Final Exam

It's been a year now since Matt Welch and Ken Layne turned off the late, lamented L.A. Examiner. Yet the site still attracts an average of 74 hits a day -- dramatically down, of course, from the thousands it attracted as an active blog. But not bad for a website that's been dormant for a year.

LA Examiner was one of the first blogs I stumbled across, and inspired me to grab Maria and start a site of our own. The scrappy blog tweaked the L.A. Times, served as a sounding board for local journalists and simply had a lot of fun. But site lost some steam by spring 2003, when it ceded much of its local media coverage to Kevin Roderick's LA Observed.

And then it just sort of stopped publishing all together one day last July, with nary an explanation.

Only recently was the empty page replaced with a boilerplate, jokingly blaming the demise on Layne, who "left Los Angeles for parts unknown." (Apparently some wild land known as "Americana").

The LAExaminer.com site now directs readers to the original site, launched in 2001; last June's brief revamp; and the prototype for the never-launched Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, which Layne and Welch developed (back when Dick Riordan was briefly flirting with the idea of becoming a newspaper tycoon).

What a difference a year makes. LA is now crawling with cityblogs, including newbies Defamer and LAist, in addition to all the others listed to the right in our new "los angeles blogs" list o' links. A tip o' the hat to LAExaminer.com for being one of the pioneers.