From the outset of Aaron Kushner’s reign as owner-publisher of the Orange County Register, we’ve been impressed by his willingness to engage not just the community but also outside reporters and critics.

In this latest example, Kushner took the initiative via email. The context for his correspondence with USC professor Marc Cooper and website Voice of OC was an old journalism axiom, a pair of articles by Adam Elmahrek and a related Romenesko report of some March 6 newsroom comments by Kushner.

Last night, Voice of OC published two emails sent by Kushner (one to both Cooper and Voice of OC, one to just Cooper) as well as Cooper’s response. From Kushner’s first email:

There are many ways a newspaper serves its community. One important way is by holding those in power accountable for their use of that power. That is why in just the last six months the Register has hired more investigative reporters and journalists to cover city halls and Orange County business and political leaders than every other newspaper in America combined. How we cover those in power with one of the largest watchdog and beat reporting teams in the country is about getting it right, which includes tone. I agree with Marc that there is no dichotomy between being respectful and having robust coverage of our community and those who lead it.

Read more

Friday was another bittersweet day for Rick Polito. Actor George Takei posted a screen grab on Facebook of the Boulder, CO freelance journalist’s hilarious bygone Wizard of Oz gag synopsis. However, because Takei sourced a Reddit user’s errant crop job, tens of thousands of people initially liked and shared an item that attributes the summary to the wrong guy: the late Lee Winfrey. (To Takei’s credit, this morning he added “Credit: Rick Polito.”)

Jay Leno first quoted Polito’s 1998 synopsis on The Tonight Show a decade ago. When the talk show host revisited the same material for a “Headlines” segment in late October, a Reddit user launched the synopsis on its merry viral way. With Polito’s name as the source author cut out. (It was visible on Leno, although somewhat cryptically, the attribution reads: ‘Inquirer Television Writer Lee Winfrey and Rick Polito of Universal Press Syndicate contributed to this report.’)

“Part of what bothers me is that both times, Leno presented this as a mistake in the newspaper, when obviously it’s a joke that I wrote,” Polito tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “My Marin Independent Journal TV column was syndicated at the time to the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers.”

Jim Romenesko was the first to point out the viral mistake. “Romenesko did his homework,” Polito explains. “He called me up on that Friday [October 26] and then FishbowlLA picked up on it, as did Gawker, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly and some other places.”

Read more

Fifteen years after being recognized in the LA Times by Roy Rivenburg as the “TV Listing of the Week,” a brief Wizard of Oz plot synopsis is getting a major new round of props thanks to Reddit and Imgur.

Jim Romenesko tracked down the author of the Kansas-busting logline, Rick Polito, who now resides in Boulder, Colorado and juggles a little freelancing with a lot of stay-at-home-dad duties. Polito wrote the cheeky summary during his years as TV critic for the Marin Independent Journal:

“It was just on Leno, it was a clue in a crossword puzzle, it showed up in Playboy, and people use it as their email signatures. Someday, I’m going to walk down the street and see it on a T-shirt and punch the person who’s wearing it,” he jokes.

Read more

Either the Los Angeles Times needs a copy editor for their headlines, or a dead astronaut just lost an endorsement deal with Nike.

The headline has been corrected since this screen shot was taken, but not before Jim Romenesko took notice. Original version can still be viewed with Google Cache.

Read more

Jim Romenesko points out this unfortunate (and awesome) photo placement in the latest issue of Orange County Where magazine.

Orange County Whore would fly off the shelves, me thinks.

[H/T JimRomenesko.com]

A funny thing happened on the way to our Wednesday August 22 “So What Do You Do?” interview with “Journal-isms” media columnist Richard Prince. Columbia Journalism Review staff writer Michael Meyer published a Tuesday blog item highlighting some of the other media critics besides Jim Romenesko worth reading. And forgot to include Prince.

We know this because Prince touched on the CJR oversight in the mid-week edition of his Maynard Institute column. While a reader later added Prince’s name via the comments, the omission reinforced one of the most revealing points made during our conversation:

“When we talk about the lack of diversity in the media in general, it’s also true about the lack of diversity in media columns. In other words, “Journal-isms” does not get linked to by a lot of the predominantly white news sites. We’re not on their radar screen and we’re not important to them.”

Read more

Media blogger Jim Romenesko tracked down Kevin Porter, the 22-year-old Los Angeles resident behind of the “Sorkinisms: A Supercut” video that went viral this week. Porter, a professional video producer, told Romenesko he’d been working on the video that highlights Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for recycled dialogue since 2010, but picked up the pace a few months ago to have it finished in time for the Newsroom premiere.

The video went viral shortly after being posted to YouTube on Monday morning, much to Porter’s surprise.

“I definitely underestimated people’s interest in it,” he told Romenesko. “I estimated it would get probably a couple of thousand view the first week. But the reaction has been larger than I ever imagined. Did I think the LA Times, Entertainment Weekly, Grantland and the Huffington Post would pick it up? I didn’t.”

Porter, a long time Sorkin fan, wrote on Twitter that he’s thinking about doing a follow-up video: “Maybe Part II premieres once The Newsroom season is over. There’ll be loads of material.”

Several Bay Area Patch sites received a total of nine San Francisco Peninsula Press Club Awards over the weekend, prompting Chief Content Officer Rachel Feddersen to triumphantly declare via email that Patch.com was “the most significant media organization in the nation, bar none.”

Jim Romenesko then published Feddersen’s email, prompting the rest of us to wonder what she’s been smoking.

That isn’t to say that AOL’s network of hyperlocal websites hasn’t produced good work, or that its Bay Area journalists didn’t deserve those press club awards. We’re happy for our NorCal colleagues. But we’re pretty sure they’d rather have Pulitzers. And work for the New York Times.

Full memo at JimRomenesko.com

The Associated Press is laying off 10 employees, reports Jim Romenesko. Among those losing their jobs is LA-based entertainment writer Rosalie Fox–who had nearly 20 years with the company. Others hit include two assistant bureau chiefs on the East Coast as well as a photo editor in San Francisco.

Romenesko also reports that the AP is ditching the premium-service personal finance wire it had run since 2008.

Looks like Poynter has found its replacement for Jim Romenesko. Director of Poynter Online Julie Moos announced today that TBD writer Andrew Beaujon has been hired to cover the media beat for MediaWire–as Romenesko is now called–and Poynter.org.

Interestingly, in writing up Beaujon’s hire, Moos went out of her way to point out that traffic at Poytner has never been better.

That dual focus brought 483,000 unique visitors to Poynter.org in January, more than any month we’ve tracked, other than May 2011 when Osama bin Laden died. That’s a 76 percent increase in unique visitors over the website’s audience in January 2011. And 25 percent of last month’s audience came between 9 and 201 times, a loyal core of visitors.

In other words: “We’re doing just fine without Jim Romenesko.”