JULIE WALMSLEY

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...