Everyone, pat your great selves on the backs: I just found out over the weekend that our “5 Worst Trader Joe’s Parking Lots” post won LA Weekly‘s “Best Comment Thread” Web Award last week.  Over one hundred comments registered on the post, with most of you sharing your war stories, parking tips, and suggestions for alternate stores with better parking.  For all of you pissed off Angelenos who had enough of these damned parking lots and chimed in, thanks.  And great job.

So the LA Weekly‘s been publishing for 30 years now! Thirty years since visionary Jay Ulin launched the iconoclastic free weekly. It’s changed a lot since then–like the city–and these days not everyone’s happy with the changes. It should be said it’s not seeing the Amazon-rainforest-esque destruction that the LA Times has been seeing; its editorial dep’t has not been quite laid to waste the way it has at the Times. But are people still reading the way they used to? With page counts dropping, one wonders.

All that aside, it’s time to celebrate the paper’s continued existence with LA Weekend, a two-day extravaganza of some of the high points of LA art & culture–much of which has been discovered, championed, or affiliated with the storied newsweekly over the decades. From a “Meat Lovers’ Panel” to occasional LA Metblogs author Wil Wheaton, it’s quite an assembly. Not quite sure how the Meat Lovers’ Panel will fare, scheduled as it is opposite the Grilled Cheese Invitational, necessitating a painful choice for fans of high-calorie repasts.

Full schedule behind the jump.

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In the winter of 2000, I was working as an art teacher in Sherman Oaks when a co-worker asked me if I wanted to attend a meeting with her at a pirate radio station. “They’re giving away radio shows,” she said, and when I demurred that I didn’t know how to DJ, she told me they’d teach me how. I thought for a second, and despite the fact that I’m pretty shy & tend to not throw myself into work situations with strangers, I decided to give it a shot. It was an uncharacteristic decision.

It changed the course of my entire life.

Joining killradio.org, an online radio station with a sometimes-pirate terrestrial broadcast, brought me into contact with people I never would have met in a million years: anarchists, eco-punks, jazz poets, Bollywood-music geeks, Black Bloc-ers, traveling minstrels, bike messengers, indie DJs, Food Not Bombs chefs, radicals and militant members of movements that prioritized the democratization of media outlets. It was the first move that sparked a series of cascading events in my life that… Read the rest of this entry →

I try to peruse K-Rod‘s LA Observed on a semi-regular basis, and so when I stumbled upon this mention of an internal note from the LA Weekly, naming LA Metblogs (among other great city blogs like LAist and LA Observed) as a “competitor blog” to the Weekly’s own, well, I must admit to feeling a flush of pride. The Weekly’s been an institution in LA since Jay Levin fired it up in 1978, and while its quality has fluctuated with the times it still is, in my opinion, one of the flagship sources for local journalism & writing that provides a strong sense of place.

I’d like to ask you, our readers, what you’d like to see more of on LA Metblogs, and how you think we can serve you better. At first I thought I’d ask for you to send me feedback via e-mail, so no other media outlets could bogart the good ideas; but really, it would be great if every news/culture pub in LA could raise its game–so fire away in the comments.

The memo in its entirety is here on LA Observed.