Since late October, @avary has been tweeting regularly about prison life, referring to himself as #34 and regaling his followers with tales that will probably turn into a mindfuck prison thriller screenplay someday, because some people are so irrepressibly hip that even imprisonment for a tragic crime turns all cool and A Clockwork Orange-y in their hands.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian wrote about the wayward Pulp Fiction and Beowulf scribe's stream-of-consciousness Twitter early last week.

But then: Plot twist! Milian's blog post led authorities to realize that Roger Avary wasn't in prison at all. Rather, he had somehow ended up on a work furlough program, which allowed him to hold a day job and merely bunk up at night with fellow furloughees. This is both not the hardscrabble prison life everyone thought @avary was describing, nor the prison sentence Roger Avary was supposed to be serving. So guy got nabbed and they sent him to real prison, prompting @avary to tweet:

LAT is preoccupied with how Avary ended up in furlough instead of jail, but what I want to know is, (1) Was @avary faking his prison badassery, since he was never in prison in the first place? (2) If so, was it a ploy to make us think he is irrepressibly hip and A Clockwork Orange-y? Because that would be pretty lame. (3) Alternately: Is the jailhouse equivalent of a work-study program actually as disgusting and terrifying as I always imagined real prison to be? Meaning @avary wasn't trying to deceive, it's just that we soft-bottomed media folks foolishly assumed that his scary tweets were from the belly of the beast, when in fact they represent a relatively pleasant penal existence, and when @avary gets to real prison it's going to get really crazy.

[LAT] [LAT] [LAT]

L.A. Times political columnist George Skelton just doesn't think it's right for poor reporters to have their sides of interviews with political figures publicized just because the law says people are entitled to access documents created by their government:

The public records act seems to be running amok when a reporter's private interview with a public figure can be handed over to competitors. I don't mind my interviews being taped. I just don't want the transcript being given out to rivals or political hacks.

I might want to hold back some of the quotes and info for a future column. Or I might be unsure how an answer should be interpreted.

Amok! We have something of an interest in the notion of publicizing reporters' private conversations with government employees via open records laws, so it should go without saying that we think it's awesome. But Skelton's smug disapproval is a crystalline distillation of why people hate reporters: Government employees labor under open records laws that perpetually threaten to lay bare virtually every word they write, and newspapers like Skelton's employer are the primary engine for forcing, through frequent lawsuits, state and federal agencies to live up to their obligations under those laws. But that's all supposed to apply to somebody else. Apply it to a reporter and—well, what about the competition?! What if I want to hold back some of the things back? Isn't there some kind of immunity, or something? It just seems wrong to publish things that some people don't want published, doesn't it? Icky.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky (pictured) is leading the way, according to LA Observed: The politico's website is overseen by former latimes.com editor Joel Sappell; contributors include another former Los Angeles Times editor and a former Newsweek correspondent.

The articles wouldn't be out of place in a local newspaper. You've got your anecdotal ledes; your "quiet" and "bittersweet" response to injustice; a quirky fish-out-of-water character shaking up a local organization; a followup on failed legislation; a listicle.

But said listicle gives the briefest acknowledgment of "critics" of a proposed subway line, and instead rattles off seven arguments in support of the plan, supported by such "proponents" as "Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member." A story on an anti-STD media campaign is sure to mention the "crucial infusion of $700,000... [from] Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky," who elsewhere is busy "warning homeowners to avoid solicitations from" certain con artists.

None of which is particularly scandalous since a politician's website is supposed to be filled with propaganda, and as far as propaganda type content goes, this "experiment" is very light on the dogma, and very readable. So cheer up, imperiled journalists: Dabbling in flackery might not feel so dirty, after all. And it pays!

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) released its figures today. And it's bad. From April to September the average sales of 400 papers slipped 10.6 per cent from last year to 30.4 million. Each paper had a strangely arms-length way of covering its own demise.

"The Los Angeles Times was fourth with daily circulation of 657,467, down 11.1% from a year ago," said the Los Angeles Times, quickly and with little further analysis except a statement to say that this was expected. This was a fairly common tactic.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, says the good news is that websites are up! Except theirs, down "29 percent, to 9.2 million, compared with September of last year, just before the presidential election." Which surely counts as 'but we just had a huge spike' excuse-making.

The justifying and silver-lining seeking continued. See if you can guess where this is from: "At The New York Times, which has repeatedly raised its prices in recent years, weekday circulation fell 7.3 percent, to about 928,000, the first time since the 1980s that it has been under one million. As the third-largest paper, it continued to have by far the largest Sunday circulation, at 1.4 million, down 2.7 percent."

The San Francisco Chronicle, which reported the sharpest decline, 25.8 per cent, opened with this: "The Chronicle said Monday that reshaping the newspaper's business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation."

It's completely understandable. It's just sad to see great papers and great reporters scurrying to cover disastrous news with soothing reportorial language and knowing juxtaposition of sentences. I'd almost prefer 'Holy Crap We're Fucked! Help Us! Buy This Paper!' to be splashed across each front page.

As the New York Observer notes, Artley follows in the footsteps of our own Richard Rushfield, who was LATimes.com entertainment editor up through July, and in the wake of the head of the Times' online advertising, Juliana Jaoudi, and the head of online entertainment advertising, Jennifer Van Hook, both let go in the past week.

Formerly editor of IHT.com, Artley was part of a team of outsiders general manager Rob Barrett brought in after he was hired in 2005 to remake the site. Her departure, then, could lead to greater control by the newspaper's print side of the heretofore relatively independent website.

Replacing Lyons and Mankiewicz as hosts of the long-running show, formerly hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, will be A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, two men widely respected in the world of film criticism who have both served as fill-ins on the show in the past.

As the LA Times Patrick Goldstein notes, Ben Mankiewicz wasn't all that bad, but it appears as though he was brought down by the tremendous weight of Lyons' Herculean suckage.

To be fair, Mankiewicz, the scion of a fabled Hollywood family who hosts Turner Classic Movies presentations, was clearly more knowledgeable than his counterpart. As my colleague Chris Lee reported last December, Lyons, son of film critic Jeffrey Lyons, was held in such low esteem in the critical fraternity that others in the profession were lining up, happy to be quoted by name ridiculing his work, with Chicago-based film critic Erik Childress saying of Lyons: "He has no taste. Everyone thinks he's a joke."

So how awful was Ben Lyons? This awful:

You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it's gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don't care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That's all I want from a movie like this.

Film lovers of the America rejoice — your own personal long national nightmare is finally over! But what will now become of the "Stop Ben Lyons" blog?

On Sunday, the Calendar section will be wrapped in a four-page supplement designed to look like LA Times content, LA Observed reports. In reality, the content is advertising copy for the movie The Soloist.

To make the supplement especially confusing, it contains a Q&A with an actual columnist for the newspaper, Steve Lopez, whose book inspired the movie.

The Soloist, by the way, is about a journalist "disenchanted" because "the newspaper business is in an uproar." The journalist (Lopez) becomes inspired by a street musician, writes a series of columns about him and becomes determined to turn the guy's life around.

But no one reads the columns, because they come buried under and surrounded by lookalike ads. Wanting for readers, the newspaper goes bankrupt; the street musician languishes in obscurity, destined to live out his days penniless and alone. (We're joking about this terrible ending, of course. Like that could ever happen.)

A piece on Japan's bullet trains published today by John Glionna is datelined "Nagoya, Japan." Some of it, though, could have shared a byline with the world's greatest collection of trainspotter trivia. Compare Wikipedia's entry on Japan's high-speed Shinkansen trains to Glionna's description of the advanced rail system:

Designed to traverse Japan's mountainous terrain, the trains use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. They travel on elevated tracks without road crossings and apart from conventional rail. An automated control system eliminates the need for signals.

Wikipedia:

In contrast to older lines, Shinkansen are standard gauge, and use tunnels and viaducts to go through and over obstacles rather than around them. With a minimum curve radius of 4,000 meters (2,500 meters in the oldest Tōkaidō Shinkansen), the system was built entirely from the ground up on elevated tracks without road crossings and separate from conventional rail. It employs an ATC (Automatic Train Control) system, eliminating the need for signals.

Glionna:

Officials boast that on average the trains are less than half a minute late each year, which includes delays caused by earthquakes, typhoons and snow. During the line's 45-year history and transport of 7 billion passengers, there have been no deaths from derailment or collisions.

Wikipedia:

During the Shinkansen's 44-year, nearly 7 billion-passenger history, there have been no passenger fatalities due to derailments or collisions, despite frequent earthquakes and typhoons.

The Wikipedia article has a note from the site's volunteer editors that the article's "sources remain unclear." We'll give Glionna, who became a foreign correspondent the Times last year, some credit on that count: At least it's obvious what his source was.

(Photo via Lassie, Get Help)

Some inside the Googleplex believe that Crowley got the code for his new friend-finding startup Foursquare from Dodgeball, the startup he sold to Google for an estimated $40 million in 2005. And after Valleywag reported their suspicions, a source tells us Crowley has been going around telling people at South By Southwest that he did reuse the code, and that he doesn't expect Google will do anything about it.

But that's not what he told Dan Fost of the Los Angeles Times when asked about the charge. Fost credulously printed Crowley's reply:

The code is all brand new. I didn't understand that story. I'm sick as a dog and pasty because I've been holed up for two months writing this stuff.

If only Fost had thought to factcheck that with, say, any of the South By Southwest attendees to whom Crowley confessed. Or with engineers who have inspected Foursquare's code and found elements directly lifted from Dodgeball. That would be work, though — an element curiously missing from much of today's tech journalism.

(Photo by thenextweb)

Postal rates are going up. Rather inconvenient for magazines, since their revenues aren't.

Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, may have hired local newspaper reporter Amy Ruiz for a job she was unqualified for, all to stop her from reporting on his relationship with an 18-year-old man. (Most gay guys we know would brag about dating an 18-year-old, but whatever.)

Newsday editor John Mancini disappeared for almost a week after the Cablevision-owned newspaper published a story about a sexual-harrassment lawsuit against Eddy Curry, a player for the Cablevision-owned Knicks. Now he's back on the job.

The Los Angeles Times, having cut 310 editorial jobs since July, is planning more layoffs. Wait — wasn't the editor bragging about how he could pay his reporters on online revenues alone? We're confused.

Radio talk jocks at Clear Channel are losing their jobs, too.

It's no surprise Cooper would demur on questions about who he is or is not dating, and what their gender might be. After all, if that were the sort of thing the AC360 host talked about, the world would know by now.

But it is interesting to learn that journalists are routinely and formally held to promises about their questions as a condition for interviewing Cooper. Gawker alum Choire Sicha, who recently sat down with Cooper for the Los Angeles Times, described the screening process in an aside on his personal blog:

Access to Mr. Cooper through the network is dependent on their conditions that no personal questions be asked, whatever that means, and so I agree to their conditions, as stupid as they may be.

One wonders how often Cooper himself makes promises to sources about what kinds of questions he'll ask them on camera  

Jarvis, a former ink-stained wretch, calls it a historic moment. Perhaps it is for him, since the Entertainment Weekly founder has made a career out of guiding old media organizations into digital nirvana. To make his living, it helps if he can argue that there's a pot of gold at the end of the online rainbow.

So LA Times editor Russ Stanton's recent disclosure that the newspaper's website revenues covers its editorial overhead — print and online — makes a handy PowerPoint slide for Jarvis.

But Stanton's claim doesn't withstand casual scrutiny for anyone familiar with the economics of online-only publications. The LAT newsroom, even after considerable cuts, still houses 660 people. And yet, in December, according to the newpaper's own figures, its website only generated 120 million pageviews. At that rate, that's 2.2 million pageviews per employee per year. One Gawker Media blogger, in a much-cited example, did double that figure in a month.

And fishiest of all, Jarvis's scenario doesn't include any expense for actually selling those ads. Do Stanton and Jarvis think ads, online or off, get magically sold through the simple grandeur of the wordsmithing to which they're attached?

Perhaps the Tribune Co., the publisher of the Times, is phenomenally good at running its business, but I doubt that, since it recently filed for bankruptcy. More likely: Stanton is engaging in wishful accounting. And since Stanton's tale suits Jarvis's needs, he's reprinting it without applying a media critic's needed skepticism.

Chocano, whom we've admired since her days at Salon, broke the news in a brief note to FishbowlLA; her departure leaves veteran Kenneth Turan as the lone full-timer among a growing pool of freelancers (including Kevin Thomas, whose own contract the paper bought out in 2006). Fittingly or not, Chocano's final feature for the Times addressed the portrayal of hard economic times in the movies: "The pendulum seems to be swinging again from the decadent mainstream art of fat times to the scrappy countercultural art of lean times. For a while, at least, anger and unadorned reality may stage a cathartic comeback." We'd like that, too, Carina — just not like this.

• Among the OUsted at the LAT: Carina Chocano [FishbowlLA via MCN]

"In Los Angeles media circles the legend is told that in the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times was so fat with news, feature stories and ads that a paper thrown on the porch of actress Barbara Bain landed on—and killed—her dog. (As the Herald Examiner gleefully reported at the time.) That was then. Now the paper is featherweight..."

Nowadays it's only big enough to kill their gnomish CEO Sam Zell, if thrown hard enough.

But they're not the only newspaper to shrink: check out the Guardian, downsized in 2005. The old broadsheet version was definitely dog-killing size:
[via Matthew Hunt]

And look at tiny little Rolling Stone, the AP points out today. Could it have killed a dog, L.A. Times-style, in its bigger days? Probably not.

"No one was injured and the powder proved to be harmless. My sources say the letter was addressed to staff writers Richard Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian and included a demand for a retraction to their story this week that detailed flying mishaps early in John McCain's Navy flying career. The nut mail was said to carry an upside-down stamp and language about saving babies in addition to the Barack Obama threat." [LA Observed]

"Pissed off" is among crude language regularly removed from Times coverage as part of what McCoy acknowledges is "a conservative standard" when it comes to publishing coarse or vulgar remarks...

Clark Stevens oversees the style and usage guidelines at The Times... "It's a phrase we've all heard, and most of us have used. But is it essential to the story (or the quotation) here, and is it consistent with the overall tone and image we want to project to our readers? I think that's where conservative judgment prevails in favor of not using it..."

The policy for the first time takes into account the online world vs. the print world. As McCoy wrote in her cover note to staff when she distributed the updated guidelines on obscenity and taste, "A less formal voice may be appropriate in online stories and on blogs (as is often the case in feature stories too), but a conversational style is not an invitation to abandon The Times’ high standards by introducing gratuitous obscenities."

So whether it's on latimes.com or in print, curse words and crude language are supposed to be used only when they are essential to conveying an important point of the story.

Thanks for keeping everyone excruciatingly up to date on your slow-motion embrace of Web culture, LA Times, rather than boring us with stories about, say, philandering politicians and their mistresses!

[LA Times via Romenesko]