Dear Reader: Please pay no attention to John Horn, who should be ashamed of himself today — not just for his facile collection of "lessons" studios have "learned" so far this summer, but for daring to suggest that The Happening was anything but a success for Fox and Manoj Night Shyamalan. The effrontery! Even the…

Yesterday's hearty Defamer welcome of Patrick Goldstein to the blogosphere was one of many around the Web, with Nikki Finke's hat-tip today falling the most conspicuously between "housewarming present" and "gentle kick in the nuts." To wit: "I'm told that, despite heavy promotion by the paper and other media,…

The work of "Big Picture" columnist Patrick Goldstein accurately reflects the LA Times' dedication to producing nothing but the hardest of hard-hitting entertainment journalism: his columns, which run the gamut from "Here Is An Old Producer I Had Lunch With" to "This Focus Group, Made Up Exclusively of Ten-Year-Olds…

Come for the Secret Diary Of A Call Girl review, stay for the copy-editing questions. (She found the show surprisingly boring and, yes, a subhead would work in both places.) [Los Angeles Times]

There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so…

Tribune CEO Sam Zell famously cursed one of his journalists earlier this year when asked whether refocusing the company would undermine serious journalism. He called such thinking "classic... journalistic arrogance." But now Zell is struggling to service $12.8 billion in debt amid a weak economy, and he's planning…

Really, I wasn't trying to be posh for the book party Arianna Huffington threw Saturday for Oxford scholar Jonathan Zittrain and his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It." I pulled up to Larry Ellison's Pacific Heights manse in a black Town Car because that's the only vehicle I was able to flag…

Just as one tires of Sam Zell's schtick-the 66-year-old newspaper proprietor's folksy pep talks to Tribune newsrooms have become sadistic rituals-there comes a useful reminder of the alternative, the pompous grandees of journalism who used to run the newspapers. Six former editors of Zell's Los Angeles Times have…

Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our acute grief at the news of Short Circuit Redux, LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez today mulls over the pandemic of horror glutting the marketplace. With this week's release of Prom Night leading the way, Fernandez counts more than a dozen do-overs en route to theaters,…

If film critics are in fact a dying breed, we at Defamer would like to urge them to get on with it. It's a little cruel, we know; some of our best friends are critics, and we'll miss them terribly. But if we have to read another motherfucking article like the one Patrick Goldstein wrote today about the Demise of the…

Neil Budde, the founding editor of WSJ.com and former Yahoo News chief has won a new gig at the Los Angeles Times. Despite the woes of print newspapers, trading Jerry Yang as a boss for foulmouthed motorcyclist Sam Zell sounds like a good bet right now.

And so it begins. Tribune CEO Sam Zell announced in an email today to employees that he'll be cutting 400-500 positions across the company's various newspaper divisions. "Unfortunately, I can't turn this ship from its course of the past 10 years within just a few months," Zell wrote. "Further, while I will do…

Sure he'll stand idly by as the Los Angeles Times fires a succession of editors with backbone but Sam Zell, the mercurial owner of the Tribune Company, is a laissez-faire kinda guy. In a recent memo to staff he informed them now they can surf the internets completely unmonitored. " I do not see how a member of the…

Web hits, "the current fool's gold of the newspaper industry," are bringing down the level of discourse in this country, says veteran Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Dwyre, in a column that leads with the saga of Golfweek's editor, who was fired after sticking a noose on the cover last week. The press, Dwyre…

John Carroll (pictured speaking) became a newspaper martyr when in 2005 he resigned as editor of the Los Angeles Times rather than implement budget cuts demanded by the penny-pinching corporate overlords. But that wasn't enough for David Simon, creator of The Wire, the HBO drama about crime, politics and the media…

"The year was punctuated by anxiety over the decline of many newspaper book review sections and worry that publishing, with its old-fashioned way of printing books on paper and shipping them to stores or to online services, can't keep up with a fragmented, increasingly distracted and digital world," according to the …

LA Times media columnist Tim Rutten castigated the sports journalists of America over the weekend for not covering "the transformation of baseball clubhouses into the plush equivalent of crack houses." Then he went on to recount a blind item about a "very veteran National Hockey League defenseman," who told him…

The final two presidential debates before Super Tuesday will be co-hosted at the end of January by CNN, the Los Angeles Times and Politico. Apparently, nobody relayed news of this partnership to LA Times media critic Tim Rutten, who, over the weekend, called CNN "corrupt" and "incompetent" for botching last week's…

Newspapers sales have fallen 3 percent year-over-year. With the exception of USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, the vast majority of major papers lost subscribers. This year the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry organization that reports subscriber information, included online readership in the report. In…