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I just noticed that the RealTalk LA website has gone up with a mix of stories, brief items, holders and dead links. The blogs I can see are called Schlock Angeles — "devoted to studying the most interesting and unusual schlock that has come from Los Angeles" — and Cuchilla Takes on Coachella. There's no obvious click to see a staff list or masthead, and you have to create an account and log in just to use the "contact us" feature. (Not going to happen.) There's also a note from founder Jay Levin, long-ago co-founder of the LA Weekly, that also runs in the premiere issue of the print magazine:
Since selling the Weekly in 1995, I’ve investigated the remarkable diversity of LA even more comprehensively.While the Weekly followed the successful model of “alternative” city weekly newspapers around the country that provided meaningful alternatives to mainstream daily newspapers, I am founding RealTALK LA and reaktalkLA.com with a substantially different mission: to unmask an LA most of us don’t know about and to do so for an audience whose needs are largely neglected by existing media.
Our LA society and region have evolved into an extraordinarily dynamic creature that is under the radar of traditional media. The region is multileveled, intricately subcultured and infinitely textured. It extends far beyond the grasp of marketers and social analysts—and yes, it is more complex and diverse than even poets and novelists have captured.
RealTALK LA is about revealing the exceptional range of mindsets and the felt lives and activities of the real LA’s residents. Our goal is to unveil the personalities and societal richness of the region in a manner meant to delight, inform and inspire, and to be utterly can’t-live-without useful.
In essence, we’re determined to re-invent the regional magazine and website to make them about—and relevant to—the people who inhabit this community and who are driving its 21st century reality and creativity. LA’s “mindscapes” and its “peoplescape” constitute our editorial landscape.
Also: Life & Times on KCET features RealTalk tonight at 7 pm.