Yo, in a minute with Evan Lovett, you know where I am.

The I am studios in the heart of Los Angeles.

And this another episode brought to you by the good folks at Surrido's Auto Square.

Extra, extra, read all about it.

Not so fast, readers of the LA Times, which was gutted this week.

They laid off 20% of their staff, over 100 people.

And this was the single largest newsroom purge in the history, the

143 year history of the LA Times, a civic institution in Los Angeles.

Now some people say good riddance, they certainly did on Twitter.

Others will shed tears.

One of them may have been me.

But one thing is certain, Los Angeles grew significantly, along with, and

because of the LA Times. It was once a fiercely conservative newspaper run by Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler as they used it as a tool to build the city and to drive public opinion.

But gradually the pendulum swung another direction.

As the city evolved, the people changed, and the landscape of news media shifted dramatically.

And the LA Times didn't change along with it.

I was a reporter there in 1999 2000. I saw firsthand how difficult they found it to embrace quote unquote new media.

And I'm going to get into this because they've been playing catch up ever since.

So after a quarter century of half-hardly trying to

put a band-aid on their website in e-newspaper, there have been new directions,

misdirections, redirections in the newsroom. and the LA Times is it a self-inflicted crossroads.

Now I've been here with the paper I'm an LA Times cheerleader on record for years for life.

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