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Thursdays are worse than Mondays

By Ophelia Chong
February 5, 2009
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homicide

Just when you thought it was safe to go out and get cigarettes, the Los Angeles Times now has the Homicide Map online for your viewing, and Thursdays is the chart topper as the day with the most homicides in Los Angeles.

Its murder via Google Maps courtesy of the Los Angeles Times. A quick perusal of the statistics on the page gives you an idea of where and who has the best odds of an untimely death in Los Angeles. Guns are the top weapon of choice with "other" coming in a far second. "Other" must be whatever was handy at the moment.

The macabre aside, the User Interface is very well designed, you can search by area code, date and name. For research purposes this site is stellar. Where the print version of the Los Angeles Times is lacking, the web side is coming up fast to cover what is missing. Where you might not pick up the newspaper, you would certainly peruse the online version for all the information you will ever need about Los Angeles.

Going into the Southern California/ Local section of the site, and then into the Blogs, I would like to see more imagery to highlight the assortment of Blogs, the front pages have had the benefit of the first round of design focus, now time to move further to the back; right now it looks like a very dry list of "to-dos". With the return of the Homicide Report, I am looking forward to seeing what else the LAT has in store for us, appealing to our tendencies to "rubberneck", might be the first step in attracting a larger online audience and making the newspaper more relevant.

Image: Ophelia Chong / General William J. Bradley & the Sad Sad donut.

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