In the post below I note that the “Employment Development Department” (actually the unemployment office) wants people receiving benefits to check with “at least” three prospective employers per week. And this isn’t news to anyone in the greater Los Angeles print journalism market … but the nation’s No. 2 media market doesn’t have enough serious […]

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They handle most of this unemployment stuff over the internet now. The signing up, the form-filling, the fact-checking. Which is convenient, because as someone who never has been unemployed, I really didn’t want to make lots of trips to DMV-type settings and hang out with other jobless folk eager to get themselves on the dole. […]

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Short answer? Yes. Journalists have to be the biggest whiners in the American workforce. Certainly the most prominent. Because so many of us have access to mass media, even outside our former sinecures in print: Alternative weeklies, web sites, blogs … and since what a lot of us did for a living was write, we […]

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Jim Matthews is an important journalist, brothers and sisters. He occupies a niche, granted, but a niche most of us in journalism tend to overlook or trivialize. Distancing ourselves from a substantial subset of our potential readership. That niche: Hunting and fishing. Jim Matthews is the Boswell of the Great (SoCal) Outdoors. A guy who […]

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I covered the 1980 Masters for Gannett News Service. First golf tournament I ever covered, and I started with the biggest. True story. Kind of a sad story, too, because the experience largely was wasted on me. Think of all the sports writers out there who could die happy if they got to cover the […]

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The L.A. News Group is sending no one to the Beijing Olympics, barring some late change of heart. Meaning that the MediaNews-owned ring of suburban dailies has gone from three reporters at both the Sydney and Athens games (of 2000 and 2004) … to two at the Torino winter games (2006) … to zero at […]

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Jim Long may be the toughest, most resourceful and most relentlessly enthusiastic journalist I’ve ever met. Particularly when we take into account the hand nature dealt him. My history with Jim Long began when a woman named Joyce Miller, adviser for the Eisenhower High School paper, said she had a wonderful candidate for a part-time […]

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Any useful journalist who has been around newspapers for any length of time can tell you: It’s an avocation, not a vocation. We love(d) what we do. And we will allow huge tracts of our real lives to go to pieces to make sure the print product we worked for is as good as it […]

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I was operating from memory when I did a lengthy post on former San Bernardino Sun colleague Claude Anderson. The mass of information was correct, thank goodness, but a few facts were off a bit, and a few others I didn’t bring up at all because I didn’t know. Like how old he was when […]

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Matthew Kredell covered just about everything during his tenure with the Los Angeles Daily News. Even though he never was a full-time staffer. Something most of the rest of us didn’t know — because he seemed to be at a major L.A. event five days a week. Dodgers, Lakers, USC … and then the Kings, […]

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