JULIE WALMSLEY

The New York Times ' Neal Boudette wrote on Tuesday about how the big carmakers are adjusting to the threat of ride hail making individual car ownership obsolete. Among the interesting bits were examples of Los Angeles-area people going mostly carless (from my view the last and final test among U.S. cities), that automakers are now considering the first and last mile (to the bus or train station and back) that mostly occupies public transit analysts, and that a shift away from individual car ownership could be a financial relief for automakers, who expend massive capital to produce new cars. Boudette breaks out that math: Automakers are generally betting that sales of vehicles to fleet services will offset any decline in sales to individual consumers. Boston Consulting Group predicts that 44,000 cars will be sold to ride-sharing fleets in North America in 2021, more than making up for an expected net decline in consumer sales of about 8,000 vehicles.  The bigger impact mi

If you skim the LA City Council's recent meetings, you might believe that it took action on sidewalk repair, finally deciding who exactly is responsible in one cohesive policy. No. All the 15 members of the council did on Dec. 13 is receive another report from a subcommittee and officially file that report. This is an issue that has gone on and on. I wrote about this all the way back in my Patch days in 2010. There were two versions of the article - one for Encino and one for Chatsworth. The Patch people killed the Chatsworth one, the more comprehensive one, and for some reason pulled the timeline that ran with both. Pathetically, it does not require much updating after six years.

I only just read this unnecessary piece about the Gatto family in the Los Feliz Ledger yesterday, though it was published Oct. 27. The title misleadingly suggests it's a look back at unresolved elements of the investigation and not a big MacGuffin of a lurid look into a struggling family. No one can make the paper reevaluate or pull the article. There is unfortunately no unified standard of journalistic ethics for all media outlets to follow. I keep the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics in mind when in doubt, and try to share any thorny issues with editors. I know, from my own Ledger days, that the paper's Publisher-Editor Allison Cohen would not much heed them anyways, having used her position to rail against Griffith Park preservationists and the imperfect, but mostly sincere and committed, local business improvement district. I was unfortunately a party to both, having my reporting twisted with heavy editing to unfairly slam individuals among those

I wrote a listicle for LA Weekly to help people find 7 places to combine yoga and booze this month in Los Angeles. Yes, I ask the hard hitting questions for you. It was part of my week of fun articles, the other being my piece on Netflix-for-rad-toys startup Joymode . (Look for it on Thrillist on Thursday Sept. 22.) I became interested in the trend when I received an invitation for one of the events, and wondered how common it is to stack a happy hour on top of yoga class. I learned it's common, and spreading. Boston has a Bendy Brunch (vinyasa + mimosas), and Washington D.C. has Soul & Spirits, both produced by yoga event organizer Grip the Mat , which does Vinyasa to Vino here in LA. Later this month, a St. Louis ale house will combine yoga with a tasting , like the Dude's Brewing Company event featured in my Weekly article. That event was planned by Yoga Buzz , a St. Louis nonprofit that plans various yoga events to make it more accessible to the community. Early

My overview of the downtown Los Angeles Arts District for a special issue of The Real Deal is now live. The Real Deal is really a trade magazine for an investor-developer-agent-analyst readership, so I'm glad I had an editor who let me write honestly about a community uneasy with the change driven by that readership. I didn't have the editorial space to go as deep as I could have on different perspectives on change in the area, with Boyle Heights just across the river as an example of a vociferous, bordering on violent,   debate over the redevelopment of a longstanding Los Angeles community . It is noteworthy that two Arts District success stories -  Poketo  and  Angel City Brewery  - don't just sell product, but organize community. How quickly Boyle Heights would change without opposition is debatable; the two communities differ significantly. Part of the developer interest in the Arts District is the availability of a particular kind of space. As I wrote in the

Washio  suddenly ended its Uber-for-your-clothes-like business of smartphone application-based laundry service to and from wherever you are, effective Aug. 29. The company's founders addressed customers in a letter on the Washio webiste: As of Aug 29, Washio will be shutting down its operations. No more orders will be accepted and outstanding orders will be returned promptly to customers.   We are not alone in believing in Washio’s core business, technology and team, and hope it lives on in some shape or form in the future. But, that story has yet to be told…   From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank you for all of your support and belief in Washio, our vision and our love for sharing cookies and clean clothes. The cookies are a reference to the cookies given to customers at each visit, the mobile service's version of a hotel mint on your pillow. I wonder how much ever-changing contracting policies for their pick-up and drop-off staff, called Ninjas, led to

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am wrapping up my project for the ICFJ-S&P Global Financial Data Journalism Program . I am honored to have won the first prize fellowship to expand my dig into the LA gig economy that started at LA Weekly . My piece on two LA millenials making the gig economy more navigable runs on Thrillist Los Angeles on Friday; the rest of the project will run here, as a series: Wed. Aug.  31    Mileage, mapping, and weather applications Wed. Sept.   7   Gig economy accounting Wed. Sept. 14   Out-amenitize the competition Wed. Sept. 21   Lawyer up Wed. Sept. 28  Side hustle your side hustle Wed. Oct. 5      Cash out early Wed. Oct. 12    Monetize your mistakes Wed. Oct. 19    Find your people -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Los Angeles City Hall was a finalist for this year's Black Hole Award, on my nomination . The government of the U.S. Virgin Islands took top prize. The runners up were the Wisconsin Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee (second time in the Black Hole) and the Marshall County, Tennessee's Sheriff’s Office. You can read about all of the "winners" here .

Alexandra Alter wrote in the New York Times yesterday that Barnes & Noble isn't dead yet, if you read into the retailer's middling quarterly performance as an indicator. Barnes & Noble  had another not-so-bad quarter, which these days counts as good for the struggling bookstore chain. When the company  reported its earnings  on Thursday for the third fiscal quarter of 2016, there were signs that the steep losses that have plagued it in recent years may finally be leveling off. Also, Alter reported, the big retailers are starting to gain ground on e-books, and what retail sales they lose go at least in some part to the indies. Good news to me since I wrote last year about how local Los Angeles independent bookstores are surviving , and saw what they really are to community, placemaking, and authors trying to find a niche audience for their work.

Santander Consumer USA, a lender that was issuing Uber-cosigned weekly leases to the rideshare company's contracted drivers until an unexplained split last year, had to answer SEC questions yesterday  about past financial reporting. Inquiry into the Spain-based firm's public disclosures were not related to the past Uber partnership (though that partnership does merit some questions). However it reminded me to finally share unwritten parts of an LA Weekly piece I wrote last fall about Angelenos who use their smartphones as their employers, finding daily gigs via application-based personal services like Uber , Lyft , Wag! , Washio , and TaskRabbit . I call them smartphone microlaborers. I was limited to about 1250 words and only one photo, so I couldn't include all the colorful bits I found in this subsector of the local gig economy, or all the new questions that arose from looking at these contracts and what the smartphone gig life really means in practical terms. With

The Society of Professional Journalists , of which I am a proud member, has an annual  Black Hole Award  to "highlight the most heinous violations of the public's right to know." Timely, as I've been meaning to revisit the battle I fought last year with then-City Council District 4 representative Tom LaBonge, his obscured 501c3 [supposedly non-profit] organization Sister Cities, and what felt like all of Los Angeles City Hall. Some of it emerged earlier this month when a citizen lawsuit pushed the city attorney's office to go hunting for documents that disappeared from LaBonge's office, and the contents of the shredder- and incinerator-bound file boxes suggest illegal behavior including campaigning from sitting office. The Los Angeles Times later obtained emails showing willful refusal of my document requests around Sister Cities. My nomination is a bit scattershot, as I learned of the award and the impending deadline last minute. I rushed through, but yo