Los Angeles Times Begins Year-Long Web Overhaul

My hometown paper finally comes to its senses:

L.A. Times Launches First Stage of Yearlong Web Redesign

The Los Angeles Times today launched the first stage of a year-long initiative to improve and expand the newspaper’s Internet offerings, with a special emphasis on utility for Southern Californians.

As part of this effort, The Times also today reintroduced free access to calendarlive.com. With more than 2,000 searchable events at any given time, and featuring The Times’ top critics and reviewers, calendarlive.com has the Internet’s most comprehensive listings for theater, music, dance, opera, art museums and galleries and family events in Southern California.

The year-long initiative will include continuous improvements to latimes.com and calendarlive.com. For instance, visitors to latimes.com will now find a wider, cleaner home page that includes “Pacific Time,” a prominent home for Times stories that take the pulse of Southern California. The home page is also a one-stop online guide to all Los Angeles Times news, features and classifieds sections and content.

I could care less about “Pacific Time,” but I welcome the return of free access to calendarlive.com. When the LAT began to require subscriptions some time ago, I gave up on Kenneth Turan and the other in-house movie critics and relied more heavily on AO Scott and the NYT stable (later on, of course, Manohla Dargis switched coasts). I’ll start reading the LAT reviews again, though it’ll take time to renew the habit.

On a more blog-related note, there’s no word yet on whether the overhaul will include RSS. That’s an absolute necessity in this day and age, if you ask me. Permanent links would be nice, too.

(Via Virginia Postrel.)

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Robert Garcia Tagorda
About Robert Garcia Tagorda
Robert blogged prolifically at OTB from November 2004 to August 2005, when career demands took him in a different direction. He graduated summa cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and earned his Master in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.