LA Times to Discontinue Premium calendarlive Service to Both Subscribers

Tomorrow morning the LA Times will phase out a $4.95 monthly subscription to it’s calendarlive section, offering “unlimited access to the most powerful local arts and entertainment search engine in Southern California - don’t just find movie show times, find restaurants near that theater.”

It only took two years for the Times to learn that people won’t pay for widely-available free content. Along with this strategy shift, online Times users will be regaled with a new home page, “which is lighter and loads faster on PCs.” Mac users, looks like your SOL.

The full memo from latimes.com GM Rob Barrett to Times Employees posted below courtesy of paidcontent.org.

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.