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Online city guide LA.com formally launches this week, two years after Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group bought the domain name from Las Vegas Internet entrepreneurs. The L.A. Business Journal says the site will sell keywords on its search engine and put together various packages to attract advertisers, but already American Express is running ads. The story by RiShawn Biddle calls LA.com a successor to LAInsider.com, an earlier unsuccessful corporate attempt to create a profitable Los Angeles portal.
Yes, LA.com and its blog LA.comfidential have been up for awhile, but in shakedown mode. President Lynda Keeler and editor Laurie Pike (both pictured with the story) have been refining the content and design. (Still a ways to go: the left side of the pages are not fully visible using the latest Mozilla for Windows or Netscape 7 at 800x600 pixels. And the blog mistakenly says the original Border Grill is in Santa Monica. Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger first opened BG on Melrose, in the same tiny space where their City Cafe started. As the BG website says.) The launch party is at the former Perino's on Wilshire.
*Update: A multi-million dollar marketing campaign during March accompanies Monday's launch, the Denver Post (a MediaNews property) reports.
Also in the LABJ: The Daily News (also Singleton's) begins to offer home delivery in most of Los Angeles, instead of just in the Valley, thanks to a shift by the New York Times. Last year, the NYT switched local distributors (it is now delivered here by the L.A. Times), and former distributor PCF approached the Daily News hoping to make up the lost business.