Veteran KCRW employee Sarah Spitz is retiring at the end of the year after nearly three decades with the public radio station. Spitz first joined KCRW as a pledge drive volunteer, and as she tells FishbowlLA, “I walked through the doors in May 1983 and never left.”

Though her official title has been publicity director since 1988, Spitz has worn a number of hats during her KCRW career. She’s a recognizable voice during pledge drives, and has left her mark on the station’s programming. Spitz founded our beloved “Left, Right & Center” in April of 1996. She recalls:

“It was originally an interview show, in which each of the panelists got to interview a person of their choice once a week from their chosen political perspective (Arianna was on the right back in those days!). But by the time May 1996 rolled around, we had FIVE Wednesdays (the original day for the original format) and we decided to try a roundtable with all panelists — which everyone loved. A new format was born; the show moved to Fridays, where a week in review belongs! LRC is nationally distributed.”

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All Things Considered — Except This One Thing: Margaret Wappler has a funny post on The Guide about the Grateful Dead refusing to grant NPR permission to use one of their songs unless they promised to do a piece on the band on All Things Considered.

Drew Barrymore Victim of Hit and Run: The actress wasn’t hurt — and she got the license plate of the person who rear-ended her car on the corner of Santa Monica and Gardener today. How much you wanna bet the perp was a pap?

And For His Last Trick: Jay A. Fernandez’s final Scriptland column will run tomorrow with a kicker that calls for a “moratorium on some industry tropes that have grown mealy and stale.” Jay, you’re going to the Hollywood Reporter, a mere hair’s breath from Variety. Think you don’t like H’wood tropes now? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Motoko Rich owns the Peggy Seltzer story, and don’t even think of nabbing a tiny bit of it.

Rich writes about the deep thinking that went on at Riverhead. They all knew about the author’s various names:

Ms. Seltzer told her editor and her publisher that she wanted to use the pseudonym because it was the name she was known by in the gang world and because she was trying to reconnect with her birth mother and felt that using her real name would complicate this effort.

And you know what those gangbanger book clubs are like! Publishing windfall.

Sarah McGrath was snowed by a letter of recommendation:

(She)…had provided what she said were photographs of her foster siblings, a letter from a gang leader corroborating her story and had introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a person who claimed to be a foster sister.

Was it the Mrs. John L. Strong stationery that impressed her or the elegant turn of phrase?

Poor freelancer Mimi Read–she got stuck with the trip to Eugene and the pit-bull meet up.

Ira Silverberg, JT LeRoy’s agent, chimes in:

It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail.

Silverberg couldn’t check even one detail–the actual existence of his author.

ExPat Jane doesn’t mince her words:

You gotta have Chip or Becky struggling with the gang bangers and crack heads in the ghetto instead of whiling away in the suburbs to make it worth signing.

Yxta Maya Murray is so proud of herself for believing every single word. Oh good grief.

And NPR didn’t air Seltzer’s interview with Michel Martin on Tell Me More. And guess what–she doesn’t sound the same as she did in the Boston interview–she’s also all worried about sounding “racist”. That’s the least of her worries.

She also claims that people in Eugene, Oregon think she looks “ethnic” and approach her in the supermarket. Su-u-u-re they do.

Michael Goldstein explains why writers lie.

White chicks sittin’ around talkin’: Celeste Fremont explains it all to Patt Morrison, who recalls Danny Santiago. Cupcake Brown, call in, please.

Kate Taylor explains why fact checking is so expensive.

GalleyCat has the publishing world covered and he’s our own lil’ homeskillet, yo.

Daniel Hernandez covers the fires down in San Diego, and asks all the right questions.

Britney’s mom, Lynn Spears, has written a parenting book. Title search for How to Raise a Drug-Addled Skank is underway.

Who did buy Luke Ford’s other blog?

NPR should just hire Joe Escalante, already.

Paris Hilton has announced that she wants to be frozen when she dies. And not one minute before.

(photo by John Grasberger)

From the annals of “All News Is Local” come some of the top stories to hit our inbox. Well, the top stories that aren’t about 11-year-old boys shooting giant pigs:

NPR: Day to Day interviews Mia Farrow about Bush’s sanctions against Sudan. Your guess is as good as ours.

CNN: A Venezuelan TV station has been accused of trying to incite a hit on Hugo Chavez. And the Venezuelan government is none too pleased with CNN, either.

Tabloid Baby: Someone at this site is clearly in lust with someone at X17, cuz why else would they run a story like this?

If you’ve been following the Long Beach Halloween hate crime story and the media coverage of same, there’s another story in the LA Weekly by an FBLA editor.

On the Media did an interview that made the powers-that-be at the Los Angeles Times so distressed that an editor placed several frantic phone calls to the NPR producer–on Monday, a federal holiday. Funny, no one at the paper was willing to go on the record when contacted previously.

FBLA isn’t the only site to have noticed the LAT’s reluctance –Mickey Kaus and the WSJ’s Best of the Web, as well as a number of bloggers linked the the Weekly’s stories.

Earlier:

FBLA EXCLUSIVE: Behind the Halloween Hate Crime Story
David Mills Tells LA Times to Shape Up on Halloween Hate Crime Coverage–Tells FBLA Why

We all secretly have our Oscar speeches in our heads, don’t we?

Along with our moms, and our deities and our third-grade teachers, we’d use the airtime to make a romantic or meaningful offer of thanks to someone unexpected.

Or maybe we’d use the limelight to really stick it to Tracy Schindler for turning the entire fourth-grade class against us and stealing Ben Glassman out from under our noses and sending us home crying in a heap of fractured self esteem nearly every day of our wretched grade school lives.

Or something.

Either way, NPR Multi-Platform Network is giving us a chance to thank the Academy in its “Write Your Own Oscar Speech” contest. The only catch is, NPR doesn’t want you to write your speech. Instead, the judges want you to write an acceptance speech in the voice of the characters portrayed by the nominated actors.

“There was a recognition that our listeners are very smart and very creative, and we’d like to bring them in whenever possible,” an NPR spokeswoman told FBLA. “Maybe we’ll have people write their own speeches next year. (For this contest) it came down to the idea that most of our listeners would identify with the characters in the films.”

That and nobody cares about your own petty childhood traumas and the nasty little girls who inflicted them. (So there, Tracy!)

Here’s NPR’s press release on the contest:

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It happened a few days ago — or maybe it happened months ago and we just hadn’t noticed. But Sacha Baron Cohen decided to drop the in-character interviews about Borat and just … be himself.

When Baron Cohen won the Golden Globe (Wow. We’re not used to saying that.) for best comedic actor, he made made an anus joke that would make his fans proud. But he did it in his own voice, not that of his Kazakhi avatar.

“I saw some amazing, invigorating parts of America. I saw some dark parts of America and some ugly parts of America. Some parts of America that have rarely seen the light of day. I refer of course to the anus and testicles of my co-star, Kenneth Davitian,” the LAT quotes him as saying. “Ken, when I was in that scene — I thought to myself, ‘I better win a bloody award for this.’”

So what gives? Why is the man who has so jealously guarded his true persona suddenly taking the spotlight? Baron Cohen explained his self “outing” to NPR News’ Day to Day on Friday:

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