As first reported by Steve Pond of TheWrap, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association on Monday elected a much younger new president. Theo Kingma, who started out as a projectionist and later became a photographer, is just 46. The two previous heads of the HFPA were both in their seventies when they took office.

Kingma has indicated he plans to improve the reputation of the HFPA, which has been further targeted in recent weeks via a pair of TheWrap stories by site founder Sharon Waxman. From Pond’s earlier op-ed piece:

In recent months, TheWrap has been contacted repeatedly by members of the HFPA and by studio reps who deal with the group. None wished to be identified, but all complained in increasingly strong terms about HFPA policies and practices and described the upcoming election as pivotal… Kingma originally agreed to speak for this story, but cancelled when he did not receive permission from HFPA leadership to do so.

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Far-flung tech journalists have converged on downtown Los Angeles this week for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (June 11-13). Among this group of E3 journalists is Mike Yawney, a correspondent for Toronto’s CITY-TV who goes by the Twitter handle of @Gadget_Guy.

The big news on Monday’s preview day was the aggressive price point ($399) and advantageous policies of Sony’s PlayStation 4. Yawney has a page set up on the CITY-TV website to showcase his convention floor tweets and at one point, while raving about the Sony press conference live demo of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, he reminded his readers that the game is Canadian-made.

After that particular demo was cut short due to a technical glitch, Sony Computer Entertainment of America president-CEO Jack Tretton told the crowd there are currently 140 games in development for the PS4. A hundred of which will be available in the first year.

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A New Kind of Leaker for an Internet Age (NYT)
What does a leaker look like? Sometimes, people who reveal secrets remain in the shadows, and the public is left to guess at their motivations, agendas and states of mind. Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old man behind the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s pursuit of phone and computer data, upended that history. He is a new kind of leaker of the wired age: an immediately visible one with a voice and the means to go direct with the public. In a era of friction-free Web communication, he disdained the shadows and stepped into view with a lengthy video interview he gave to The Guardian, which broke the story based on information he provided. He stated his motivation plainly, saying, “The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.” HuffPost / The Backstory The Guardian has labeled Snowden a whistleblower after the NSA contractor revealed himself Sunday as the source for several recent surveillance scoops. But some news organizations have been less quick to describe Snowden as a “whistleblower,” opting instead for terms like “source” or “leaker.” The Washington Post / Erik Wemple News organizations’ hesitancy to use “whistleblower” may well derive from the term’s meaning. According to this definition, a whistleblower is an “informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it.” Clearly Snowden was looking to stop something here, but whether it was wrongdoing depends on whether you’re director of national intelligence James Clapper or, say, a civil liberties advocate. The Guardian Snowden is a “hero” who has exposed “one of the most serious events of the decade — the creeping formulation of a mass surveillance state,” Julian Assange said on Monday. The WikiLeaks founder said the question of surveillance abuses by states and tech companies was “something that I and many other journalists and civil libertarians have been campaigning about for a long time. It is very pleasing to see such clear and concrete proof presented to the public.” The New Yorker / Daily Comment He is a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison. The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistleblower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air — and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right.

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Have you noticed anything different about Mediabistro? Yep, our home page is rocking a much cleaner look. All of the great content you love is now grouped according to industry: social media, advertising/PR, TV and video, publishing, design and tech. Click on any of these categories in the navigation bar to find our blogs that cover those fields, plus applicable courses, jobs and premium features from AvantGuild.

Now front and center: The Slider features stories from across our sites and updated throughout the day. What’s Hot @mediabistro keeps track of top news and trends. And the MediabistroTV player includes our dynamic, original videos geared toward media professionals.

Want to go deeper, in fewer clicks? Further down is the Scroller, with up-to-date news from all our blogs. If publishing is your passion, you can view what’s hot on FishbowlNY, FishbowlDC, FishbowlLA and GalleyCat. Is TV your beat? If so, you’ll get the latest news from  TVNewser, TVSpy and LostRemote. The right sidebar includes top job openings, new course offerings, must-see events and streaming updates from @mediabistro.

Great design doesn’t just look pretty — it allows the content to shine through. And we think the new Mediabistro does just that. Like it? Love it? Let us know what you think.

As BuzzFeed’s first, former and so far only LA bureau chief, Richard Rushfield saw his fair share of solid Web traffic reports. But he has now moved on to a company where those numbers are truly spectacular.

FishbowlLA tipsters inform that Rushfield joined Yahoo Entertainment a few weeks ago as features editor. Sure enough, we found what looks to be a first bylined item, dated May 30. Although we imagine much of Rushfield’s day-to-day duties will fall on the enterprise and long-lead assignment side.

Rushfield joins Yahoo Entertainment on the heels of former TMZ GM and LA Times vet Alan Citron’s arrival as business lead. The LAT genealogy also extends to Yahoo editor-in-chief Scott Robson, who worked with Rushfield at The Envelope. At this rate, we wouldn’t be surprised if Patrick Goldstein is soon announced as a Yahoo columnist.

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Twenty years after shepherding the classic 1993 rom-com Sleepless in Seattle, producer Lynda Obst is sharing something called Sleepless in Hollywood. Her second book arrives Tuesday and, befitting a treatise that regularly references gargantuan tentpole productions, has a prominent main pillar of its own.

Obst’s thesis is capitalized in the sub-title and solidly contextualized in the first chapter. The author uses the short-form of Scene rather than Chapter; so, from Scene One: The New Abnormal:

How did this happen? How did it become easier for someone who knows no one to make a movie for $150,000 than for someone who knows everyone to make one for $20 million? Or for a guy who made a movie for $100,000 to make his next movie a superhero tentpole for $100 million? Nothing makes any sense…

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Wired reporter Ryan Tate has a solid recap of the Facebook mini-scandal involving George Takei. In case you missed it, many were shocked by Colorado-based author and gag writer Rick Polito‘s revelation to Jim Romenesko last Thursday that he is getting paid to provide Takei with humorous Facebook material.

The Star Trek alum has made previous reference to social media outsourcing on The Howard Stern Show and in his book Oh Myyy!: There Goes the Internet. But predictably, the Romenesko item sparked much larger media fallout. The good news for Takei is that – per the final paragraph of Tate’s Wired item – damage is likely to be extremely temporary:

Disillusioned fans, however many there are, seem likely to come around. One devoted follower, to whom the writer of this article happens to be married, reacted Thursday to news of a ghost-joker by saying, “I feel cheated!” Given the opportunity the following day to suggest a tough interview question for Takei, she added, “Just tell him he’s awesome.”

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Five years after FishbowlLA first wrote about it, the legal crusade by Florida-based litigant Peter Letterese against the Church of Scientology continues. When Letterese recently reached out to us once more, he used an analogy that – regardless of the merits of his various complaints – lingered.

“In numerous places within his own writing, L. Ron Hubbard openly wrote about being a big Ian Fleming fan,” Letterese explained via email. “Every bit as dangerous as the Nazis, who used tanks, guns and ships to “conquer,” Hubbard, who didn’t have the financial resources for all that, created his own SPECTRE.”

In other words, Letterese is drawing a line from real-life USSR organization SMERSH and Fleming’s book-inspired version SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) to the idea that Hubbard was the equivalent of Ernst Stavro Blofeld and David Miscavige, ostensibly, Ernst Blofeld Jr. The current leader of the Church of Scientology does not have a white Persian cat, but as Janet Reitman‘s 2011 book about the non-profit religion alleged, he has owned dogs that come pretty close:

Miscavige would arrive flanked by his wife and Lou Stuckenbrock, a retinue of aides and, often, his beagles. He had five dogs, two of which, Jelly and Safi, wore tiny blue sweaters with commander’s bars. Miscavige was known to make his staffers salute the dogs, who held ranks higher than those of many people on the base.

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When you’re watching reality TV, and we know you do watch reality tv, do you ever wonder what’s really going on? How did the reality stars become reality stars? How much do they get paid and is anything faked?

MediabistroTV asked Chef Roblé Ali, star of Bravo’s Chef Roblé & Company those very questions. Watch the film to see what he says.

For more videos, check out our YouTube channel and follow us on Twitter: @mediabistroTV

For those unfamiliar with Canadian TV gabfests, it’s hard to properly convey just how much of a baffling evening void George Stroumboulopoulos filled with CBC’s The Hour. All manner of hosts and experiments were attempted before his arrival, with none able to find success the way “Strombo” finally did.

Another element distinguishing Stroumboulopoulos from his Canadian predecessors is that he has been given the opportunity to carry over his casual brand of talk to the international airwaves of CNN. In a brief Q&A with Reuters LA entertainment reporter Piya Sinha-Roy, Stroumboulopoulos outlines two golden rules for his Sunset & Cahuenga export – no set lists of questions and no publicist-driven exceptions:

“I do ask questions that they [the guests] don’t want to answer, but they have to answer them, and if they don’t want to answer then we’re not the show for them. There’s a lot of great places for people to go where they can control the conversation. We’re not that show. I want this to be a grown-up conversation.”

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