LAT cuts back weather map, comics

In a move to save space, the Los Angeles Times weather page dropped 43 international cities, 16 U.S. cities and four California locales — Blythe, Mt. Wilson, Rialto and Santa Rosa. The goal was to reduce the newsprint devoted to weather to a half-page each day. From the note:

[In California] the four places that ended up being cut from the page completely...were either small in population or close enough to listed cities that the weather information was essentially the same. Editors kept representative locations where temperature or precipitation extremes are often noted in news stories (Woodland Hills, Barstow, Big Bear Lake, etc.)

To decide which national cities to keep, editors checked a graphic from 2007 that showed U.S. regions from which California residents have moved or where Californians’ family members are most likely to have relocated....Tthe list tends to skew a bit toward the West and Northeast, with fewer cities from the Southeast and Upper Midwest.

To choose international cities, editors used census data showing the native countries of SoCal residents, and they tried to retain locations with large local immigrant populations. (That’s one reason a larger percentage of Asian cities than Canadian cities remain.)

The Sunday comics pages were also cut to six from eight, with a redesign squeezing in all but two strips deemed expendable: ‘Undertown’ and ‘Stone Soup.’