Sorry, Gary Owens, but one of very best things to ever happen to “beautiful downtown Burbank” is now officially ear-marked for February 2014 east coast relocation. The Tonight Show will soon be Jimmy Fallon‘s to re-invent, within Lorne Michaels walking distance.

As LA Times reporter Joe Flint recently reminded, it was Owens who first coined the phrase as a radio announcer and then made it famous on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Although NBC may well  find a worthy TV ratings successor to occupy the main studio at Alameda and Olive, it will never quite be the same:

Carson, who moved The Tonight Show from New York to Los Angeles in 1972, also used the “beautiful downtown Burbank” line but never tried to take credit for it.

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Reuters reporters Ronald Grover and Liana B. Baker had the scoop last Friday about New Year’s Eve being the day LA Times parent company Tribune Co. would finally, officially emerge from a four-year bankruptcy. This morning at 4:42 a.m. PT, LAT reporters Walter Hamilton and Joe Flint added circumspect confirmation in the paper’s own pages:

The company sought Bankruptcy Court protection in December 2008 after an $8.2 billion leveraged buyout by real estate magnate Sam Zell saddled the company with $12.9 billion in total debt just as advertising revenue was collapsing…

Despite the financial travails of the newspaper industry, Tribune remained profitable throughout the bankruptcy. It built cash reserves of more than $2.5 billion as of November 18, according to a U.S. Bankruptcy Court filing this month.

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Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood reported late Friday The Tonight Show lost at least 20 employees while host Jay Leno took a major paycut to save as many jobs as possible as part of a “downsizing.”

According to Deadline’s NBC insider, the layoffs have to do more with Comcast than the ratings:

“I don’t think ad sales are off. I just think the people who bought this company, Comcast, wants to go through everything at NBC and get their money back,” an NBC insider tells me. ”It’s hard to go through those kinds of cuts. It’s more a network issue than a late-night issue. And I would say that Jay doesn’t get credit for digging out of a gigantic hole every single night. He’s a very valuable guy to NBC and someday everyone will understand that. He does a great job.”

Joe Flint of the Los Angeles Times reported that Leno’s salary went from $25-30 million to likely around $20 million.

In addition, the weekly show budget will be reduced from approximately $2.3 million to $1.7 million.

At one end of Tom Kane’s voice-over actor resume, there are credits like announcing the 78th Annual Academy Awards. At the other, as revealed in today’s LA Times piece by Joe Flint, is some very strange subbing for an actor who was a presenter at that very ceremony:

Kane has found work imitating celebrity voices so ad agencies can use his impersonation to sell clients on the idea of using the real actor for a commercial. “I’ve actually gotten Morgan Freeman a number of jobs,” he said.

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Here’s a good example of how to proactively cover a Twitter fracas. Rather than simply recap the tweets, TheWrap CEO and editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman picked up the phone today. The result is a deeper look at the issues Reason magazine editor Matt Welch has with the business direction taken by his former employer, the LA Times.

For Welch, it’s not just a matter of the questionable March move to a paywall, which was the crux of his exchange on Twitter with LAT media and entertainment reporter Joe Flint. It’s also about how the newspaper has prioritized its budget cuts:

“Even though they’ve cut a ton, they cut stupidly,” Welch said. “They cut the people making news and they keep every stupid blowhard columnist who nobody likes and gets paid a generous six-figure salary.”

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A lesser known piece of reality TV kingpin Mark Burnett‘s empire is the Van Nuys located VIMBY, which stands for Video In My BackYard. With local crews in about three dozen American cities, the company has provided customized video content for a whole range of clients including Macy’s, Mazda and Red Bull.

Now, together with LA’s ChannelPort Communications, KABC and BBC America, VIMBY is getting ready to turn on arguably its biggest showcase yet. Per an LA Times report by Joe Flint and Greg Braxton, the in-restaurant McDonald’s TV channel is being officially served up after beta runs in LA, San Diego and Las Vegas:

The McDonald’s channel is being rolled out slowly during the next few months and will soon be up in 800 McDonald’s restaurants in Southern and Central California…

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Despite the fact that Howard Stern has built an empire around the daily rote of interacting on-air with a colorful bunch of studio workmates, Dan Patrick met with resistance when he first pitched a similar radio show format after leaving ESPN in 2007.

As he tells Joe Flint of the LA Times, his new bosses were none too thrilled with the idea, but he held firm and today, his daily joshing with the “Danettes” – executive producers Paul Pabst and Todd Fritz, operations director Patrick “Seton” O’Connor, and Sports Illustrated blogger Andrew “McLovin” Perloff — is a key reason why the program has amassed a combined weekly radio, TV, and online audience of around 2.5 million. Patrick shares an interesting Hollywood comparison for his “Man Cave” ministrations:

“I don’t like it to be labeled a sports show,” Patrick said. “We’ve created almost a Truman Show, where you’re looking into this little world we’ve created, and we let you look in, warts and all.”

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Accusations of intellectual theft in Hollywood typically revolve around screenplays. But in the case of StarClipz vs. StarGreetz, the narrative length being tussled over is of the logline length.

Per LA Times reporter Joe Flint, local start-up StarGreetz Inc., which launched this week and allows people to purchase celebrity custom greeting messages for dissemination on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms, is being sued by StarClipz. That’s a lot of “z’s” to go along with the parties of the first part:

StarClipz and its founders, industry veterans Mark Lieber and Adam Newman, filed a lawsuit this year in U.S. District Court claiming that Frankel took their idea and business plan. Lieber and Newman not only accuse Frankel of swiping their idea and trying to cut them out of the operation but also of being motivated in part by “Lieber and Newman’s status as a same-sex couple,” their suit said.

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Yesterday we listed all the people who are no longer at the Calendar Section of the LA Times. We noted it makes the section look pretty dysfunctional. We don’t hear of en masse exits from say the Sports Section. But it’s been pretty consistent at the Calendar section.

The newspaper has sent us a statement saying we forgot to mention they’ve hired people too. Hear that obit writers? You should also talk about how people are being born. Otherwise it’s only half the story.

From Nancy Sullivan:

LA Times Calendar section: The Mass Influx

NEW HIRES (in the same frame):
Joy Press, Randall Roberts, Melissa Maerz, Gerrick Kennedy, Yvonne Villarreal, Nardine Saad, Nate Jackson, Rebecca Keegan, Nicole Sperling, Ben Fritz, Joe Flint, Steve Zeitchik, Julie Makinen, Deb Vankin, Jori Finkel, Amy Kaufman, David Ng

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LA Times writer Joe Flint had a nice little “scooplet” yesterday via the newspaper’s “Show Tracker” blog. The item has already been picked up by TV Guide and TV Squad, and will no doubt be mutating across the web throughout the day.

ABC Media Productions is apparently happy with a recent test run of potential new daytime talk show mates Tori Spelling and Jeff Lewis (pictured), host of Bravo’s Flipping Out. Writes Flint:

In the test pilot with Spelling last week, the two had good chemistry. The show, which is still in the development stage, wants to be a talk show version of Will & Grace.

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