It’s so sad. Everything I love about The Times is slowly going away. It’s like a family member with a prolonged illness. Eventually you just want their pain to be over and death seems a blessing.

The Book Review is always the first thing I read on Sundays. That ritualistic joy is something I share with book lovers throughout LA. And there are hundreds/thousands of us. Even when it wasn’t the best product it was still ours – we are loyal. I know because we gather, we talk, we fuss, we moan, we compare...

Again it is an LA Times connection with the community that has been important. What is it that they don’t get about how to connect with us? A fold in the Saturday paper along with Current will kill that connection..

Maybe it’s that blessing of finality – at least for me. What a tragedy.

Chris Strudwick-Turner
(Strudwick-Turner is Vice President, Marketing and Communications for the Los Angeles Urban League. She is writing as an individual and former public affairs director at the Times.)

 Ariel Capital's Charles Bobrinskoy, who thinks the LA Times ought to forego its role as a reporter of foreign news and concentrate on local stuff, must have a smile from ear to ear, assuming he saw the front page of Sunday's LA Times (3/4/07). Only four stories on page A1 and not a "news" story among them. Instead, Times readers were treated to a Bobrinskoy-style feature on the entertainment industry in Hollywood, a Bobrinskoy story on a local LA community (Harbor Gateway), and two features dealing with food and drugs. Only the last one, about Central America, might have raised the financier's eyebrows. He would have preferred an emphasis on drug running in Southern California. No war in Iraq, no threat from Iran, no worry about North Korea... not even a word about Walter Reed. Someone surely was listening to "Frontline" the other night and decided to give Bobrinskoy's idea of how to run a newspaper a try.

Ralph Shaffer
Professor Emeritus, Cal Poly Pomona
(Sent to LAT as letter to the editor)