JULIE WALMSLEY

My latest Freelance Toolbox column, and last from my seat as Secretary-Blogger for the Freelance Executive Committee, is now out. I will still contribute to the SPJ freelance community. The entire November-December issue of Quill is available for free here , and will be for about the next four weeks. After that it's reserved for SPJ members only, along with all archives. Andrew Seaman's ethics column is always good reading. Here, the second installment of my teachable moments doing digs as a freelancer -

The September-October issue of Quill, the magazine of the  Society of Professional Journalists , is out. For this installment of the Freelance Toolbox column, I wrote about ethical and legal fuzzy areas freelancers face when doing a dig. Short version: learn from my costly mistakes and do not submit a single word, or even discuss stories at length, without a cast-iron contract.

I am going to add this to my Resources page. And post it on The Independent Journalist  as well. Writing: A Guide pic.twitter.com/Ke2SajhCed — ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 4, 2015 *Please pardon the profanity.

The July/August issue of Quill , the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists , is now out. My Freelance Toolbox column in this installment covered the advantages and disadvantages of coworking.

The Los Angeles Mall is city-owned and thus bolsters the General Fund, the biggest pot and largest deficit among the city's accounts. Retail spaces at the Los Angeles Mall, which sits below City Hall East between Main and Los Angeles streets, go for between $1 and $2 per square foot, according the leasing documents available. The rent at the coffee/smoothie shop that used to be a Robek's is $1.45 per square foot. The same proprietor is taking over a separate kiosk where rent is actually higher than an enclosed retail space. There, she will pay $1.65 per square foot. Leasing space requires submission of a proposal as if responding to a standard city request for proposal, and commitment to paying a living wage. But like private sector applicants to a property manager or owner, the shops must demonstrate business acumen and financial solvency. Café Michel will be replaced by Filipino restaurant Pili Manila Grill. There, the rent is $1.35 per square foot.

My piece on longtime Larchmont destination Chevalier's Bookstore is now up at Larchmont Ledger and needing a correction. In a conversation with his friend and fellow bookworm, Bert Deixler, Holter proposed buying the store. The two local residents approached Winthrop, and by the end of October they were the new owners of Chevalier’s. It was actually Deixler who suggested buying the store to Holter, not Holter's idea. Holter at the time said, "Yeah right!" and brushed off the suggestion. But after thinking about it and seeing the barren store again, he changed his mind. More backstory on Chevalier's, and the other two independent bookstores I wrote about, Stories on Sunset in Echo Park and Skylight Books in Los Feliz, is here .

Last month Pat Morrison sat down with then-Councilman LaBonge on his way out of city council , where he has looted managed Council District 4 since 2001. In his interview, true to LaBonge form, he kissed an acquaintance through glass, used a chocolate chip cookie to illustrate better council district divisions, and called valid questions (including mine ) about frivolous spending of public works money "horse s---" because money spent to illuminate the Los Angeles Zoo - which is already funded with taxpayer dollars via a nebulous non-profit with highly paid executives - brings people joy. Morrison persisted, asking if that should be the work of government:  You were criticized for spending money from your discretionary fund on things like holiday lights around the zoo instead of, say, on potholes. That was a bunch of horse---- because the zoo lights bring joy. The DWP years ago created the holiday lightfest in Griffith Park. That $100,000 brought nearly 200,000 people to t

So, the independent bookstore is not dead. At least not in Los Angeles. I visited  Skylight Books  in Los Feliz,  Stories on Sunset  in Echo Park, and  Chevalier's Books  on Larchmont for forthcoming articles for the Ledger papers, and found full stores with interesting stories and committed customers. People still use libraries too. I was at the Silver Lake Library twice last week, and parents actually go with their kids and read from printed books, not iPads and Kindles. I wasn't allowed the editorial space for all the photos and interesting bits about the stores, their ownership, and their strategy. The outtakes - A longtime neighborhood hang, Skylight Books has been open since 2006, and owned by the same LLC. Some of the individual investors have changed out, but a core group continues to shepherd the store. The resident cat, Franny, is very sweet. She just hangs out with customers all day. She is named for J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. The store

The UCLA hospital system was the site of another cyber attack , the LA Times reported yesterday. I, along with Holli Herdeg, wrote about hospital data as one of several Los Angeles critical infrastructures vulnerable to cyber attack for EPICenter LA. In the article , we covered a 2014 breach into Community Health Systems, the second largest hospital operator in the country. Details of that attack were not provided until mandatory disclosure in an SEC filing: "The attacker was able to bypass the Company’s security measures and successfully copy and transfer certain data outside the Company… this intruder has typically sought valuable intellectual property, such as medical device and equipment development data. However, in this instance the data transferred was non-medical patient identification data related to the Company’s physician practice operations and affected approximately 4.5 million individuals who, in the last five years, were referred for or received services from ph

The city council today advanced the possibility of permanently closing the pedestrian tunnel on Sunset Boulevard by authorizing cost analysis, with a report due back in city council on an undecided date. The analysis is moving forward against the hopes of a group of local art enthusiasts who want it converted to an outdoor gallery modeled on the one in Cypress Village . I first learned about issues with the tunnel, and plans to close it, from one of Silver Lake city council member Mitch O'Farrell's field deputies. Then O'Farrell's press rep said no plans exist, weeks before O'Farrell filed the motion that today became a city council order to look at costs and find budget to get it done.

Weeks after his press deputy insisted that plans to permanently close the Micheltorena Pedestrian Tunnel amounted to an unfounded rumor, Councilman Mitch O'Farrell filed a motion in city council to request a cost report on closure. That is, he needs to know how much money to come up with to close a tunnel he said he has no plans for, though I first learned about those plans from another one of his deputies in April. Art supporters in Silver Lake hope to make an outdoor gallery out of the tunnel that extends under Sunset Boulevard, what used to be a pedestrian passageway designed to get kids on foot to school safely. They hold the Cypress Village Art  Tunnel as their model, and hope to stop the cementing before the city finds the money to get it done.

I wrote about tire slashings in Silver Lake for this month's Los Feliz Ledger. Pending corrections will update the map and copy to accurately reflect the area that gets hit: Effie Street and Crestmont, Maltman, and Golden Gate avenues. According to one of the unnamed sources mentioned in the story, about 90 percent of the activity is within a 100-yard radius of the corner of Effie Street and Golden Gate Avenue. I didn't have the editorial space to go as deep as I wanted to. Within this story, there were several issues which merit examination: The use of the senior lead officer system in the LAPD - the very relationships that keep the police in touch with neighborhoods keep benevolent residents from criticizing, not wanting throw the officer who's become their friend under the bus The larger trend of property crime in Los Angeles, overshadowed by a recent spike in violent crime What it actually takes to arrest and prosecute any offender, and why it's not hard to

This morning the LA Times' David Zahniser wrote about the arrival of David Ryu in Los Angeles City Council, and how he could interact with that body's president, longtime City Hall denizen Herb Wesson.  Zahniser's article primarily covered the election's outcome as a function of controversial redistricting and the resultant disgruntled voters looking to smack back at City Hall, but he also discussed Wesson's role: Wesson, who has served on the council for a decade, said he expects to get along with Ryu just fine. The job of a council president, he emphasized, is to help the 14 other members become successful. Ryu, he pointed out, had few serious policy disagreements with Ramsay. The council president has another responsibility, which wields dealmaking (or breaking) power over all legislative action: agendizing. Wesson, who supported Ryu's opponent Carolyn Ramsay, decides what goes on the agenda when, and how to break out single motions and ordinances into

The Cypress Village Art Tunnel was open to the public tonight, providing a model for what Silver Lake hopes to create out of the now-closed pedestrian tunnel next to Micheltorena Elementary School on Sunset Boulevard.

Silver Lake art enthusiasts want their own version of the Cypress Village pedestrian tunnel-turned-outdoor-gallery, as I wrote for the Los Feliz Ledger . The article is short and I was limited to one photo. Unfortunate, as the photos tell the story of how the Sunset tunnel in Silver Lake now sits, and what Yancey Quiñones created in Cypress Park. Another untold element of the story is why people believe that it will be closed permanently. I first heard it from Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell's deputy in a Silver Lake Neighborhood Council meeting. But on follow up with that office, O'Farrell's press rep Tony Arranaga told me he didn't know where that came from. A rep for public works also said no projects were in queue. The view into the tunnel on the south side of Sunset Boulevard at Golden Gate Avenue, across the street from Micheltorena Elementary School.  Photo courtesy: Matthew Mooney The view into the tunnel on the north side of Sunset Boulevard jus

As seems to be the nature of grant-funded projects, mine is suddenly over. I've been Project Manager and Editor of the Los Angeles Health Care Systems Security Project and its website, EPICenter LA , since May 2012. I knew it was coming and was ready to move on, but expected to make this transition beginning in March rather than late January.  After a generous first wave of funding from the Annenberg Foundation, a second wave from other organizations did not arrive in time. I would have liked a little more time to launch the enterprise reporting we'd planned for the blog. We'd only just begun, with a team in place and a schedule finalized. Finding material for 124 unique pages of mostly curated content for a centralized repository of terrorism and disaster resilience information had consumed much time. But we'd shifted focus to the blog and I thought we were finally off and running. We did build a foundation. EPICenter LA is live, with information for multiple aud

The Pershing Square-adjuacent mill co-working space Blankspaces , stylized as b:LA for the hipsters whose office budgets it is trying to magnetize, was once the department store Schulte United. Councilmember Huizar, among others, did a relaunch of sorts for 529 S. Broadway last year, highlighting its changes over the years, and rebranding it as a center for creativity. On my way out of Blankspaces after nearly a year at multiple locations (and other unpleasant coworking experiences before that), I thought I had the scoop on this trivia, fascinated as I am by a time when going out to a department store was a big deal. But Bianca Barragan covered the conversion of the space last year for Curbed.