Hello.

Journalists (well, most of them anyway) tend to shy away from any type of self-exposure, including myself. It’s about the STORY, not about YOU - that’s what we’ve been told over and over again by journalism professors and editors and publishers, and rightfully so. It’s not about us, it’s about those we report on.

So you can understand the hesitation and anxiousness I felt when I decided to post the above photo of (gasp!) myself, but I’ve grown tired of feeling that way.

I have been wondering what to make of this blog ever since I started writing in it. I’ve written about baking bowling ball cakes and print newspaper consumption in Europe and my love of  kitsch, not fit for consumption movies like “Love is All There Is,” and why I hate and love Los Angeles all at the same time.

I’ve described how I must be the only person on the face of the Earth who can’t have a blood test because of impossible to find veins and how I wanted to crawl into a hole and die when I found my first white hair and documented Henry the Maltese’s entire knee surgery (the one section of my site I get the most emails about).

I’ve agonized over the very thing all young writers agonize about - having a career doing what they love and at the same time felt like all my journalism dreams were coming true.

I have complained, whined, explained how beautifully baking calms me down, highlighted some of the articles I’ve worked on over the last year and also probably talked a lot of crap.

I’ve done all this while wondering - what the hell am I writing about?

I always feel like I’m all over the place when I write here, which I guess is an accurate reflection of my life at the moment.

I want everything at once. And as such, I want to write about everything at once. And that’s why if you browse through the posts on these pages, you’ll find everything from pumpkin muffins to musings on the 2008 presidential election and recaps of Bollywood films.

For a very long time, I’ve wrestled with what to write here - the self-loathing and criticism that comes with being a writer is no exaggeration, believe me. I have stared at so many blank posts, only to write a few lines and delete the entire thing. I wasn’t wasting any paper, but it still felt like a waste.

And so, I was driving (more like standing still) on the traffic infested freeways of Los Angeles when it finally occurred to me what this blog was and should be about: The Human Journalist.

You might be thinking,  huh? what exactly is a journalist if not human? Well, according to this UK poll, being a journalist was recently regarded as the third most untrustworthy profession - so to some, I’m sure “journalist” is synonymous with Beelzebub.

Many people tend to think of journalists as soul-less leeching creatures who are always on the chase for their next story, no matter what the cost. And while I haven’t run across this too often in my career, there are times when I’ve felt the deep-seeded hate.

Today was one of those days.

I called a source to fact-check a few paragraphs of information and within the first few seconds of speaking to him, I knew he was going to lash out at me.

“Is that how you people operate?” he said to me in a condescending tone. “Is that how you work?”

Uncalled for kind sir, uncalled for.

A few months ago I was on a phone with a woman, trying to explain that I was in search of some information for a story and she cut me off and started explaining that the way I had approached her on the phone was all wrong.

“Don’t they teach you how to properly talk in journalism school?”

She went on and on, belittling me, refusing to answer questions, but I carried on and finally got what I needed out of her, while dreaming of ramming the phone all the way through the line and up  her nose and then going across the street to the bar to get a shot of tequila and cry. And I don’t even drink.

I guess what I’m trying to say, in the most roundabout way, is that my entire life I’ve been trying to find the central part of what ties all the other parts of me together. It would be easy and almost lazy,and not even  entirely true to say  that it’s my ethnicity that’s at the core of my being. Being Armenian is a huge part of who I am, but it would be unfair to say that it is the one thing that completely effects all other areas of my life.

But what does effect and infects its tentacles into all parts of my being, is journalism. It has always been my core, the one thing that I remained certain about above all others, throughout adolescence and high school and college and ‘the real world.’

It makes me feel alive.

And so in an effort to finally unify this blog under one concept, put a soul behind the third most untrustworthy profession and use this truly as a comfortable space to not only express my ideas, and half-ideas, but to connect with others, I’m now The Human Journalist. I write, I bake, I dream about seeing my byline in the L.A. Times and NY Times, I love kitsch, awesomely bad movies that would make any film critic lose respect for me. I love Los Angeles, but I’m not afraid to say I hate it too. I want to write about the problems this sprawling landscape has, and meet some amazing people in the process. I want to craft words together for my stories as beautifully as my grandmother strings together the thinnest of yarns for the winter cardigans she makes.  I want journalists to be respected and acknowledged and not underpaid. I want to write feature stories that have the potential to make someone stop and think, “Huh. That was interesting.” I want to see all the hard work I put into an investigative story and say - I really made some kind of dent in the world.  I want to be able to make other people feel the way I feel when I read stories from my favorite writers.

I want to feel (virtually) alive. And I want to bake some amazing desserts to reward myself with.

So here I go. This is an experiment into the human side of a journalist - about her wants and dreams, about her likes and dislikes, some of which have nothing to do with journalism at all and about discovering herself on this torturous yet rewarding path that only a crazy person would purposefully choose.

This is place where I’ll probably do a lot of what I was doing before, but without any fear or anxiety - and for a writer, to write without either the former or the latter is complete and utter peace.

I am intrepid, see me write. And of course, welcome.

I like to bake. I guess that’s obvious if you’ve been reading for a while now, but it’s not necessarily because I love sweets (and don’t get me wrong, I do).

It is truly the best form of therapy, especially if you do late in the evening, watching The Nanny while trying to mix your batter and then subsequently fill the house with intoxicating baking smells at 2 a.m.

It’s glorious and I will tell you why.

Because you can go through the worst day in the world, a day that doesn’t make sense, a day that makes you cry, makes you wish you could dig your head in a hole because nothing is going right and people are annoying and you wish you could transport them all to a barren island so they can just revel in their annoying-ness and then hopefully die off and then you can come home, get together a few ingredients, mix them together and know at the end of the day, that if you follow the directions and put some love into it, you will have made something good, and that’s enough to make everything in the world seem better.

Honest.

That’s the same reason why I love to write, although I would compare journalism more to making macarons or boston cream pie than to your regular muffin.  It’s grueling, you’ll want to give up, but if you keep pushing on you realize that when it’s finished, you are beaming from ear to ear. And that’s the type of fire you need to have, whether you’re reporting or baking, or just even living really.

Creating new things to eat or read is all I need to melt away all the stress in my life. At least until it appears again, anyway.

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.” - William F. Buckley, Jr.

When I traveled to London, Dublin and Paris earlier this year, taking photos of people actually reading newspapers became sort of an obsession for me. As a young journalist who was thrust out of school a little over three years ago into a melting media market that bled jobs daily, life became uncertain and depressing and well, worrisome.

I felt as though the dreams I had been building upon since middle school of becoming a writer were falling through the cracks - and that I would never get them back. I never could be a Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, writing about worldly problems and changing the world in the process. I could never be a Ben Badikian, an editor at the Washington Post who came into possession of The Pentagon Papers. I would never be in that atmosphere. That excitement, that time.

I could never write for the Los Angeles Times or Atlantic Monthly or the dozen other publications which I cherished more than life itself.

And while now, I have resolved my fear and am more in the “I can” rather than the “I can’t” box, the possibility of not fulfilling my passions is still a frightening concept. I know I have what it takes to write for the L.A. Times and the NY Times and whatever else. I just know it. It’s the one thing in my life that I am completely, 100 percent sure of. When I get there, I don’t know. But I will get there.

In the meantime, I found comfort knowing that there were still people who actually read newspapers, even if it was overseas. There are papers everywhere you go in London. On the tube, in cafes, on the street - it’s really a reading culture, and as someone from Los Angeles which suffers more from a “tv culture,” it made me feel at home.

The world of media is changing right in front of our eyes and it’s amazing to be in the middle of this revolution. I am excited to see what the future holds for journalism, but for now, I revel in the fact that somewhere in the world, someone cares.

In the span of a week,  two articles that put the social networking phenomenon known as Twitter through the ringer decided to grace the pages of the New York Times. One of them, “Let Them Eat Tweets,” was written by none other than Virginia Heffernan herself, a woman, who only weeks before declared her virtual hatred for the iPhone.  The other, written by Ms. Snarky herself, columnist Maureen Dowd was titled “To Tweet or Not to Tweet.”

In these articles, both women not only profess their annoyance for a tool that is being used by millions of people around the world, they give Twitter a virtual gang beating, make it bleed to death and then leave it tossed on the side of the road.

“I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account,” wrote Maureen Dowd.

Twitter is connectivity for the poor, boasted Virginia Heffernan. Both came off sounding like elitist and obnoxious curmudgeons. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up the next day to a column from both of them that started with the phrase, “Back in my day…”

These recent tirades in the NYTimes against Twitter bring up fascinating observations about the newspaper industry and the people in it, mainly that that attitudes portrayed by the likes of Dowd and Heffernan are perhaps part of the reason why I wake up to media companies going bankrupt, institutional newspapers halting production and journalists being laid off a dime a dozen.

It is obvious that these curmudgeons still “don’t get it.” And by “it” I mean a variety of things, mainly that the newspaper industry is failing and needs to reexamine their models and strategies, that social media is valuable and that change is necessary and good.

Facing the facts is a necessary evil. Why not be proactive about the changes taking place in the industry, instead of writing a column about how much you hate this new internet phenomenon which does nothing to change public opinion, but instead really shows your true colors as a bitter, self-absorbed, dino-journalist who is resistant to change.

I mean, have you seen how many people have been laid off in the newspaper industry in  2009 alone? Have you? Do you need a refresher? That’s 8,484 and counting, in case you had forgotten. Meanwhile online publications and community journalism are soaring. It’s time to either step off your elitist pedestals, or join the game.

If you’re not interested, I say move over, and let an entire generation of passionate and ambitious journalists who understand social media and welcome change (myself included) take over, because obviously, someone is not doing something right.

Contrary to popular belief, I still pine to one day see my byline within the pages of the New York Times. I still believe  in the thrill of the chase for a story, in long hours poured over research just to satisfy my own craving that I have my facts straight. I still get a rush every time I interview someone for an article and I still believe that journalism can change the world. I want to change the world. And apparently, so do a lot of young people, as journalism programs, at least at USC and Columbia University, have seen a huge increase in applicants:

“It’s like an adrenaline rush. Every day is different. Every story is different,” said Annenberg student Adrianna Weingold, 24. When she added, “There are very few careers that let you get out in the world and talk to people and learn something new every day,” an old flame within me leaped anew. Really.”

Adrianna, I am so there with you.

I am still unclear as to why the two aformentioned journalists have such a strong disdain for such a simple and small thing as Twitter. What is there to not “get,” I wonder. Why would someone who has their feet planted in an ever changing industry be such a curmudgeon? More importantly, why WOULDN’T you want to connect to people, especially your readers. These columnists, I believe, have forgotten one very important rule, that journalism isn’t about them. Journalism is about the world, about people, about different experiences and events. It’s a huge pool of diversity that keeps growing. Why a columnist who has millions of people read her column every week would purposely refuse to take part in a dialogue with them is just beyond me.

But you know, whatever. You just keep hammering away at your columns,  and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, along with the journalists who “get it” all across the the U.S and beyond. In the wise words of The Borg from Star Trek, resistance is futile.

Before I graduated with a journalism degree almost two years ago, this little space of mine on the world wide web was just a place where I could share my thoughts, my likes and dislikes and the events which occurred on a daily basis. After I received my B.A, the thoughts I had about this blog began to change. I started to think more about what I was putting out there for the world to see. I began to worry about the topics I was discussing and the caliber of my writing. I thought up ways I could make this place better. I was rarely getting comments, so I might as well have just deleted everything I wrote and not look back. This was my thought process.

For a long time I didn’t write, or started to, but immediately erased my post, feeling self-conscious about everything I did here. I would look at websites like Dooce and try to figure out ways to achieve the same kind of popularity. Other times, I would consider converting my amalgam of posting topics into one niche idea that I would concentrate on, like journalism or food.

But the thing is, I’m not just about journalism or food, though they are perhaps my two biggest passions. I am about so many other things too. I slowly  began to realize that I could never fit into a niche. This is why this blog is called “writepudding.” Not only is it a play on “rice pudding,” but it allows me to write about whatever I like, just like a pudding allows you to put in so many different and versatile ingredients.

The same inner struggles I experience with this blog, are the same ones I have about my professional career as a writer. There are times when I am so overwhelmed. There are days when I dream about leaving the city and renting a log cabin in Wisconsin just so I can think and write and write and think - just so I can clear out my mind and come up with an amazing idea for a novel. Then, there’s every day of my life, when I drive by the Los Angeles Times building in downtown, on my way to Santa Monica, wishing and hoping that I will have the chance to work there some day and wishing and hoping that that day was already here.

One thing is for sure - to be in this profession, either a journalist or a writer, the only thing that keeps you going is passion - because it sure as hell isn’t the money, or the perks, or the praise or the hours, because they all suck. You have to constantly reinvent yourself, your ideas, your skills and underneath it all, if you don’t have a burning fiery passion for it, it will fizzle out sooner than you can say “I’ve had enough.”

I don’t think I will ever have enough.

After a bout of writer’s block and much thought, I’ve decided the best solution to cure the struggles with feeling insecure about my writing and trying to get published and explore other writing opportunities is quite simple: more writing. It’s sortof like that Pepto Bismol commercial where a girl calls a help center because her friend is having a cherry overload and the customer service rep says the solution is more cherry. Or maybe I watch too much television.

I made some pretty aggressive resolutions this year in terms of my writing and I’m glad I did because they motiviate me to pursue what I love further. It has now been 47 days since the new year began and I am doing my best to balance a freelance writing career with a full-tim job as an editor. Needless to say, it’s difficult. I have published a couple articles online, but nothing gives me more of a thrill than print or a publication that reaches and affects a large number of people in the U.S and abroad.

It has been almost two years that I have graduated school. In my dreams before I left school, I imagined myself as a reporter for a publication like LA Weekly, writing short stories on the side, developing ideas for a novel and inching towards my ultimate goal of writing for a national magazine and the New York Times.

Quite often, life does not work out the way you plan, especially when you’re still wrapped up in the protective cocoon known as school. While I am very thankful I have a job, especially one in the field I studied and have such passion for, I want more. I want to be the young reporter who breaks news stories, who affects people’s lives, who encounters amazing people and new experiences through the articles she writes. I want work long hours and work hard, if it means writing something I’m proud of, if it means writing something that others want to read.

Anyway, enough romanticizing on my soap box for today. I’m sticking to my resolutions. For now, I’ve compiled a list of publications that I’m going to pitch ideas to. Hopefully, one of them (or more I hope) will bite. In the meantime, I’ve made a lot of meaningful connections with writers, journalists, editors and PR people on the amazing phenomenon known as Twitter. I hope to grow and continue these relationships. I’m hopeful and looking forward to accomplishing the first in a series of goal I’ve set out for my life.

“If you believe that some day it’s going to happen, some day it probably will happen. You just have to make sure you’re there when it’s happening, and ideally you’re at the front of the parade, and the principle beneficiary of when it happens, but it’s not a kind of thing where you just sort of sit back and wait.”
- Steve Case

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it - Oscar Wilde

As any good writer or journalist was and probably still is, I am a lover of books. I have been from a small age, where I remember gobbling up the entire “Indian in the Cupboard” series and “Diary of Anne Frank” as fast as I could. I could read during anything, even when my mom was hell bent on vacuuming the entire house, and there was no room I could run to to escape the loud, unnecessary humming sound that came from the cleaning device. For some reason, I was really into Leon Uris novels, even though they were beyond my scope and probably, my understanding. Jewish history and the Holocaust fascinated me, most likely because I could relate to it, since I grew up knowing my own tainted history of the Armenian Genocide. I think the first book I remember reading was called “Rent a Third Grader” by B.B Hiller in, you guessed it, third grade. I brought it to school with me and my teacher became so intrigued, that I think she might have recommended it to other students or teachers.

It was the story of a class of third graders who try to raise money so they could save a retired police horse name Partner from going to HappiPet Food to meet his end, and it was amazing. After that, I remember delving into “The Babysitter’s Club” of course, as well as the “Nancy Drew” series which I absolutely loved, and Judy Blume books.

Over the last couple of years, my reading has sharply declined, because well, as you know, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans, as John Lennon once said. The books I was reading were mostly for school and I only managed to read a few for pleasure including “Back roads” by Tawni O’ Dell and “Lolita” by Nabokov. However, because of a humanities class I once took, I discovered my favorite book to date, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera. If you have a reading list, or you’re looking for a book to read, I cannot stress how wonderful this book is. It will leave you breathless.

In 2008, I wanted to change my reading habits, so I started three books but never managed to finish them, including “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. It wasn’t until I started reading the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer that I remembered how much I absolutely love and adore literature and reading, which is quite ironic, because they aren’t very well written and almost quite laughable, but when you have such an intriguing and amazing story as the one that Meyer created, it’s easy to let down your guard and be consumed by the tale. Four books about Bella and Edward’s vampire-human love tryst later, I am completely enamored with books yet again and I’ve stacked about 19 books I must finish this year, that you can find the titles of below.

1. Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
2. Slaughterhouse - Five - Kurt Vonnegut
3. Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom
4. Skylark Farm - Antonia Arslan
5. Fig Eater - Jody Shields
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
7. Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
9. The Hungry Years - William Leith
10. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
11. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Call of the Weird - Louis Theroux
13. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey
14. Immortality - Milan Kundera
15. Julie & Julia - Julie Powell
16. Beginner’s Greek - James Collins
17. The Nanny Diaries - Emma McLaughlin & Nicole Kraus
18. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
19. Difficult Loves - Italo Calvino

It’s not 2009 yet, but I’d like to take a moment here and highlight the roller coaster of a year I’ve been through, so that in a future entry, I can highlight the steady ground I’m hoping to be on. I thought about the best way of writing all of it down, and although I’d love to write a long-winded and perhaps boring to some essay on my 2008 adventures, I think a list is in order.

This year I…

-Spent the early hours of New Year’s Day at Disneyland, despite tickets being sold out. We managed to get in to the park because of the good graces of a stranger with extra tickets. That day will never be forgotten.

- Was hired as a full-time editor for a social media company

-Began doing freelance work as a journalist, which led me to write about some incredible and some not so incredible films, interview Ben Kingsley and a bunch of others and meet a lot of other great writers.

-Accidentally deleted this blog, which caused me to lose almost two years worth of entries

- Went to Montreal with my boyfriend, had great food, did great shopping and met Charles Aznavour

-Co-hosted an edible gardening internet radio show

- Saw Adele perform at The Roxy

-Took sessions with a personal trainer and enrolled at a new gym

-Watched my sister graduate high school and enroll at my alma mater

-Went through a luxating patella surgery with Henry and nursed him back to health for about five months

-Witnessed the incredible and miraculous election of 2008 and cried when Obama won

- Became a member of the Society of Professional Journalists

-Revisited the Magic Castle after my initial outing there to interview a magician

-Dyed my full head a single color for the first time ever

-Started to regularly attend the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market

-Wasted so many hours of my life sitting in the horrendous traffic of Los Angeles

-Made some amazing online friends through this blog

-Broke my camera, fixed it only to have it break again

-Tried to resist the phenomenon that is “Twilight,” but fell victim to the dazzling story of Edward and Bella, which marked my regression into adolescence.

-Worked my first red carpet, where I met Stan Lee, Frank Miller, Doug Jones, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Julie Benz

-Took my obsession with Bollywood to a whole other level by managing to watch at least one film almost every weekend for the better part of the year

-Went to work on developing a new online publication gear towards the Armenian community (still working)

-Found amazing online tools such as Twitter and StumbleUpon, which I now use daily

-Became progressively more obsessed with Anthropologie

-Prayed for snow that never came

-Didn’t spend enough time in bookstores

-Took the GRE, a rather painful experience that I will most likely repeat again sometime in the future

-Did a lot of baking and found some recipes I really loved

Esha Momeni, the California State University Northridge journalism graduate student, who was arrested and jailed in Iran’s Evin prison while in the country to work on her thesis, has been finally released. The release comes 25 days after Momeni’s initial capture, which I wrote about here.

Below is the message released on the official Facebook group, “Free Esha.”

Hello Everyone!!

ESHA HAS BEEN RELEASED!!!

We got the news this morning. We have no other details but are happy that she’s safe and back home with her parents.

We would like to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts for all the support, work and prayers. Every bit of your efforts made this happen.

The official blog for Momeni includes a list of 90 professors, educators and chairs of departments who have signed to expedite her release.

I will follow with more details once they come in…

Photo by socraticgrant

Daily newspapers have a long history of endorsing candidates for office, whether that may be for governor, or in this year’s case, for president. As the race winds down between Democratic hopeful Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain, Editor & Publisher has published an updated tally of print media outlets across the nation endorsing the candidates.

Overall, The Obama-Biden ticket has the lead with 121 newspapers total, with an over 13.5 million circulation. McCain and Palin have the endorsements of 42 newspapers, with a total circulation of 3.8 million. Here in California, Obama has won the support of 23 newspapers, including The Fresno Bee, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Daily News, The Modesto Bee, Pasadena Star-News, San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. John McCain has the support of five newspaper in California, including the San Francisco Examiner (seriously?) and San Diego Union-Tribune

Interestingly enough, the three top circulated newspapers in the country, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have not endorsed anyone. Peculiar…very peculiar. I don’t particularly read USA Today or The Wall Street Journal, but as you might have guessed from reading this little blog I keep, that I am a New York Times nut. In the case of the NY Times, it’s a bit strange they haven’t endorsed anyone, particularly because the commentary in the paper is more or less a dead give away that they support Barack Obama and because in 2004’s election, they publicly endorsed Democratic nominee John Kerry. And don’t forget that they came out in support of Hillary Clinton during this year’s primaries as well.
Barack Obama’s official site does have a list of newspapers that have endorsed his bid for the presidency, and also some excerpts that are very eloquent and so well written, that I would like to highlight just two of them here.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Times without hesitation endorses Barack Obama for president. But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama’s character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity…In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be.

From the Boston Globe:

The nation needs a chief executive who has the temperament and the nerves to shepherd Americans through what promises to be a grueling period - and who has the vision to restore this country to its place of leadership in the world. Such a leader is at hand. With great enthusiasm, the Globe endorses Senator Barack Obama for president. The charismatic Democrat from Illinois has the ability to channel Americans’ hopes and rally the public together, at a time when the winds are picking up and the clouds keep on darkening…An early Obama campaign slogan declared, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” His critics deemed such rhetoric too ethereal. Now it seems prescient, as the nation confronts a financial crisis of historic proportions, as well as all the other policy failures and debt-fueled excesses of the last eight years. The United States has to dig itself out. Barack Obama is the one to lead the way.

It’s interesting that newspapers feel the need or desire to endorse potential presidential candidates. In a profession where objectivity rules overs subjectivity and fair and balanced is the ultimate goal (Sorry Fox News, you fail at your own motto), should newspapers endorse candidates? Is it there place to do such a thing? Or are they meant to provide you a service of news without injecting opinions in it? What is accomplished by endorsements? Are people really swayed by their respective newspaper’s decision to endorse a candidate?

These are important questions to be asking. My particular feeling about the matter is divided. I love seeing the publications I read take a stance on issues, at the same time, I feel that remaining neutral is completely respectable and credible. One thing I can tell you, is that even though it’s not Nov. 4 yet, history has already been made in so many ways. As far as newspapers are concerned, it is interesting to note that that the Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama, the first time the paper has endorsed a Democrat for president. In another move of epic proportions, the Los Angeles Times’ endorsement of Obama marks the first time the paper has endorsed anyone for president since 1972. Even Esquire magazine has gotten in the game and endorsed Obama!

Two more weeks. Just two more weeks.