Observing LA Observed

by Russell's Rants

LA Observed is a Los Angeles-centric blog-style website.  It has fresh daily content that varies from a nice aggregation of the day’s local news to insightful commentary on mostly serious issues facing the city.  The site describes itself as “a website devoted to independent reporting, informed commentary and selective linkage on Los Angeles news, media, politics, business, books and other topics.”

LAO, as it calls itself, has some pretty impressive talent, including Bill Boyarsky, the long-time political writer for the Los Angeles Times, and is edited by Mark Lacter, who doubles as the on-air business analyst for one of the local NPR stations in town, KPCC.  In fact, on Tuesday morning, I heard Steve Julian of KPCC do a really good interview with Mr. Lacter on the morning show about the current status of California economics – only to later find his post on LAO containing more information, an economic graph and the transcript of his KPCC interview.

LA Observed styles itself as the non-snarky alternative to more topical, human interest-style blogs.   My favorite self-disclosure about its editorial style came in response to the self-posed question:  Does LAO publish gossip?  The answer:

 “We hear a lot of media and politics gossip — and would be happy to hear more — but in the end relatively little gets into our posts. For us to treat pure gossip as blogworthy, we need to believe it might be true and have a good reason to publish it. . . .”

Nice!