Amid new talk of layoffs, blogs are hot at the Times

A sudden flurry of high-level meetings and grim faces this week at the Los Angeles Times has people in the newsroom on edge again. There's been a long quiet period since the last big staff cuts, but the bankruptcy proceedings are moving toward an end, Tribune reorganized this week to treat the Times separately from the chain's other papers, and if a highly speculative Wall Street Journal story is to be believed, the Times is on the market. Any of that could trigger new budget cutbacks — many staffers have assumed they're coming, it was just a matter of when — and so could plain old bad financial news. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, the LAT's flakkery blog posted a memo from online editor Jimmy Orr saying that visitation to LATimes.com is up substantially and that a bunch of the paper's blogs set new traffic records last month. Thirteen blogs registered over a million page views in June. Orr credits more aggressive freshening, better packaging and improved playing to the search engines by the Times' bloggers.

The paper's most-visited blogs, according to Orr, are listed below: