California IOUs sold on Ebay, Craigslist

California started giving out registered warrants, unofficially called scrips or IOUs, last week due to its cash-strapped state, according to a Los Angeles Times story by Reynolds Center intern W.J. Hennigan.
This has caused warrant sellers and buyers to hit the Internet, making warrant deals on sites like Ebay and Craigslist. Some buyers are looking to profit from the warrants annualized interest rate, while cash-desperate sellers are hoping to squeeze any money they can from the IOUs.
California's bond debt has also plummeted, down graded from A-minus to BBB status, only a step away from receiving the "junk" rating of BB.
View the story here. To learn more about bonds, visit our recent story on Electronic Municipal Market Access here.

Journalist sells Hollywood news site

Entertainment business writer Nikki Finke announced Tuesday that she has sold her news Web site, Deadline Hollywood Daily, to Mail.com Media Corp (MMC), The Wall Street Journal reported.

The sale is a move that may possibly hint at the growing value and popularity of small, online media outlets.

Finke, who has written for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times and New York Magazine, is the founder and writer of DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com.

Finke has been the “Deadline Hollywood” columnist for LA Weekly since 2002, writing about the business, politics and culture of the infotainment industry. Together, her print column and her Deadline HollywoodDaily.com have won first place in major entertainment journalism contests, including the Southern California Journalism Awards' Entertainment Journalist Of The Year and the National Entertainment Journalism Awards, in which she swept every online category.
According to the Wall Street Journal story, neither Finke nor MMC Chief Executive Jay Penske, son of auto-racing magnate Roger Penske, would disclose the amount of the sale.

GM bankruptcy resources

The Los Angeles Times has created a list of General Motors Corp. top 20 unsecured creditors with the type and amount of claims each has in G.M., a great resource for reporting how G.M. filing for bankruptcy will affect other organizations. It also has great graphics on the number of union workers at G.M. and G.M.'s global sales by region.
The New York Times also has enlightening multimedia on G.M.'s current predicament, including a timeline graphing G.M.'s history from 1908 to today chronicling its struggles and successes up to the Chapter 11. Its graph contrasting the amount of cars and trucks G.M. has been producing since the 1960s is also very insightful. A NYT map showing the number and locations of jobs the company has cut in the past two years helps show where plants may be closed and jobs may be lost in the aftermath of the bankruptcy filing.
Click here to see the most recent press releases from G.M.

Have other information or resources you'd like us to find for you? Comment and let us know.

LAT biz section reporter dies at 46

The Los Angeles Times reports Annette Haddad, a real estate reporter for the paper's business section, has died of complications from ovarian cancer. She was 46. Haddad first joined the paper in 1992.

From her L.A. Times obituary:

Although she had spent much of her career at the Times as an editor, she embraced the idea of covering real estate when offered the chance in 2004. During her time on the beat, she had 17 Page 1 stories on a variety of aspects of the market, including a sharp Column One feature that provided an early look at the impending foreclosure crisis.

For more click here.

New bureaus for LA Times

Next year, the Los Angeles Times will add several new bureaus in the newspaper's key coverage areas, which include the South, East and the Valley, according to the online journal LA Observed.
The report says veteran business reporter Jennifer Oldham is scheduled to oversee the Valley bureau.
Oldham joined the L.A. Times in 1995 and worked for four years as a business researcher. In 1999, she became a reporter and covered a variety of business beats. One of her investigative stories led to the recall of faulty furnaces. Most recently Oldham covered LAX and regional airports.
For the full story click here.

Trump story is a fake

The Fox News home page included a big, breaking story about how Donald Trump left a waitress in Santa Monica a $10,000 tip. Defamer, E! Online and the Huffington Post also posted the story, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.
Problem is the story was a hoax. Even the signed receipt that allegedly documented Trump's big gift was made up.
The story is traced to back derober.com, a celebrity gossip site that alters photos of the rich and famous. When Fox asked for a response from the site, which is run by two brothers from Venice Beach, here's what they had to say:
“We can’t believe a credible news source, such as Foxnews would feature a story for an entire day without doing their homework. If foxnews would have checked out the rest of derober.com, they would have realized that derober is a satirical celebrity gossip blog that features PHOTOSHOPPED photos."
The Los Angeles Times wrote a story explaining the hoax. Read it here.