Reporters

A Los Angeles television reporter is dating Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, about two years after his extramarital affair with another local newscaster led to the breakup of his 20-year marriage. KTLA-TV Channel 5 reporter Lu Parker, a former Miss U.S.A., has been dating Villaraigosa since March, station officials confirmed Monday. On Sunday, while working as a weekend anchor, Parker announced a story about the likelihood of Villaraigosa running for governor in 2010.

Most reporters would love to make $75,000. In a year. So it set my eyes to blinking when I read that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman got paid that much for a single speech, sponsored last week by the San Francisco Bay Area's clean air district.

I have to admit it would be fun to join the rollicking beat-down of the New York Times and Alessandra Stanley that has followed the chief television critic's egregiously error-ridden tribute to Walter Cronkite. Wasn't the public fascinated, after all, to learn that Stanley and the nation's Paper of Record managed eight mistakes in an almost 1,200-word tribute to Uncle Walter?

Former President Clinton arrived in North Korea today in a dramatic bid to negotiate the release of two American TV journalists sentenced to 12 years in prison for illegally entering the secretive nation earlier this year. Clinton, the husband of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, is the highest-profile U.S. official to visit North Korea in nearly a decade.

It's not hard for most people to know what to do when they happen upon a crime, or its aftermath. They find a police officer and cooperate in any way they can. Only it's not always that simple for a journalist working on a story. And that's not so simple to understand. The latest fight over a claim of reportorial exceptionalism comes to us from San Francisco, where a college photojournalist documenting life in a sketchy neighborhood happened on a homicide scene.

"It's safe! You can go out, even at night!" I've been hearing this over and over for the last three months, since violence started to drop in Baghdad. So last week, I told three of my Iraqi colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, "Let's go out and have dinner!" It had been almost two years since we had ventured out after dark. So we decided to play it safe and chose a restaurant about 10 minutes from our compound. It was so nice to get out.

An American scholar and freelance journalist who recently wrote about the growing strength of Taliban militants in Pakistan has been expelled, a media rights group said Saturday. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern that the deportation of Nicholas Schmidle, who has written recently for the New York Times Magazine and the online magazine Slate, could presage heavier pressure on foreign journalists working in Pakistan.

The writer was one of the legion of underpaid beat reporters in Mexico, the kind who churn out four or five stories a day, for low pay and little recognition. They know all about the corrupt and violent dealings going on around them, even though they can't always pass on this knowledge to their readers.

TIJUANA -- The model-reporter who proposed to Tom Brady at Super Bowl media day is being laughed at -- and deservedly so -- in the United States. She is not considered so entertaining in Mexico, at least not to some of us.

The bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi newspaper reporter was recovered Tuesday in Baghdad, and police in the southern city of Basra began an intensive search for a Western journalist working for CBS News and his Iraqi interpreter. Journalists have been frequent targets in Iraq, which the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said remained the world's most deadly country for media workers despite recent security gains.