Meredith Vieira's trip to L.A. *

She actually calls it La-La Land on her Today Show blog. Later, the host fills in fans on a trip to Universal Studios and guest shots on Jay Leno and Ellen Degeneres' show. This morning, though, Today aired Vieira's main reason for coming out here — a five-minute piece on the children of Skid Row. "It's an incredible sight," she told the nation today. "I don't know what the answer is, but I know there is an answer." Video

She blogs about the reporting:

I’m back in New York and it’s great to be home. I now have a renewed appreciation of what it means to have a home, after having met 15-year-old Franklin and his 17-year-old sister Ancara—two kids living on Skid Row in Los Angeles.

After reading about Franklin and the documentary he’d made about homeless children, I wanted to meet him. But I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of what I would encounter on that trip to south central LA. On literally street after street, hundreds of homeless people were walking, but with no real place to go. Others sat on the sidewalk with their belongings in a shopping cart. Some talked to themselves. Some screamed out obscenities. Some slept. It felt like every few minutes another police car would pull up and officers would don rubber gloves and search someone for drugs. And in the midst of it all, these two amazing teenagers....

When I stood on those streets I was overwhelmed. How do you solve a problem that is so complex? Some people are here because they have no other choice. Some are here because they’re drug addicts. Others, often with mental illness, were "dumped" here so they could be someone else’s problem. And then there are the children who are born here, and know no other world.

I finally asked Ancara, "What is the answer to this?" She said "I don’t know what the answer is, but I know there is one." Franklin and Ancara are doing their part to find an answer. But I wondered, ‘‘Are we?"

A little geographic mix-up: she placed Skid Row in South-Central Los Angeles.

* Noted: Here's an LA Weekly piece from last year by Sam Slovick that may have inspired Today's producers.

Photo: Screen grab