Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

new times

Looks like it’s been a busy week for the folks at Los Angeles Times Interactive: The online arm of the L.A. Times launched a redesign of latimes.com (screenshot) and entertainment guide CalendarLive (screenshot) and removed the paid subscription barrier for CalendarLive.

• latimes.com: “L.A. Times Launches First Stage of Yearlong Web Redesign” (05/10/05)
• Editor and Publisher: “‘L.A. Times’ Sets Calendarlive.com Free” (05/10/05)

The new latimes.com home page seems a bit stark to me. They’ve widened it out and seem to offer more content above the fold, but the result is that I’m not really sure where I’m supposed to look first. I do like the tabbed widget for entertainment-related content in theory, although, in execution, the widget doesn’t feel like a cohesive “unit.”

I think the CalendarLive redesign — particularly the section pages — do a much better job than the latimes.com home page of packaging content. However I find it distracting that the lead story is all the way over to the right of the page, out of line with the other top stories, while what I would normally think of as the “lead story” slot is occupied by a (albeit nicely designed) set of search forms. It’s an interesting choice to prioritize function and search over story content.

And I’m actually somewhat cheered to hear about the pay barrier dropping at CalendarLive. (Note, the site still requires user registration; it just doesn’t require users to pay for access anymore.) I was skeptical of how well it would do when the barrier first went up in mid-2003. In such an entertainment- and media-rich market as Los Angeles, I wonder if the paid barrier actually put the Times at a disadvantage versus other free local entertainment news outlets. Granted, I’m not in the Times’s target market, but for me, the paid wall led me to stop going to the site altogether, even for coverage of big news and events in the Times’s backyard, like the Oscars. If I can find similar info through other outlets, why bother dealing with the hassle of paying for it?