News of the blogs

L.A. Now has gone live on LA Times.com, with posts on the news and the region from the recently hired Veronique de Turenne (yes, that one) and veteran Times staff writer Jesus Sanchez.

Also: All 120 blogs (!) from the Daily News and its sister papers are being redesigned to give them a standard look, feel and typeface. The following leaked memo from the head of interactive at the Los Angeles News Group recommends some blogs be carried by all papers in the family — and omits mention of others.

We have 120 active blogs on our sites right now (not counting test blogs or blogs that are used to create NGPS feeds). Of those, there are 16 blogs that directly relate to beats that are covered on a LANG-wide basis, and should be included on all sites. If your site does not include these blogs, please add them, to both your main feeds and any list of blogs you have.

Those blogs are: 100 Percent Soccer, Clippers, Halo Happenings, Hollywood Babble On, Inside the Dodgers, Inside the Kings, Inside UCLA, Lakers, On the Red Carpet, Postcards from Eric Noland, Quackalackin', Scott Wolf inside USC, Talking USC Basketball with Matthew Kredell, The Mayor of Television, The Reel Deal, Steve Dilbeck at the Super Bowl.

On top of that, there are 15 blogs that don't directly correspond to LANG-wide beats but are clearly of interest LANG-wide. You should strongly consider using these blogs:

Farther Off the Wall, Hollywood Joe, In the Ring, A View from the Tower (NHRA), Anime: The Underside of Reality, Drive Time, Haddock in the Paddock, Hockeywood Tonight, Horse Play, Idol Chatter, In the Rough, Savvy Skier, the Start Button, Vinyl Word, Who Are You Wearing.

Finally, there are 6 blogs that you should all know about, and you may want to run on your site - but it might not fit for you geographically: Out in Hollywood, Friendly Fire, LA Outdoors, LA Mama, the City in Curtains, Sausage Factory.

[Internal references snipped]

Over the next few weeks, we will redesign all of the blogs to put them on a standard three-column template, to ensure that all blogs have omniture code, ad tags, a basic look and feel and the same typeface. We'll likely do it one paper at a time, and while we're working on your paper, I'll work closely with you to make sure that we don't lose the blog-specific information - sidebars, bios, color schemes, etc. I'm still waiting on a plugin from Indigio to begin this process, but there are indications we'll have it soon.

thanks, Josh

--
Josh Kleinbaum
Managing Editor of Interactive
Los Angeles Newspaper Group