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Silicon Beach: 5 People Making L.A. a New Tech Industry Capital

Los Angeles may be 350 miles south of Silicon Valley, but it's making strides to close the distance between the two in terms of sheer brain power and inventiveness (with a little bit of entertainment thrown in for good measure). Here are five people from our People issue helping to make that happen.

The Band Harriet Slept With All Your Mothers

"I knew it was a provocative title. But the song isn't as provocative as the title makes you think," says Alex Casnoff, singer-songwriter of Los Angeles indie rock quartet Harriet, referring to "I Slept With All Your Mothers." It's the first single off his band's debut EP Tell The Right Story. Seat ... More >>

The Story of How Lalo Alcaraz's Cinco De Mayo Cartoon Cost Brentwood Patch Editor Dennis Wilen His Job

We once said that Patch, that national network of "hyperlocal" news you can snooze to, just doesn't get it. And this completely proves our point. The ex-editor of Brentwood Patch today published the story of how he was fired last year for running a cartoon that the company's New York editors found ... More >>

To MOG Or Not To MOG? We Test All The Damn Streaming Music Sites Using The Highly-Scientific Captain Beefheart Method

​See also: Spotify: The Honeymoon's Over Which Is Better: Spotify or Grooveshark? With MOG's big roll out last week, your options for streaming music sites are more numerous than ever. Its main rivals are Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody, AOL Music, Rdio, Last.fm, and Grooveshark, and competitions i ... More >>

Spaceghostpurrp Ft. Speak: "Way Back," Or What We're Listening To Instead of "Otis"

Spaceghostpurrp and Speak​While you were running back Jay Z and Kanye's impossibly out-of-touch single "Otis" last weekend, Spaceghostpurrp and Speak were recording in Miami's Poe Boy studios. While you were recalling Jigga and 'Ye's humble roots, two of today's realest rising rappers were t ... More >>

SoCal Verizon Customer Dies, Still Receives Bills for Internet That Never Worked

Think you can escape the great Verizon ripoff? Think again.​It's a cruel, yet common, habit among hokey Internet companies struggling for relevance: Milk the confused old folks (who didn't grow up with the new-fangled Nets and therefore aren't quite sure how that stuff should work) for what li ... More >>

Eric Garcetti, L.A. City Council President, Takes One More Baby Step Toward Admitting He's Running for Mayor (VIDEO)

ExposayQuick campaign tip: Keep better company.​Everyone and their mistress knows Eric Garcetti is running for mayor. Hell, we even drew up an eight-item list on the utter obviousness of it, way back it in January. But the L.A. City Council president is taking his sweet time to drop an offici ... More >>

Everyone Loves a Troll: How Christwire Fooled Rachel Maddow, Howard Stern, 3 Million Coachella Heads and Counting

ChristwireThe mega-trollers, in costume as Bryan Blake and Mike Watson​Christwire.org is a joke. IT'S NOT REAL. Not a genuine bone in its blogroll. (Except for when they also fool their Christian freelancers.) Every day, the two dudes who run Christwire read hundreds of your angry comments a ... More >>

Is Match.com to Blame for Sexual Assault on L.A. Film Executive?

Love at the Urth Caffe goes terribly awry​Match.com hasn't been getting much love and appreciation for its romantical services in the digital age. A pack of subscribers just sued in February because, they claimed, hundreds of thousands of the site's users were either inactive or downright fak ... More >>

L.A. Newsrooms Are Minority-Challenged in This Heavily Latino City, According to ASNE Journalism Survey

The Times they aren't a-changin.'​Looks like affirmative action, that controversial relic of the grunge era, is officially over in newspaperland. For the third straight year the number of minorities in newsrooms across America declined, according to the latest American Society of News Editor ... More >>

'LA Weekly' Names Underachiever Keith Plocek as New Web Editor

Keith Plocek comes to LA Weekly.​True story: An acquaintance of ours wanted to go for this job. We said, sure, if you can waive a wand and make six-figure traffic appear instantly, you're in. The shoes of LA Weekly's former web honcho Erin Broadley are huge (like Ru Paul size). She was nothin ... More >>

LAPD Chief Says Jeffrey Stenroos, L.A. School Officer 'Shot in Chest' at El Camino High, Was Lying [UPDATED WITH PHOTO]

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, who announced tonight that the officer-involved shooting may have been a farse​Updated after the jump with a PHOTO of Jeffrey Stenroos, who has admitted to shooting himself in the chest. Update: Word on the street is Stenroos probably shot himself. He's out of jail af ... More >>

Demand Media, eHow Factory in Santa Monica, Already Worth $1.9 Billion: Retarded Web Searches Prevail

It's no Gehry, but Demand Media's oceanfront headquarters do just fine​In an unassuming mid-rise office building on the Santa Monica cliffs (1299 Ocean Avenue, to be exact), the nation's most profitable "journalistic" machine is hard at work -- churning out those short, un-researched half-answ ... More >>

In Memoriam: Beverly Hills' Jacopo's Pizzeria Closes

Flickr/Muy YumRIP Jacopo's Pizza​ As any West L.A. native knows, Jacopo's Pizzeria was an L.A. institution. For years, the restaurant's red leatherette booths supported the behinds of many Angelenos, from families' chowing down on garlic cheese bread, sausage pizza and ricotta-stuffed ravioli ... More >>

Former 'Baywatch' Beauty Donna D'Errico Says TSA Agents Singled Her Out For Body Scan At LAX (You Know, Because Her Body Is So Friggin' Scannable)

PlayboyD'Errico, in the days when security wasn't so tight.​You're an underpaid TSA security guard. Nobody likes you. Not even your own mother. How do you fill those eight hours a day? Picking out hot chicks MILFs for the notorious full-body x-ray scan, of course. At least that's (sort of) th ... More >>

Website Yo! Venice! Accuses AOL's Patch Of Taking Content: Patch Says It Was A Misunderstanding

VSA via FacebookDid Patch rip off content again?​The folks over at the Yo! Venice! community news site have grown wary of seeing competitor Patch, an AOL-funded start-up, continually post the same local news only minutes after, it claims, its own version of the news items go live. But what ha ... More >>

Following West Hollywood Plagiarism Controversy, Patch Replaces Editor On East Coast Who Ripped Off Photo

Talk of the SoundPatch been caught stealing content -- again.​AOL's hyper-local news site Patch is finally made a decisive move regarding plagiarism problem. Following content theft in West Hollywood and then in New Rochelle, New York, the site replaced the editor in the latter case. This acc ... More >>

AOL News Site Patch Caught Plagiarizing Again: This Time It's Not In West Hollywood But In New York State

Talk of the Sound​We received some sanctimonious feedback after the Weekly reported Thursday that the West Hollywood version of AOL's McJournalism news site Patch lifted someone's content wholesale and then failed to immediately apologize for it (the site later took the obituary in question down a ... More >>

Will More West Hollywood News Outlets Mean Increased Scrutiny for Local Politicians?

The Sunset Strip in West Hollywood​LAist noted the other day that West Hollywood now has three "media outlets" training their eyes exclusively on the small, 1.9-square-mile city. It's the kind of thing that makes one wonder if West Hollywood politicians will now come under more scrutiny? At ... More >>

A Betrayal in Proud Pomona

Century-old police department fears the end of its own thin, blue line

The Next Wave of Fast Food: The Sushi Popper?

Sushi PopperSushi on a Stick!​ Here's a pop quiz: Name a few items, food or otherwise, that are sold in a tube. Toothpaste? Check. Push Pops? Double check. Yoplait Go-gurt? Yuck (but a check nonetheless). Soon we can add sushi to that list as culinary entrepreneurs Lucas Furst and Evan Kaye a ... More >>

CNN Launching Food Blog: Eatocracy Coming Soon

what your new site will look like, more or less​ We have CNN to thank for so much. The invention of Permanent Television, Jane Fonda in a Braves cap, the number of times we get to say "Wolf Blitzer" every day in casual conversation. And now, in addition to giving us Anderson Cooper hour after ... More >>

Carly Simon Resurrects "You're So Vain" Rumors, Once Again

Who So Vain?​About forty years ago, Carly Simon fornicated with some famous dudes. The list allegedly includes James Taylor (her main squeeze), Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, the 1968 Yugoslavian Alpine skiing team, Spiro Agnew, the 14th Dalai Lama, a young Dav ... More >>

Still No Decision on MySpace Mom Trial Dismissals

Time seems to have stood still in Federal Judge George Wu's courtroom. Back in November Dean Steward, the lawyer defending Lori Drew, who was accused of harassing a young girl through a bogus MySpace account, filed for a dismissal. The "Rule 29" grounds were simple: The government had not put on any ... More >>

MySpace, MyRules: Why Jurors Gave Lori Drew a Pass

Despite the architectural gravitas of its setting -- downtown's WPA Federal Courthouse -- and the presence at the prosecution table of the formidable U.S. Attorney Tom O'Brien, the Lori Drew MySpace trial never felt like it should have been a federal case. After listening to testimony from and about ... More >>

Bulletin: MySpace Mom Beats Worst Charges

Just before 11 a.m. this morning Federal District Judge George Wu spoke the words that ended the weeklong MySpace Trial: "All right, let's bring the jury in." Lori Drew (R) and her daughter Sarah Drew who was Megan Meier's best friend leaving the U.S. Federal Courthouse. Photo by Ted Soqui. Click ... More >>

MySpace Mom Trial: To Be or Not to Be?

Federal District Judge George Wu has shown an easy ability to reference films and TV shows during the trial of Lori Drew. Maybe, then, he's familiar with Laurence Olivier's famous prologue to his film version of Hamlet: "This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind." The line is especia ... More >>

Pat Kingsley

Flack like me

Hollywood Schmoozer Meets Internet Geek

Agents 2.0: The new generation of dealmakers at UTA Online

Heat-Releasing Missives

And nonsense and sensibility

Chest of Lies

Identity theft, self-promotion and the search for laminates at Sundance

Moguls Will Be Moguls at Camp Allen

Shareholders get burned around the Big Media campfire

Bandwidth on the Run

Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe

Foreign Affairs

The box-office slump of 2005 is a reality, regardless of what language you speak

The Secret Lives of Cheetahs

Despite critical raves, Carroll Ballard’s Duma may go quietly into the night

Trailer of Tears

It’s gonna be a long, not-so-hot summer movie season

Cheerleaders

A Star is Born

Yesterday, in fact, in Andrew Niccol's Simone

Shrieking in Cyberspace

Relax. Your computer’s fine. We’re only blowing billions on an overhyped terror threat

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Some brilliant — and bungled — attempts to save the urban forest

Music-Driven Lifestyle. Positive?

E-Bombs Away

Protest, panic, and the politics of packet monkeys

Eraser Heads

Music Pho the Masses

Over noodles, the digiterati charts the music industry's brave new world

Seeing-Eye Browser

Out on the Web

GeoCities founder David Bohnett just wanted to make the WWW a community. Now he's worth $350 million.

Chillin' With Uncle Sam

Feds to teens: Just say no, dude

Future Tense

Today's computer conveniences could be the tools of tomorrow's totalitarianism

Downloading

Return to Sender

Hanks and Ryan sleepless again in You've Got Mail