Photo by tanakawho via Flickr There have been 59 homicides in Los Angeles County so far this 2008. 2007 saw 845 (though, that can change). Of those 845 homicides, LA Times reporter Jill Leovy wrote about every one of them "in a straightforward, comprehensive way" in The Homicide Report, a genius creation that will go down in bloging history. Leovy is pretty much done with the blog while Ruben Vives begins to take over......

Today in Column One of the LA Times, Mitchell Landsberg along with Cao Jun examine Shanghai's subway system of five lines and 95 stations that serve 2 million people a day (with six lines scheduled to open in a couple of years). Juxtaposing it to Los Angeles with that fact that construction in Shanghai began four years after LA's Red Line, it makes our city look a bureaucratic embarrassment hung up in NIMBYism and......

We've written about it before — how the LA Times Column One feature regularly disrupts our morning newspaper time. The stories are rarely more than well-written fluff, like, say for instance today's story on Czech marijuana. (Aside: What?) The sad part is, we're equally flabbergasted by the stories every single day; eastern European mary jane is more important than 90% of the subject matter covered. So here's an idea from today's suggestion box, courtesy......

So our very own LA Times pulled off something of a coup Friday morning. The paper got a shout out in that other Times newspaper, when Richard Oppel credited our local rag for having an embed on the scene at Thursday's brutal suicide bombing in Ramadi. As a newspaper editor, you pray for a scoop like this. Major world news, and you are the only newspaper outlet with a reporter on the scene. It......

In today's "Los Angeles Times" Column One, reporter Daniel Hernandez pays a visit to El Congo Manuel on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and shares the world of Santeria with readers in his article "Little Shop of Santeria." We're not crazy about that title--would a Times copy editor have called Cotter Church Supplies "Little House of Catholicism"? Anyhoo, the article itself is terrific: Charles Guelperin, the Santeria priest, explained the day's aim: "We're doing......

The "Column One" feature, "Holding Up a Tradition," on the front page of yesterday's Los Angeles Times mystifies us. Why would Angelenos be interested in the antebellum architecture craze sweeping the South? The piece focuses on the popularity of a new housing subdivision in South Carolina called "I'On" that features houses modeled after antebellum plantation buildings with generous porches and collonades. Perhaps Times editors thought it time to publish a literal "Column One" feature......