The fake front page story in Thursday's Los Angeles Times was a PR disaster; staffers are signing a petition calling it "embarrassing and demoralizing." Naturally, then, management is planning a sequel.

Whether they admit it or not, Wikipedia is every reporter's crutch for finding mundane details on deadline. Most know to cover up their laziness. But not this Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent.

Too busy partying in Austin, Dennis Crowley never replied to our questions about whether Foursquare was built on code owned by Google. He's denied it to other press, but we hear he's telling buddies otherwise.

Mailing it in for Hamilton Nolan, who's, er, on assignment, I'm here with your post-inaugural, Nobama media column.

Anderson Cooper prefers to address questions about his sexuality with on-camera winks, nudges and the like. There's a reason the CNN anchor is not asked for more direct answers in formal interviews.

The editors and writers of the Los Angeles Times could shut off the presses tomorrow and live off its website, media pundit Jeff Jarvis claims. But the numbers don't add up.

Yet more bad news from the abattoir better known as the Los Angeles Times newsroom: Film critic Carina Chocano is one of 75 staffers put down today by butchers at the Tribune Co., bringing to 325 the number of LAT employees laid off since last summer and the fourth full-time film critic to vanish from a Tribune daily…

Everybody knows that the L.A. Times has been in trouble lately, with shrinking ad sales and dealing with the outbursts of their eccentric billionaire CEO and threatening to suing their staff memo-leakers. But LA Observed reminds us that back in the day, the paper was so big that it killed a dog:

Come on, crazies, not the old mysterious white powder gag again. What is it about political psychopaths, abortion freaks, and Anthrax? They've got a fetish for the stuff. Get a new move, terrorists! "I'm told the Los Angeles Times mailroom opened a hand-scrawled letter today that read 'death to Obama' and contained a…

While these parts have been known to house a predatory cougar or two, nothing could have prepared us for the family of bobcats who have moved into a foreclosed home in Lake Elsinore. The brood — at least two adult cats and three kittens — have lived in the house for weeks, sunning themselves on an outside wall and…

Could the editors at the Los Angeles Times be any more useless? Their newspaper is going down in flames, with cash flow declines ranked worst among the deeply troubled Tribune Company newspapers. Their best hope for salvation is the Web, where the paper is desperately behind upstart competitors like Nikki Finke's …

There's a place and time for discussing the inanity of movie lists — usually early January, right when the radius of critics' annual Top 10 circle jerk is at its widest. But a few prime exhibits pop up throughout the year as well, such as last weekend's Los Angeles Times feature selecting the top 25 Los Angeles…

Red-Headed Step-Fox: The cycle of abusive box-office analysis is renewed today at the Los Angeles Times, where John Horn broke out his calculator and a hot wire hanger in assessing this summer's winners (Paramount, Warner Bros.) and losers (Sony, Disney). And, as per recent LAT tradition, 20th Century Fox was carted…

Former LA Times editor Andres Martinez's new lawsuit is a sad story of betrayal that should convince any journalist never to date a publicist, unless she can somehow find one who is not crafty and constantly scheming to leverage the relationship. Martinez left his job editing the editorial page amid scandal. He tried…

Outfoxed: Though ticket prices continue to rise and box office records are broken nearly every week, this will be 20th Century Fox's first summer without a $100 million hit since (yikes) 1997. How could anyone have predicted such dire earnings from a blockbuster slate that boasted Space Chimps, an X-Files sequel…

Dog Days: By August 29, the struggling L.A. Times will have laid off 150 of its employees following job cuts announced last month. Exactly what does the paper plan to do with its diminished resources now that so many of its "non-essential" employees are gone? Why, run a 35-page "Stars With Puppies" slideshow, of…

Tribune Company's Los Angeles Times is one of the most hard-pressed big-city newspapers: the parent company is over-leveraged; the local market reeling from a real estate crash; and like all papers the LAT is suffering from competition from the internet. Even so, the 150 newsroom layoffs announced today are shockingly…