OLD Media Moves

LA Times real estate blog folds

November 19, 2009

Jonathan Lansner, the real estate columnist and blogger at the Orange County Register, points out that the Los Angeles Times has folded its real estate blog, LA Land, into another blog.

Lansner writes, “It’s a victim,so to speak, of a consolidation strategy where most business content will appear in one giant financial blog. LA Land’s last post reads …

LA Land has moved to a bigger, brighter, newer home. You can now find it in our Money & Company blog. You will still be able to find all the real estate news, foreclosures, and Hot Property pieces, but now in our uber-business blog.

  • Says my old pal, Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times …

We aren’t killing it, we’re merging with other business-related blogs. It’s a strategy that we have had a great deal of success with, gang blogging (see LA Now, Fabulous Forum or Hero Complex, named best blog at Online News Association this year). Three years ago, with a bunch of single-author blogs, only 4% of our site traffic came from our blogosphere. Today, it’s 20%.

  • One comment on the final LA Land post seemed most special:

I’ll miss you LALand. You were a great blog and I’ll definitely miss the musings of Pete, Pete, Lauren, Beef, Nelciso,Cal, and even Lefty. It is funny how, just like real folks during the recession, LALand is going to be bunking with friends (Petruno) to cut costs. Farewell.

The latest Los Angeles Times blog to fade away is L.A. Land, which never seemed to quite recover its mojo from last year’s departure of originator Peter Viles. When real estate reporter Peter Hong left the paper last month on a buyout, the blog became less necessary. Now what’s left of the real estate news and observations has been folded into Money and Company, the main blog produced by the paper’s business writers. … Back in April, based on these stats, L.A. Land was doing way better than most Times blogs.

Read more here.

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