It's official — the L.A. Times' ill-conceived experiment with charging a fee to read stories about film, music art, culture, style, and books ends at 5 a.m. Tuesday. No word on how much readership and good will it cost the paper, or on how many subscribers actually took the plunge. Starting tomorrow, LATimes.com will also get a new look. Today's memo from LATimes.com general manager Rob Barrett makes official what LAO reported on April 24:

TO: Times Employees
FROM: Rob Barrett, General Manager, latimes.com
SUBJECT: Latimes.com Debuts New Look

On Tuesday, latimes.com will debut a new look, new services and added utility as the first step of a yearlong initiative to improve and expand the website and make it a more powerful complement to the paper. Along with these changes, The Times will reintroduce free access to calendarlive.com.

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, which is lighter and loads faster on PCs, is also a one-stop online guide to all Los Angeles Times news, features and classifieds sections and content.

These initial changes will be effective at 5 a.m. PDT tomorrow. They are intended to make latimes.com a daily stop in the lives of Southern Californians while exposing calendarlive.com's extensive offerings tothe broadest audience possible. 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.

More information about these and other changes planned for latimes.com are contained in a news release that will be issued Tuesday morning and posted on TimesLink . We invite you to visit the site to check out the improvements, and we'll keep you posted about other significant enhancements as they are implemented.

ROB BARRETT

4:53 PM Monday, May 9 2005 • Link
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