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Both the L.A. Business Journal and LA Weekly are getting ready to unveil newsier websites. In the new issue, the Journal announces that over the next two weeks it will phase in a new look at labusinessjournal.com. There will be daily business news, stock info and "other content" yet to be specified. Separately, the paper reports that LA Weekly is looking for a managing editor to oversee a daily web edition that editor Laurie Ochoa hopes to launch early in 2005. She conceives a site with breaking news, weekend updates, staff-written blogs and discussion forums. Ochoa told the LABJ that blogs by Marc Cooper and Joshua Bearman and breaking news posted online first by Nikki Finke have increased traffic to the Weekly's website.
Meanwhile, the Weekly has also announced a senior-level promotion that sounds at first glance like a blurring of lines between editorial and advertising. But it could be that I don't understand the reporting lines at the Weekly. Anyway, the release says that creative director John Curry, who has been in charge of editorial design, is adding "responsibility for the creative direction of the business side of the paper....Moving forward, the design team will work on a variety of projects across the paper both for editorial and marketing/advertising." Curry will report to Ochoa on editorial matters and publisher Beth Sestanovich on other matters.
And: The LABJ also reports that the Daily Breeze will stop printing the paper in-house and will contract with Southwest Offset Printing in Gardena. The move, which will cost about 87 jobs at the Breeze, was prompted by the New York Times shifting its local print run from the Breeze to Southwest. Some of the laid-off Breeze printers will get jobs at Southwest. (The Breeze reported on this Dec. 8. The story has moved into the paper's fee-for-access archives, but the cached version is still on Google.)