Mashable had some fun over the weekend with the story of Alex Thompson, the 45-year-old female freelance photographer who also operates the neighborhood crime watch Twitter account @Venice311. The article begins with some 18th century town caller framing and moves on to this, under the sub-headline “A Crappy Beginning:”:

Thompson’s story begins in a way all good epics should: with a steaming pile of sewage.

“So I’m walking out of my house in Venice, right? And I can’t believe what I see,” she told Mashable. “Some guy had just dumped over 50 gallons of raw sewage from his RV onto the street.”

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When FishbowlLA tweeted out an LA Weekly-themed #FF group last Friday, one friend-follower handle was conspicuously absent (@simone_electra). That’s because Simone Wilson, for several years a tireless shotgun partner on the LA news beat with Dennis Romero, is now living and working in Israel.

“I actually quit my job at LA Weekly at the beginning of October, but because I still had a couple print stories in the tubes, it took readers a while to notice I was gone,” Wilson tells FishbowlLA via email. “It was 100% my decision to leave. Management at the paper made it clear that they would have loved to have me stay.”

“But for health reasons (I have cystic fibrosis, and the 24/7 news grind was rough on me) and wanting-to-see-the-world reasons, it just felt like the right time to move on,” she adds. Another reason Wilson chose Tel Aviv is that her boyfriend’s family owns an apartment building there, making it very cost-efficient for them to relocate.

Last week, Wilson had a solid piece in the Jewish Journal about Israeli Army conscientious objector Natan Blanc. She plans to do more freelancing for the SoCal paper and has other outlets in her sights as well.

“I actually just spent about a month writing a story involving the recent Israel-Gaza conflict for a major U.S. magazine, but I’d rather not say who until it runs,” Wilson teases. “I’ll also be pitching stories to alternative magazines and other U.S./international outlets.”

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Here’s an item that has the scandalous, photo-driven hallmarks of a classic LA Weekly “The Informer” dispatch. The only anomaly is that it comes not from Dennis Romero or Simone Wilson but rather first-time freelance contributor Jonathan Maseng.

Just ahead of the 2012 Reebok CrossFit Games this weekend at the Home Depot Center, LA Weekly has published some absolutely disgusting Facebook photos shared by the the owner of the LA downtown end of the CrossFit operation. The pictures, which you’ll have to click through to see, feature in one case GymFit personnel gleefully standing above a homeless man passed out on a sidewalk.

LA Weekly editor-in-chief Sarah Fenske tells FishbowlLA that Maseng’s story started blowing up this morning around 9 a.m. PT, three hours after it was posted. “Right now we’re getting three times the normal traffic on laweekly.com, entirely thanks to that story.”

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In the category of 2012 Radio Journalist of the Year, KCRW’s Warren Olney is surrounded. Per this weekend’s preliminary announcement of finalists for the LA Press Club’s 54th SoCal Journalism Awards, his fellow nominees are all sixth-tenths of a click down the FM dial: KPCC’s Larry Mantle, Stephanie O’Neill, Molly Peterson and Frank Stolze.

Dylan Howard, last year’s Entertainment Journalist of the Year, is nominated once again in that category. The only difference is that this time around, he’s representing celebuzz.com rather than Star magazine and Radar Online. For the repeat, he will have to best Nikki Finke, THR’s Alex Ben Block and LA Weekly film critic Karina Longworth.

Meanwhile, despite a recent LA riots coverage snafu, Longworth’s alt-weekly colleague Simone Wilson is in the Online Journalist of the Year bracket, alongside a bunch of political outlet heavyweights. She’ll have to beat CNN.com’s Michael Martinez, Truthdig’s Chris Hedges, The Huffington Post’s Robert David Jaffe and the enviroreporter.com tandem of Michael Collins and Denise Ann Duffield.

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Media mission accomplished.

As TIME managing editor Rick Stengel explained earlier today to Forbes blogger Jeff Bercovici, “the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention.” Even if, as is the case with the May 21 issue, the person depicted on the cover is not actually featured in the accompanying article.

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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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Have you hit your 15-article monthly limit on the Los Angeles Times website?

Simone Wilson at the LA Weekly points out two easy ways to get around the paywall:

• Open a new browser. You can read 15 more articles, and when you’re done with those, just open another browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.). Rinse and repeat.

• “Remove all cookies” from your web history. This is really the easiest way past the paywall — just go into you’re browser’s preferences tab and clear out the cookies. Here’s a handy guide on how to delete cookies in various web browsers.

Personally, I signed up for the Sunday paper for $12 a year and that grants me unlimited access to the LAT website. If you don’t want to shell out the cash, you now have a couple of options on how to get around the paywall.

Freelance photographer Tyson Heder is still behind bars after he was assaulted and arrested during the Occupy LA raid early Wednesday morning.

Simone Wilson of the LA Weekly provided an update of the messy scene at the Metropolitan Detention Center:

The situation at the Metropolitan Detention Center — where photojournalist Heder and gobs of other arrestees are being held — is, by all accounts, total chaos.

“They’re all scheduled to be out of here by Friday, within the 48 hours,” says watch commander Sergeant Angelo. “Thats our goal.” But he adds that “there were so many bodies, so many people” that he can’t guarantee anything.

Heder’s attorney, Joe Singleton, says there’s a “big wait” at the detention center, where he’s trying to help Heder. “The court is having problems tracking down the right paperwork from the City Attorney’s office. They’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. Nobody’s told me anything.”

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The release this week of Murder Rap, a cleverly titled book by former LAPD detective Greg Kading, has stoked a whole new round of explosive media coverage about the unsolved killings of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Beginning with the LA Weekly, which blasted out a sensational headline tying Sean Combs and Suge Knight to, respectively, the killings of Shakur and Smalls.

Kading, after giving the Weekly an exclusive first look and interview, has talked with website HipHopDX.com. Although Knight has yet to be heard from, Combs told local reporters Chris Vogel and Simone Wilson via email that the Kading allegations are “pure fiction and completely ridiculous.” Per the pair’s article:

Perhaps luckily for the rappers’ families and fans still seeking closure, Kading made copies of nearly every investigative report and taped confession before he left LAPD. His explosive book details the behind-the-scenes failure by LAPD to bring Shakur’s and Smalls’ killers to justice.

In a taped confession fully reviewed by LA Weekly, Keffe D says, “[Combs] took me downstairs and he’s like, ‘Man, I want to get rid of them dudes.’ … I was like, ‘We’ll wipe their ass out, quick. It’s nothing.’ … We wanted a million.”

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It’s been a pretty sweet couple of months for the LA Times, what with Pulitzer Prizes and the mother of all Schwarzenegger tips. But the newspaper could be headed for much less hallowed journalistic ground, courtesy of an item today in the LA Weekly by Simone Wilson and Dennis Romero.

Disgraced former LA Times investigative reporter Chuck Philips (pictured), who took a buyout not long after the paper retracted his March 2008 story about Tupac Shakur because fake FBI documents were sourced, suggests that recent remarks made by his formerly anonymous story source prove that he merits not just an apology but also a new, front-page retraction of the paper’s previous retraction:

“I want them to run a front-page retraction,” Philips tells LA Weekly. “Same size, same place.”

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