From the letter:

In April, we will take another promising step to reinforce the value of your subscription by introducing Digital Access. The local content that you access digitally through OCRegister.com is moving to a digital subscription model. Current print subscribers will have free digital access on the days you are subscribed to the print-edition. You simply need to link your account to activate your free Digital Access. In the coming week, we will send a follow-up email with instructions on how to link your account.

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To go along with today’s New York Times article about Robbie Rogers, the former U.S. national team and British professional soccer player who came out in February via his website, reporter Sam Borden conducted a half-hour Google+ chat with his subject from London.

The very articulate Rogers tells Borden that since he went public with his sexual orientation, he has heard from people all over the world. Their stories are “made for the movies” and involve more than a few fearful, closeted husbands. The Southern California native also detailed his latest sideline journalism activities:

“I write for a fashion magazine in LA called BELLO, for the past three, four months. So I’ve been busy…”

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The first nine paragraphs of today’s “Column One” by Hector Becerra are expertly constructed.

Taken as a whole, they perfectly illustrate (in a feature reporting kind of way) the old AP “inverted pyramid” lede principle. That is to say, the reporter sets the scene, draws the reader in and then, thunderously, delivers a wallop.

Becerra describes a recent Sunday visit paid by Robert Adler-Peckerar to Mount Zion, a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of downtown LA. The gate was locked; a caretaker next door needed to be summoned. Once inside the dilapidated resting place, the searcher found the sadly fallen marker of the life he was investigating:

“This is what happened to one of the greatest Yiddish writers in LA,” said Adler-Peckerar, executive director of Yiddishkayt, an organization dedicated to preserving the Yiddish language and culture. “I’d never seen a cemetery like this in America.”

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There’s a quote to be savored at the half-way mark of Topless Robot editor Luke Y. Thompson‘s article “On the Set of a Sci-Fi Porno.” It was given to LYT by hot young adult (and budding crossover) star James Deen in the midst of the making of Surviving Humanity, a film intended to first be released as an R-rated offering.

Thompson tried (and failed) to get Deen to dish on the actor’s recent The Canyons co-star Lindsay Lohan. But when he brought up that infamous New York Times Magazine piece by Stephan Rodrick, about the movie’s tumultuous production, he fielded this answer:

Deen says only that it’s “accurate enough – it is real-life events reflected in a mirror and retold for dramatic effect. There’s enough in it that’s true that we can’t say it’s not true, but there’s also so much else there than what they described just in that article.”

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While the future of KCETLink’s SoCal Connected is very much up in the air, another namesake is about to be launched. Beginning Thursday April 4, Zócalo Public Square California editor Joe Mathews (pictured) will be writing a weekly column titled “Connecting California.” It’s the site’s first such regular feature.

In a brief teaser, Zócalo promise that Mathews will avoid the habit of many other Golden State commentators by focusing on the future rather than the past:

Each week, Mathews will offer new narratives for California – stories that show readers how life is here today, who Californians are now and how 21st-century California communities work — and don’t work. He’ll challenge media assumptions — that California’s people are a collection of competing demographic groups, that the good old days are behind us and that our politicians are always to blame for all our problems—by offering stories from all over the state.

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