Recently in City of Los Angeles Category

Above: Lu Parker of KTLA interviews Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in a photo seen on the Channel 5 anchor's blog. A Channel 4 photographer filmed them together recently in the Larchmont district.

I'm just going to throw this item out there: Via LA Observed, a Channel 4 blog (which according to Kevin Roderick of LAO is "not to be confused with KNBC News") reports that L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been spotted around town in a non-official capacity with KTLA (Channel 5) anchorwoman (and ex-Miss USA) Lu Parker.

There has been no confirmation one way or the other as to the nature of Villaraigosa and Parker's relationship/connection/whatever-you-call-it.

While Villaraigosa's previous relationship with a television anchorwoman did little for his political career (or seemingly the rest of his life), he's not married now, and according to Lu Parker's blog, she "lives in Los Angeles with her cat and dog," and I take that to mean she's single, so and if there is something there, there won't be any tectonic shifts in the L.A. political landscape.

As for the L.A. journalism landscape, I'll leave it to KTLA to sort out how they're going to handle this (if there in fact really is a this).

I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to click on the Channel 4 link to see the actual picture of the two at a bookstore in the Larchmont district.

The blog seems a bit incredulous about Lu Parker having her own blog, but in the interest of photographic immediacy, check out the photo of Ms. Parker interviewing Mr. Mayor (which can be quickly found here) from that very blog.

I'd like to put in a plug to day for CityWatch, which provides news about Los Angeles with a focus on the city's neighborhood councils. Thus far I find it to be the best way I know of finding out what's going on with the NCs as a whole and how the neighborhood-council system is faring in regard to the larger city government under which they serve.

Reading the history of CityWatch, I learned:

CityWatch exists to monitor the political business of City Hall, and other government agencies, to monitor the progress of the empowerment of LA's neighborhoods and to encourage grass roots civic engagement.

CityWatch is an electronic journal of observations, analysis and perspectives ... complimented by ideas and information all viewed and presented from the POV of LA's myriad grass roots neighborhoods engaged in the ongoing struggle for empowerment.

We hope you find it useful, informative and provocative.

For those of you who have been with us for the two years past, we thank you for your support and your input. Without which we could not have grown from the 256 email addresses of two years ago to the better than 60,000 subscribers of today.

I do, and I do. And I do get the site's news by e-mail. Aside from its regular news stories, there are links to every neighborhood-council Web site. The "Super Planner" for community events is currently empty, and an initiative to bring video and audio to the site hasn't quite gotten off the ground, but just the provision of all those links and the regular news stories is, in my mind, more than enough to make CityWatch a valuable site.