By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2010
In late December 2010, FishbowlLA covered Maia Lazar — the 21-year-old daughter of the late LA freelance journalist Cathy Seipp — and her work that holiday season curating and continuing her mother’s journalistic legacy. The original framing tracked the daughter-as-keeper-of-the-legacy story.
Then
Cathy Seipp had been one of the most distinctive figures in LA journalism and the early LA blogging scene. A freelance journalist and media critic whose work appeared in the National Review and many other outlets, Seipp had been a prominent, sharp-edged voice in the LA-and-national media-criticism conversation across the 1990s and 2000s. She was also an early and influential blogger — her “Cathy’s World” blog was part of the foundational early-2000s LA blog ecosystem. Seipp had died in 2007 of lung cancer.
Maia Lazar — Seipp’s daughter, 21 at the time of the 2010 piece — had become the keeper of her mother’s legacy. The original FishbowlLA framing documented Lazar’s December 2010 activity: helping plan an event, and the broader work of curating Seipp’s body of writing and the journalism-mentoring relationships her mother had maintained.
The piece was characteristic of FishbowlLA’s interest in the texture of the LA journalism community — and in this case, in how a journalist’s legacy gets carried forward by family after death.
Now
Cathy Seipp’s place in the history of LA journalism and early blogging has continued to be recognized. The early-2000s LA blog ecosystem she was part of — a foundational moment in the broader transition of media criticism and commentary to the web — has continued to be a reference point in accounts of how online journalism developed.
Maia Lazar has continued in her own life and work across the years since the 2010 piece. The broader question the piece touched — how the legacy of a working journalist is preserved and carried forward — has continued to be relevant, particularly as the early-blogging-era generation of writers ages and the institutional memory of that foundational online-media moment depends increasingly on deliberate curation.
The 2010 piece reads now as a small, warm documented moment of LA-journalism-community texture — a daughter curating her late mother’s legacy, and a blog noting the work of keeping a distinctive journalistic voice in the record.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.
This article references a journalist’s death from illness. It is presented as media-history documentation.