I’m hearing that surviving sports staffers with the Ontario/San Bernardino arm of Dean Singleton’s L.A. News Group are being told not to expect a return to the main office in Berdoo any time soon. In one of the generically nonsensical and routinely unconscionable forced migrations of staff perpetrated on journalists at LANG’s eastern properties, the […]

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(Version 2.0: Updates/corrects bio info thanks to her son, Bob Wilmuth.) Katie Castator surprised us. Again and again. She was Somebody’s Mom, three times over. Yet she had a full-time job. She apparently hadn’t graduated from college, and certainly didn’t have a journalism degree. But there she was in the newsroom, a 40-year-old rookie. She […]

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I don’t think of myself as a peculiar person. Not particularly out of the mainstream. Well, aside from this one thing I’ve done. Which I can’t really defend or justify. I have nearly every San Bernardino Sun sports section from August, 1976, through February, 2008. Nearly every one. All 11,520 of them, if I’ve added […]

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Ron Kaye, the respected editor of the L.A. Daily News, recently put to pasture by MediaNews, has launched a blog. The url: ronkayela.com … It appears as if he will talk about newspapers, and as an insider with the L.A. News Group over the past few years, he could provide a lot of the background […]

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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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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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