News Media

One of my first editors would visibly recoil when the newspaper's ad manager occasionally ventured into the newsroom. "Here they come. Here come the ad goons," the white-haired newsman would growl, before bellowing at the offender (in more florid language than this paper allows): "Stay the heck out of our side of the building, will ya?" Man, did we love that. The old Irishman lacked subtlety.

Barely a year after being forced to resign as New York governor amid derision and fury over his identification as "Client 9" of a prostitution ring, Eliot Spitzer is back in the public arena -- not as an elected official but as a pundit. In what has become an increasingly familiar ritual among American public figures who've fallen from grace, Spitzer has embarked on a public rehabilitation process through the media.

It was the hottest ticket in town, a black-tie dinner gathering of Washington's political and media elite, but Dick Cheney couldn't make it. The former vice president was busy, President Obama joked, working on his memoir, "tentatively titled, 'How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.' " As the star attraction of Saturday night's star-studded annual White House Correspondents' Assn. dinner, Obama enjoyed poking fun at his critics and the Republican Party.

The newspaper consists of a small office with one authentically untidy desk and one bare but for a borrowed laptop. A couple of chairs. Newspapers and papers stacked on the floor. And Boss Barns. That would be Barnabas Thondhlana, one of Zimbabwe's best-known newspapermen. He sits at the messy desk, explaining the vague order in the various piles. The big one is job applications, hundreds of them. The ones he doesn't like (including those of four former state spies) get thrown onto the floor.

When Stephen Colbert got a buzz cut from Gen. Raymond Odierno this week it was both the least and the most important moment in his four-night sojourn in Iraq. The Comedy Central star gave up a thick head of hair, and shelved his beloved blow-dryer. America won't soon forget the shtick -- Colbert forcibly shorn by the big, bald-headed general on "order" of the commander in chief, who beamed in via satellite TV to Camp Victory in Baghdad. That scored lots of laughs and something more.

When the LA Weekly wrote a lengthy story last September about how little Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended to his official duties, it wasn't plowing fresh soil. The mayor's exuberant fundraising and his frenetic campaigning on behalf of presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton had already received plenty of attention, in this paper and elsewhere.

Since the explosion of gossip blogs and the resurgence of celebrity magazines, L.A.'s courthouses have grown used to accommodating throngs of paparazzi, videographers, camera crews and reporters who trail the famous to their dates with infamy. But the crowd expected at this afternoon's preliminary hearing for R&B singer Chris Brown will be on a different order.

Janice Min, editor in chief of US Weekly magazine, was on vacation in Colorado when news of the biggest celebrity death since, well, Farrah Fawcett's a few hours earlier, started her cellphone ringing. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Min, who was driving, didn't pick up, but she glanced at her incoming e-mails. "Oh my God, I got like 40 e-mails in 60 seconds," said Min, whose holiday evaporated with news of Michael Jackson's death this week. "I haven't been out of my hotel room since."

When a famous person dies, their life flashes before our eyes. As with any world figure, Michael Jackson's death was a television event. Though they were slow to pick up and then confirm the news of his passing, once the newshounds had arrived, they stayed put. "We're going to stay on top of this story," Wolf Blitzer said Friday on CNN, which, like its fellow cable news outlets, declared it Michael Jackson Day. "We're not going to go very far away."

A 200-member choir sang "Man in the Mirror" in Culver City. Musicians on the red carpet at the BET Awards in South Los Angeles spoke of their admiration for Michael Jackson. And dozens of fans continued to brave the heat on Sunday to pay tribute to the music icon at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and outside the Jackson family compound in Encino. "I grew up with his music," said Nancy Bingham, 25, of Glendale, who was among those at the scene in Encino.