The Reinvented Los Angeles Times Focuses In On L.A.'s 300 Neighborhoods

By: Alissa Walker | Gizmodo

Los Angeles is a big place—400 square miles, 88 separate cities—and it's rare that what constitutes news in one corner even applies to another. For the first time in its history, the Los Angeles Times is recognizing this fact with an ambitious redesign that allows readers to zero in on what's happening down the street.

Launching as part of a May 6 rollout that starts late tonight is Neighborhoods, a new feature that pulls hyperlocal, geocoded news for almost 300 neighborhoods around the city. Using the mapping data from the LA Times Mapping L.A. project, which combined city data and user input to draw definitive boundaries for every neighborhood, each of the paper's stories are geo-tagged to a particular location within those neighborhoods. Each neighborhood then gets its own "front page" with all the news across the site that's relevant to that area. (Also included are those 88 cities within the city, like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, as their own "neighborhoods.")