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Today's Los Angeles Times sports section, once a cash cow for the paper, carries a grand total of three tiny ads. That's 11 column inches of advertising across eight pages, or about a 1% ad ratio. Two of the ads are by the same golf outfit. No wonder Sports was hit so hard by this week's layoffs. Hard to see the lack of ads as anything but an utter failure to adjust by the ad department and publisher. Speculation in the newsroom is that the Sports and Business sections may eventually be folded into one section, as they were during parts of the 1960s. For comparison: today's Daily News sports section has six ads totaling 52 column inches, including a pair of those adult business ads that Sam Zell loves so much.
Also: Larry Stewart, who covered horse racing, confirmed on KPCC this morning that he was laid off. Stewart was better known for his columns on sports media that ran for decades in the Times, and before that in the Herald Examiner. He moved to the horse racing beat last year, but that beat is largely being dropped by the Times. Audio