Latest posts
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Janice Min’s first THR hire was Kim Masters — and the show is still going
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer (2010) · Wayback archive → The single hire that announced Janice Min’s intention to remake The Hollywood Reporter wasn’t a deputy editor or a publisher — it was Kim Masters, brought in as Editor-At-Large with her KCRW show kept intact. Sixteen years later, that show is…
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The 2010 scoop on Fox’s Napoleon Dynamite animated series — and the six episodes that aired
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Alex Weprin (2010) · Wayback archive → Three days before Fox’s 2010 upfront presentation, Alex Weprin landed the network’s official confirmation that Napoleon Dynamite was being developed as an animated television series, with the original cast attached. The pilot was greenlit, the show aired, and it didn’t make…
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Alan Rich dies at 85 — the migratory music critic of LA Weekly, Newsweek, and Variety
By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2010) · Wayback archive → In late April 2010, Alan Rich — one of the most-bylined American classical-music critics of the post-1960 era — died at 85 of natural causes. His career had taken him across the NY Times, Variety, LA Daily News, California magazine, the…
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Denise Cramsey, the Extreme Makeover producer who died at 41 — and a Variety obit that aged well
By Cassidy Lee · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2010) · Wayback archive → In late November 2010, reality TV producer Denise Cramsey — the Emmy-winning executive producer of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Trading Spaces, and School Pride — died at 41 of a brain aneurysm. Variety’s Stuart Levine wrote the kind of obit that…
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The LA Press Club’s 2009 National Entertainment Journalism Awards call for entries
By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, January 2009 In late January 2009, FishbowlLA flagged the approaching deadline for the LA Press Club’s National Entertainment Journalism Awards — with a wry note that FBLA had found the call for entries on Craigslist rather than receiving it directly. Then…
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The Huffington Post Investigative Fund’s May 2009 launch — Lawrence Roberts, Nick Penniman, and the nonprofit-investigative model
By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, May 2009 In late May 2009, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund announced that Lawrence Roberts — the Washington Post’s Investigations Editor — would join as the Fund’s Executive Editor. Arianna Huffington chaired the Fund’s Advisory Board; Nick Penniman was the Executive…
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Kit Rachlis quits LA Magazine in 2009 — and the Mary Melton era that followed
By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Kate Coe on FishbowlLA, May 2009 In mid-May 2009, Kit Rachlis resigned as editor-in-chief of Los Angeles magazine. Executive editor Mary Melton was elevated to the top job. Folio reported that Rachlis’ exit had nothing to do with the controversial June cover story the magazine…
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Laurie Ochoa exits LA Weekly in 2009 — and the trajectory she landed on instead
By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Kate Coe on FishbowlLA, June 2009 In early June 2009, LA Weekly editor-in-chief Laurie Ochoa announced she was leaving the paper. The FishbowlLA framing was characteristically blunt — “no idea if she was fired or finally just lost patience with the tomfoolery of the paper’s…
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Don LaFontaine’s final illness, the family letter, and what ‘in a world…’ came to mean
By Owen Reyes · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy (2008) · Wayback archive → In late August 2008, the original FishbowlLA post relayed a letter from Don LaFontaine’s family. He had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai with shortness of breath, then deteriorated rapidly the next day with a blood clot in his lung. The letter asked…