Latest posts
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The LA Times editorial board on Manning at Quantico — and how the story ended
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2011) · Wayback archive → In January 2011, the Los Angeles Times editorial board ran a piece calling attention to the detention conditions of the WikiLeaks source held at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. FishbowlLA’s pickup praised the editorial as belated but consequential. Then…
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Gustavo Turner vs the LA Times on Echo Park — gentrification, anachronism, and a 2010 dust-up
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Pandora Young (2010) · Wayback archive → In early December 2010, LA Weekly music editor Gustavo Turner — a Los Feliz resident who knew the territory — published a sharp critique of a recent LA Times piece on Echo Park’s gentrification. He called the Times piece “an epically…
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Meghan Daum’s 2010 LA Times typhus columns — and what came next for her career
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2010) · Wayback archive → In late November 2010, LA Times columnist Meghan Daum used her column to disclose a near-fatal medical episode: what she’d thought was an ordinary flu virus had turned out to be murine typhus, transmitted via flea feces from backyard rodents. The…
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Michalene Busico’s 2010 move to Robb Report — and the long Spring Street Project diaspora
By Jordan Vega · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2010) · Wayback archive → In late October 2010, CurtCo Media announced that Michalene Busico — formerly executive editor of Entrepreneur, deputy features editor of the LA Times, food editor of the New York Times for five years before that — was joining Robb Report as…
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An LA Times reporter faces a Berkeley audience over the teacher-ratings series
By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2010 In autumn 2010 the Los Angeles Times became the story rather than the teller of it. FishbowlLA covered a UC Berkeley panel where one of the paper’s reporters defended a project that had become the center of a national argument…
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Cutie and Pop Pop — the LA Times’ 2010 profile of the Boyle Heights nonagenarian bloggers
By Cassidy Lee · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2010) · Wayback archive → In mid-June 2010 the Los Angeles Times ran a feature on Barbara “Cutie” Cooper, 93, and her husband of 72 years, Harry “Pop Pop” Cooper, who were running a blog called The-OGs.com — short for Original Grandparents — out of their…
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John Montorio’s 2008 LA Times exit — and what Russ Stanton’s first weeks signaled
By Jordan Vega · Originally reported by Kate Coe (2008) · Wayback archive → In mid-February 2008, with Russ Stanton newly installed as LA Times editor after James O’Shea’s firing, John Montorio — the last of what FishbowlLA had been calling the Baquet boys — got pushed out. Montorio told the paper it was “my…
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Doug Frantz exits the LA Times — and the Baquet generation continues to thin out
By Jordan Vega · Originally reported by Kate Coe (2007) · Wayback archive → In late June 2007, Doug Frantz announced he was leaving the Los Angeles Times, where he had served as managing editor under Dean Baquet. He had taken the job at Baquet’s request and was widely understood to be a Baquet loyalist.…
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When Brian Grazer guest-edited the LA Times’ Current section — a 2007 experiment
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Kate Coe (2007) · Wayback archive → In March 2007 the LA Times announced that Brian Grazer would guest-edit the Sunday Op-Ed section, Current, for the March 25 issue. The pitch in the paper’s press release was that the Imagine Entertainment chairman’s “endless curiosity” would produce something unconventional.…
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Luke Thompson on Jim Rainey covering the LA Times — the recursive-reporting era
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Kate Coe (2007) · Wayback archive → In mid-February 2007 LA Weekly freelancer Luke Thompson took a hard look at the LA Times’ Jim Rainey, the paper’s media reporter who had drawn the unenviable assignment of covering Tribune Company’s ongoing woes — including, awkwardly, its impact on his…