A month after the corporation that owns the Press-Telegram fired its publisher and managing editor and put Long Beach’s once-grand daily newspaper under the control of the publisher and managing editor of the Torrance Daily Breeze, longtime P-T columnist Tom Hennessy finally checked in Sunday with his take on the traumatic events.
And? Amazingly, the man who has been [...]

Long Beach’s daily newspaper is dead. Would someone please tell the management?

It probably would have been overkill if Dave Kuta had actually shown up for his long-scheduled panel discussion at Monday’s meeting of Leadership Long Beach. As it turned out, his absence at the prestigious personal-and-community-development course set an appropriate tone for the afternoon’s general [...]

‘Mr. Press-Telegram’ cries over Wrigley Field while his newspaper is stolen away

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
It was March 1, the morning after the corporate kidnapping that took the Press-Telegram away from Long Beach, and a resident was telephoning The District in distress. She was devastated that MediaNews Group, Inc., had turned over Long Beach’s 110-year-old daily [...]

A lot of folks post interesting comments on our website, both in response to–and, in some cases updating–our stories.
Yesterday afternoon, we noticed a comment from someone called Former Journo, in response to Dave Wielenga’s recent Nice Guy Finishes, At Last.

LAObserved caught on to Dave’s excellent story this week about Tom Hennessy–and the hits have been dragging in since. But read the story and you’ll know that for as much as it is about Hennessy, it’s got a greater weight: the death of the P-T.

The tough truth that Tom Hennessy never told

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Tom Hennessy all but retired as the Press-Telegram’s daily columnist Sunday, all but silencing the most-prominent voice in Long Beach journalism. That’s sad to consider, and it gets even sadder the longer you do. It’s true, though: The most-prominent voice in Long Beach journalism is [...]

Tom Hennessy frets in today’s Press-Telegram that too many people are forgetting to remember Pearl Harbor.  I appreciate his reminder — today is the 66th anniversary of Japan’s surprise aerial attack on U.S. warships as they floated like sitting ducks in Hawaii — but not so much his scolding tone. A lot has happened since Dec. 7, 1941. Perhaps [...]

Homeless vets will watch Vets Day Parade from sidewalk
Like war itself, the skirmish over the Veteran’s Day Parade makes for weird alliances. We find ourselves suddenly warming to flag-waving Tom Hennessy; his P-T column today delicately takes on parade organizers for their decision to ban anti-war veterans groups. On the other hand, while we’ve said [...]

I don’t usually do requests, but last night while dining at Smooth’s restaurant I received a special one from a rosy-cheeked woman who works on the 14th floor of a downtown highrise. She requested that The District lay off its occasional criticism of old Press-Telegram columnist Tom Hennessy, or that we at least give an equally bad time to Hennessy’s really-not-all-that-much-younger columnizing colleague Tim Grobaty–because, as she [...]

Halloween comes early this year

How afraid do you want to be?
The Press-Telegram promotes its annual Halloween scary story competition on the website–but its scariest online story today has to be the one about a pipe bomb explosion last night at Pine Avenue and Ocean Boulevard. That just gets scarier the more you think about it.