I’ve developed something of a love like/hate relationship with the Los Angeles Times (LAT) over the past decade. I love like the LAT as a news source, but I hate the LAT as a physical product.
It’s been a long downhill slide for the physical edition of the Times since they scrapped the tabloid format Calendar section, then split that section into multiple parts. That change worked out so well they decided to make the same mistake with the Comics. If you’ve ever spent a Sunday afternoon searching for the Business section buried deep in the bowels of the auto classifieds, then you know just how bad the LAT reading experience can be. It’s like a fracking scavenger hunt.
Apparently the LAT unveiled a new design earlier this week. To which I can only say, so what? Each iteration of the paper’s physical design seems to make the news reading experience just a bit worse. Even if this new version of the Times is a huge improvement, it’s still too little too late. The days when I’ll buy a print edition of the LAT are long gone.
Walking out to the curb to pick up a soggy bundle of yesterday’s news seems like an antiquated concept. And yet, that’s exactly what I had been doing until very recently. The sad truth is that my LAT subscription remained active until just a few months ago.
I used two bookmarks when I read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: one for where I was in the story proper, and one for where I was in the footnotes, which, as everybody who’s ever read it knows, were massive, and often chapter-sized in and of themselves.
In case you haven’t seen it, the next Rolling Stone magazine has the girls from MTV’s The Hills on the cover.