Posts Tagged ‘Kevin Roderick’

Buoyed by post-Memorial Day reports in the LA Times and on Kevin Roderick‘s LA Observed, the Kickstarter campaign for Our Malibu Beaches last night reached its goal of $30,000. Along the way, it was also at one point highlighted by Kickstarter as a worthy Journalism project.

The money will allow LA journalists Ben Adair (formerly of APM’s Marketplace) and Jenny Price (LA Observed, Hidden LA) to work with the firm Escape Apps to put together a tool that informs locals how to gain legal access to some of LA’s prettiest beaches. From last night’s Kickstarter update:

We made it!… with just hours to spare! Amazing! From all of us behind Our Malibu Beaches THANK YOU! You all are doing so much to open these beaches to EVERYBODY. This is gonna be the best beach summer ever.

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The Twitter profile for LA Times DC bureau reporter Matea Gold resolutely states: “I still believe in newspapers.” But perhaps not those being coveted by Rupert Murdoch and a pair of Koch brothers.

In what could be interpreted as hedging her bets, maintaining control of her professional fortunes or a little bit of both, Gold is staying in DC but moving up in terms of the daily Beltway newspaper she writes for, as money and politics reporter for the Washington Post.

Warm wishes are flowing across Twitter to Gold, proof of how well-liked a journalist she is. That’s how we first caught up to the news. Kevin Roderick has the Post announcement memo. He also spoke to Gold, who seems to confirm ever so slightly that the transitional aspect of Tribune Co. had something to do with this.

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We’ve moved from a dollop of salt to a giant pepper grinder. At least that’s the view of Doug Porter, who offers a hilarious quick-take reaction in the San Diego Free Press to the wave of coverage sparked by Hillel Aron’s barn-busting LA Weekly item:

The rumor mills continue unabated, like a distracted waiter with an oversized pepper grinder ruining a Caesar salad at a faux fine dining restaurant. My favorite take of the day on the latest LA Times speculation was in Forbes:

“LA Weekly pegs the price of the Tribune newspaper group at about $600 million. By my calculations, that’s a little more than Charles and David pull in dividends from Koch Industries each year — after reinvesting 90% of the profits back in the business. So no question they can swing it. But after a career of successfully investing in businesses that make money, I am not sure Charles Koch wants into this one.”

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Hey Angelinos? Did you cast a vote on Tuesday for Wendy Gruel?

That’s of course not how you spell either Angelenos or Wendy Greuel. But as Daily News reporter Kevin Modesti and LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick respectively note, that’s the way CNN.com and the New York Times had these two items written.

The since-corrected smudge in NYT west coast reporter Jennifer Medina‘s piece is, quite frankly, tantalizing. If Greuel’s last name were indeed more closely aligned with an oatmeal breakfast, just imagine the Oliver Twist-like campaign slogans she could be readying for her May runoff with Eric Garcetti:

“You say you want MORE from your LA Mayor? Vote for Gruel and you can always count on getting MORE.”

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Hidden Los Angeles, the popular Facebook page and website dedicated to our town’s lesser-known treasures, has slapped Los Angeles magazine with a trademark infringement lawsuit, reports LA Observed. Hidden LA’s complaint is with the magazine’s February issue and its “Hidden LA” theme, featuring “73 secret spots in the city.” The magazine also ran a Lexus Hidden LA sweepstakes and a private Hidden LA dinner event.

Los Angeles first published a “Hidden LA” themed issue in 2011, prompting Hidden LA founder W. Lynn Garrett to have a sit-down with the mag’s publisher, Mary Melton, leaving Garrett with the impression it wouldn’t happen again. This time around, she decided a sit-down wasn’t enough and filed suit.  ”I am not by nature a litigious person,” Garrett wrote on the Hidden LA facebook page. “I was left with no choice. A legally registered trademark is only as good as your steady enforcement of it.”

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In this afternoon’s KPCC item about some very exciting in-house business, reporter and union organizing committee member Adolfo Guzman-Lopez was quoted as follows:

“The vote count is clear. We look forward to sitting down with management to collectively bargain for the content employees at KPCC.”

He’s referring to a January 11 supervised tally of KPCC employees in favor of SAG-AFTRA unionization. But is a 35-to-26 vote count really that “clear?” FishbowlLA is somewhat surprised that nearly 40% of the 69 employees who will be covered by the new contract voted against it. (A union rep tells us that 69 ballots were cast, but eight challenged, hence the final vote total of 61.)

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Another blog about Los Angeles launched this past month, this one from native sons Hillel Aron and Richard Rushfield. They’re a pair left jaded by journalism careers, which have included a good deal of reporting on both Hollywood and the city that surrounds it. “We know the rules,” they write. “A website about Los Angeles is supposed to be about the search for the cutest artisanal tamale stand made of sustainable vegan bamboo. Or it can be a website devoted to kissing up to talent agents, deputy editors, chefs, curators, hoteliers and dead buildings.”

But they promise something different: “We come to point fingers and poke eyes, to name names and call names and dig up dirt.”

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By all accounts, Wednesday’s “The Big Picture” column in the LA Times is Patrick Goldstein’s last.

Kevin Roderick was the first to spot the buried lede. TheWrap’s Alexander C. Kaufman tried unsuccessfully to get LA Times folks to confirm. Then, at around 9 p.m. PT tonight, Nikki Finke swooped in with the details:

My sources say Goldstein decided to take a buyout rather than work for the new leadership at the newspaper announced earlier this year. “He felt there was no more future for him there. It was obvious since all the new people think about is driving Web traffic. They’re trying to put everyone to work doing that,” my source says.

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Simone Wilson of the LA Weekly unleashed a diatribe this morning about how terrible the paper’s coverage of the LA riots was back in ’92. She claimed that, “two full issues went by without any mention of the riots,” and that the first article on the subject didn’t appear till May 15. Worse, Kevin Roderick of LA Observed fell for it.

In truth, the May 8 issue of the paper was dedicated to the riots. Staffers worked long hours covering the story, breaking curfew and risking arrest to do so.

According to the correction, Wilson “lost” the May 8 issue of the paper, so she just assumed the worst of the earlier incarnation of the LA Weekly.

Wilson issued a correction to the story at 4:45 p.m., over seven hours after the article went online. The erroneous passages have been re-written, but the harsh tone hasn’t changed much. “One issue went by without any mention of the riots,” Wilson says, as if the weekly paper was neglecting the issue.

But the reason the previous week’s paper didn’t have mention of the riots was that it had already gone to press when the riots broke out.

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The influential local media website unveiled a sharp new look early this morning. There have been a few overhauls since Kevin Roderick first started LA Observed in 2003, but he calls this “the big one.”

Roderick is abandoning the typical blog format of putting the most recent content at the top of the page and turning the homepage into more of a typical front page, where relevance dictates story hierarchy. Roderick is also giving more room on the homepage to other bylines, a much-needed shift as the site’s roster of impressive contributors keeps growing. Steve Harvey recently brought his popular “Only in LA” column to LA Observed, and arts writer Barbara Isenberg has just joined the site.

Roderick warns that there’s still some rough edges that need to be smoothed. He writes, “Please remember that the redesign, like everything about LA Observed, is a work in progress.”