LATimes.com to Redesign, Calendarlive Going Back To Free

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LA Times’ two year experiment with a premium section is coming to an end: after much speculation, its Calendarlive site is going back to being open, ad-supported, according to an internal memo obtained by paidContent.org.(Back when it debuted, I had doubts on whether it would work…see this OJR story)

Also, the main LATimes.com page will be redesigned, with “wider, cleaner home page that includes “Pacific Time,” a prominent home for Times stories that take the pulse of Southern California”, according to the memo.

Full memo in extended post…

Related:

LAT’s CalendarLive Goes Paid

L.A. Times Hoping Time Is Right in Move to Monetize Niche Content

LAT’s CalenderLive Leading To Defections?


FULL MEMO:

TO: Times Employees

FROM: Rob Barrett, General Manager, latimes.com

SUBJECT: Latimes.com Debuts New Look

On Tuesday, latimes.com will debut a new look, new services and added utility as the first step of a yearlong initiative to improve and expand the website and make it a more powerful complement to the paper. Along with these changes, The Times will reintroduce free access to calendarlive.com.

Visitors to latimes.com will now find a wider, cleaner home page that includes “Pacific Time,” a prominent home for Times stories that take the pulse of Southern California. The home page, which is lighter and loads faster on PCs, is also a one-stop online guide to all Los Angeles Times news, features and classifieds sections and content.

These initial changes will be effective at 5 a.m. PDT tomorrow. They are intended to make latimes.com a daily stop in the lives of Southern Californians while exposing calendarlive.com’s extensive offerings to the broadest audience possible. With more than 2,000 searchable events at any given time, and featuring The Times’ top critics and reviewers, calendarlive.com has the Internet’s most comprehensive listings for theater, music, dance, opera, art museums and galleries and family events in Southern California.

More information about these and other changes planned for latimes.com are contained in a news release that will be issued Tuesday morning and posted on TimesLink. We invite you to visit the site to check out the improvements, and we’ll keep you posted about other significant enhancements as they are implemented.

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