In support of the KCRW pledge drive, the public station’s social media department has been stepping up their game. Kittens, kitten videos, and now a “what I do” meme.

Pretty sure that’s KCRW news director Gary Scott in the bottom right corner handing coffee to program host Warren Olney. Click the image for a closer look.

Last night, screenwriter and playwright Gideon Brower debuted his half-hour radio documentary “The Couple in 303” on KCRW’s Unfictional. It’s all about the experiences of those, including himself, who shared a stretch of 3rd Street in Santa Monica with a Princess Eugenia apartment building couple that turned out to be James “Whitey” Bulger and Catherine Greig.

“When the media tsunami descended last June, I started interviewing my own neighbors about ‘Charlie and Carol Gasko,’” Brower tells FishbowlLA. “They told me some remarkable stuff.”

This is a must-listen for anyone interested in the clandestine odyssey of the FBI fugitive channeled by Jack Nicholson in The Departed. Brower talks to the managers of his building and various residents to capture what it was like to know the kindly couple and then suddenly be caught up in an FBI and media fire storm. Among the revelations are details about Bulger’s subsequent correspondence from prison with one of his former unsuspecting acquaintances.

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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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A few day into the ’92 riots, KCRW and Warren Olney hosted a town forum on the issue. That single show grew into the award-winning public affairs program Which Way L.A.?

Twenty years after that first broadcast, former general manager Ruth Seymour, WWLA‘s founding producer Sarah Spitz, and host Olney sat down with Steve Chiotakis to commemorate the show’s beginnings.

Recalls Seymour, “What Warren didn’t know at the time was that he was actually auditioning. He had no idea about this because we had not made any announcement. We came to the conclusion that we had to respond [to the riots.] We were going to do a one hour show for one month only through June. And we had absolutely not a penny to do this program on. I scraped up enough money to pay a host, but I didn’t have any more than that.”

“Did I get paid?” teased Olney.

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KCRW is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its signature local news show Which Way, LA? with Warren Olney next week. WWLA was born in the immediate wake of the LA riots, as way to publicly explore the complex social dynamics of the civil unrest. The show was Olney’s first at KCRW, and he’s stayed at the station ever since.

“It was a safe and even comforting place to turn to as people searched for ways to go forward,” says former KCRW general manager Ruth Seymour of the show’s origins. “[T]he program remains a trusted source for discussion and debate about the problems and concerns of Southern Californians. The program has now served a generation of KCRW listeners. That surely is more than a success; it’s a triumph.”

KCRW has been commemorating the anniversaries of WWLA and the riots by airing several hour-long specials on that chaotic time in 1992, and exploring whether or not a similar uprising could happen in Los Angeles today.

Over the weekend, Zócalo Public Square sponsored a series of “Pacific Standard Time” panel discussions about the ephemeral nature of LA. To the website’s credit, that is also where you will find the very best summary of what went down, complete with extensive photos and archived video.

During one of the discussions, moderated by KCRW’s Warren Olney, Wim Wenders voiced the perspective of a European transplant. He said he made a beeline for Mulholland Drive after first touching down in the city in 1972, but eventually decided that LA could no longer be his lady:

LA became a dream place that “lost all reality when I left.” Wenders felt he couldn’t even talk about his life here because no one would believe it. “The movies that I make [in LA] are about that conflict between the fiction and the reality,” he said…

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Larry Mantle, Warren Olney and Patt Morrison received the inaugural Bill Stout Memorial Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism Tuesday night in the Mark Taper Auditorium at the Riordan Central Library.

From left to right: Joe Hicks, Warren Olney, Larry Mantle, Patt Morrison, David Lehrer.

(Photo by Robert Lurie)

Larry Mantle, Warren Olney and Patt Morrison were named recipients of the inaugural Bill Stout Memorial Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. The trio will receive their award on Oct. 18 in the Mark Taper Auditorium at the Riordan Central Library.

Mantle has served as host of AirTalk on KPCC since 1985, the longest continuously airing daily talk program in Southern California. Olney is the executive producer and host of KCRW’s Which Way, L.A.? and To The Point. Morrison is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times and the host of the Patt Morrison show on KPCC.

The Bill Stout Memorial Award was created by the Community Advocates, Inc., a non-profit in the human relations field led by David A. Lehrer and Joe R. Hicks, and chaired by Richard J. Riordan. Mantle, Olney and Morrison were selected for pursuing their careers in the tradition of Stout. Stout was a longtime KCBS anchor who passed away at the age of 62 in 1989.

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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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Three people have reported seeing a gunman at Santa Monica College. The community college campus has been placed on lockdown, and a stretch of Pico Blvd. has been shut down.

School is not in session, but the campus is open, and some staff and incoming students are on the grounds. And of course, local public radio station KCRW broadcasts from SMC. Warren Olney has been keeping listeners updated, but the station’s regular programming continues – including the current pledge drive.

According to college spokesman Bruce Smith, the campus was placed on lockdown around 11:30 a.m.

UPDATE, 12:31 pm: Campus lockdown has ended. KCRW Twitter feed is reporting that reports of a shooting were false.