I’m a big fan of your website. I just wanted to add my two cents worth to the ongoing bashing of the LA Times that I see there and everywhere else. I’m in my mid 30s and a serious newspaper lover — been reading them since I was a little boy. I’ve also had the pleasure of living in the northeast, the Midwest, England, France, New Orleans and for the last ten years, Los Angeles. I read the full gamut of papers available in all those places. And I have to tell you, the Los Angeles Times is a fine newspaper — better than Le Monde, the Times of London, the Guardian and the New York Times. Is it perfect? No, of course not. And it was better a few years ago when they had Tom Plate and Howard Rosenberg.

Certainly, the website is annoying. But compared to the New York Times, it is much less stuffy (ie, they have comics) and frankly just as good in terms of its journalistic content. Read the LA Times everyday and you’ll get a very good sense of the diversity of L.A. and the challenges of living here for both the haves and have-nots. A writer commented that he doesn’t know many people in his circle who read the L.A. Times…that’s too bad — they probably have no idea of the problems at Drew-King, which directly or indirectly affect them. They probably are also ignorant of the housing crunch affecting working class Latinos. They are missing out on the political analysis of Ron Brownstein, the media analysis by Tim Rutten, the always interesting articles on religion that appear every Saturday and their great science articles.

An LA Times fan,
Paul Herzog