Notice Something New in With Your Sunday Times?

The Sunday LA Times has a new addition--well, an old addition reinvented, sort of. It's LA, the new Los Angeles Times Magazine, but it's only available in print.

In the age of the internets, a print-only publication (parented by a print publication that has had to face the age of the internets and--stop the presses!--do something about it) is a risky enterprise. Eating L.A.'s Pat Saperstein reviews the new mag on her blog today, and notes the odd and somewhat mutually exclusive relationship between the Times online and the Times on your doorstep: "Does it seem odd that not only is there no mention of the new advertising department-directed LA, Los Angeles Times Magazine on Latimes.com, but no mention of a website inside the magazine either?" Compounding the confusion is the fact that the old mag's website is still up and running, albeit with stale content: "There doesn't even appear to be a new web address associated with the magazine, not that it's easy searching for something called 'LA.'"

So what's between the newly minted sheets of the new LA? According to Saperstein there are some food stories that are "trite" and "tiresome" and a recipe for uni spaghetti (now that will have us running to the newsstands!). And the rest:

Too many first-person, not incredibly well-written stories, including:
The feature about the TV writer who had a stroke -- really depressing.
The story by the former foster child-turned-lawyer -- seems like really old news.
and, hello? Q & A with Michelle Obama? Seems like you might want to mention that somewhere, like on the cover? Or in the frigging TABLE OF CONTENTS? No? Guess not.

Bottom line, it's just another place for advertising. Of course, with fewer and fewer people getting the paper in print and preferring to pick up news and features online, the joke's on the advertisers (and the Times) if no one really reads it.

Photo by debaird via Flickr