The recipients of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships have been announced, and of the 20 journalists who have been selected, one of them is a local. That would be David Sarno, technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times business section.

The John S. Knight allows recipients to pursue their ideas for innovative journalism at Stanford during the 2012-13 academic year. Sarno will work on creating “video tutorials showing journalists how to quickly build touchable, 3-D computer graphics for news.”

Other fellowship recipients from the golden state include Andrew Donohue, editor of the Voice of San Diego, Mary Aviles, editor of the EFE News Services in San Jose, and Kevin Weston, a new media entrepreneur from Oakland.

Pictured are FBLA editor Pandora Young with author Janelle Brown. Other notables at the first ever LADWP last night at the Formosa Cafe were Cecil Castellucci, Michelle Huneven, Patrick Brown, Antoine Wilson and book blogger John Fox.

We ran into LAT tech writer David Sarno who illustrated what he does for a j-o-b by kissing his iPhone. True story. Really happened. Tech writers. Hmf.

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Media blogger, Simon Owens over at Bloggasm…how can we put this gently…has a lot of time on his hands? In a good way…he could be putting his time toward something destructive…more so than media blogging…

Anyway, he ranked the top 50 newspaper blogs:

To determine this, I combed through the hundreds of blogs at the top newspaper sites and calculated each of their Technorati rankings. A Technorati ranking is based on the number of inbound links from separate blogs in a six-month period, and is a decent indicator of a blog’s popularity. Once I determined the rankings, I ordered them from popular to least popular. Below, you will find the 50 most popular newspaper blogs.

LA Times has nine in the top 50. In the top half are Andrew Malcolm and Johanna Neuman at Top of the Ticket, group blog LA Now, Alana Semuels, Alex Pham, Chris Gaither, David Sarno, Jessica Guynn, Jim Puzzanghera, Jon Healey, Mark Milian, Michelle Maltaisare at Technology and Sal Morgan and Elizabeth Snead at Dish Rag. Now when you see these people at cocktail parties you can intro them as a ‘high ranking blogger’ and see if they won’t try and correct you. Email us if they do.

Whole list is here.

“Accidental” Viral Marketing? We Think Not. Chris Hine is reporting that Gatorade and the ad agency it hired, Element 79, had “no idea” who posted that supposedly shelved commercial featuring the super-fly ball girl. Uh-huh. Just like we had “no idea” that florescent orange was an unnatural color for a beverage.

Bloggers Are The Worst: Pity poor David Sarno who is now SIX posts into the BoingBoing/Violet Blue controversy. A controversy he realized way too late he should not wade into. Well, live and learn, right, David?

Top of the Ticket, Eh? We know it’s a slow news day, but with the LAT announcing that it’s going to be axing 150 jobs sometime soon, you’d think Scott Martelle would want to come up with a harder-hitting piece than “tell us what superhero you think the presidential candidates would be” story.

Rabbi Rushfield’s Wistful Goodbye: Rabbi Richard Rushfield clearly had a lump in his throat as he closed out his post on the kick-off of the American Idol 53-city concert tour: “Outside in the still over 100-degree night, over 100 fans line a railing three stories above the driveway where the Idols would soon be loading into tour buses, their overnight homes as they make their way toward San Diego for Day Two of this last leg of their Idol journey. And on this same stretch of concrete not a month from now, tens of thousands more will stand on line to take their place when the Season 8 auditions come to Phoenix and history races on.” Someone buy this man an ice cream.

Lord of the (Virtual) Flies: Alana Semuels has a fascinating piece about the bad, bad things kids do to one another online. She also offers some tips for online safety (but we have a feeling an editor made her do that).

Well, Glad That’s Settled: David Sarno updates yesterday’s Violet Blue/BoingBoing posts with a bit of learned Web wisdom: “Bloggers are weird.” And insightful, too.

Web Scout: David Sarno gets Violet Blue‘s side of the weird BoingBoing controversy (the site scrubbed every post written about, by or containing Blue’s name.) Too bad he couldn’t get BoingBoing on the phone.

The Big Picture: Patrick Goldstein is new to blogging but has already learned the Golden Rule: Get other people to do work for you. To that end, he recruited film producer Avi Lerner to review a number of new releases. (To wit: “The Love Guru: ‘The worst movie I’ve seen in my life. It was so stupid I wanted to cry. Do I really have to say more?’”) If he’s smart, Goldstein will put this guy on retainer. (Might we recommend a MUCH smaller photo next time? The crop tool is your friend.)

Countdown to Crawford: In addition to having the best name of any of the LAT’s blogs, C2C wins us over with Johanna Neuman‘s analysis of Lou Dobbs‘ question: “Should Bush be impeached over tainted tomatoes?”

Little surprise that it took the local paper a little longer than the rest of the media to tackle the Emily Gould story. Quoting everyone from Rachel Sklar to our own sister pub, FBNY, the LAT may have been late to the game, but David Sarno makes the most salient point we’ve seen on the topic:

It’s not far off to say that the demographic that cared about this story most was the New York new media crowd. That group’s open access to megaphones and soapboxes belies its exceedingly small and unrepresentative nature — so much so that with a collective eye blink it can light up the blogosphere with vituperative chatter about what’s, after all, just a story about the by now unsurprising pitfalls of playing with the Web’s peephole-filled boundaries between public and private.

Did George Clooney Call The Cops on Brit? Probably not, but consider this HuffPo item when reading today’s lede: “Police were called to Britney Spears’ neighborhood after someone reported a swarm of paparazzi trespassing in the singer’s gated community.”

LAT‘s New Favorite Pub: No. Not that kind of pub. The LAT has an item about Roots, “an ambitious new online magazine that focuses on African American culture, politics and genealogy,” which launched yesterday. Owned by the Washington Post and featuring such bylines as Malcolm Gladwell, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and William Julius Wilson, we wonder if reporter David Sarno wrote up a resume and cover letter along with his blog post.

We Totally Didn’t Know That: In this story about how The Guiding Light is changing its production value, we learned where “soap operas” got their name. Kinda cool — thanks, Meg James!

It Came From Outer Space: Today David Sarno presents the “second in a series of occasional Web Scout mysteries, in which we investigate some of the questions haunting the Web entertainment world. In this installment, we get to the bottom of the UFO videos currently raging on YouTube.” Sarno’s on the Nigerian investment beat?

Best Paragraph of the Day: “If you hate women, men, Texas, Los Angeles, television news and any of the social progress made by Americans in the 20th century, then Anchorwoman is the show for you.” We’re so watching.

Barbie Does Lawsuits: Toy giant Mattel is suing a company running a porn site that uses the name “China Barbie.” We thought all the China Barbies had been recalled.