By Kat Stoeffel 4/11/12 5:42pm

off the record

No Strings Attached to Amazon’s Gift to Los Angeles Review of Books

Shortly after Amazon yanked 5,000 Independent Publishers Group titles off its virtual shelves in a contract dispute, the retail giant offered an olive branch of sorts to the world of letters: a $25,000 grant to the Los Angeles Review of Books, the non-profit online literary review that planted a flag in the scorched earth of Sunday books supplements in 2011.

“It’s a pittance for them,” said Steve Wasserman, former editor of the shuttered Los Angeles Times Book Review, who nonetheless applauded Amazon’s recognition of LARB.

“Criticism is the oxygen of literature,” he said. “I’m happy to see the establishment of something of really grand ambition.” Read More

By Molly Fischer 1/08/10 7:19pm

WSJ Gets the Graveyard Shift

After closing its Orange County press, the L.A. Times is now selling time on its remaining presses to the Wall Street Journal. What’s more, the Journal will get the later press run, hindering the L.A. Times’ ability to print breaking news. Says LA Observed:

I’m hearing that the Times’ off-the-composing-floor deadline of 11 Read More

By Molly Fischer 10/02/09 6:52pm

Post Ditches LA Times for Bloomberg

The Washington Post and Bloomberg News are starting a joint news service: Washington Post News Service With Bloomberg News. This follows an announcement earlier this week that The Post and The Los Angeles Times would dissolve their longstanding partnership. Says an article in The Post:

Kate Carlisle, managing editor of the Times-Post operation, Read More

By Matt Haber, Gillian Reagan and Doree Shafrir 2/25/09 1:16am

Man Bites Blog: Hey, You Media Wimps! If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones, Then Go Join Facebook

A democracy cannot function without a free press.

O.K., we know that, and you probably can’t see another word about it. The point of what follows is practical. We’re in this unbelievable business morass, an indescribable battlefield. How do we get out of it?

Contributing to this catastrophe has been newspapers’ stubborn refusal Read More

By Matt Haber 2/24/09 11:06pm

Media Mob Sleeps With the Fishes

On July 6th, 2005, The Observer officially launched the Media Mob under editor Tom Scocca with a post that attempted—and failed—to introduce an awkward portmanteau word we thought would capture large media companies’ incursions into the then-still novel medium of blogs. We called it (shudder) blogentrification, and described it as follows:

It starts with Read More