After a 13-year run, The Los Angeles Times is shutting its national edition next week, officials said yesterday.
The separate national edition has been an endangered species for years, kept alive as a way to give the newspaper's reporting a physical presence in Washington and New York.
But the edition was costly and the paper's owner, the Tribune Company, had been planning to shut it earlier this year. Instead, the company gave it a temporary reprieve, scaling it down in March from a four-section color broadsheet to a 24-page format measuring 11 inches by 19 inches, with no paid advertising.
It was sent by facsimile to about 1,500 people in Washington and a few hundred in New York, mostly free.
But now, even that version will end, with officials saying yesterday that the national edition would cease publication Dec. 22. Officials said the loss would not be so great because the paper was widely read online.
"We've learned over the past year that most of our East Coast audience reads us on the Web," said David Garcia, a spokesman for The Los Angeles Times. He said the paper was planning to enhance its Web site, www.latimes.com, "to highlight our Washington coverage, which we believe is the best in the country."
The Times has begun an extensive cost-cutting program, most recently eliminating 85 jobs in the newsroom. Executives said that if the national edition, which was compiled by two employees, were to continue, two other people in the newsroom would have to lose their jobs; management decided to eliminate the national edition to save those two jobs, executives said.
John Arthur, assistant managing editor, said that with so many readers going to newspaper Web sites, including that of The Los Angeles Times, the paper would not be losing much by giving up the national edition.
"A lot of people go to the Web site for this stuff anyway," he said.
The Los Angeles Times will still be available to readers all over the world, not only from the Web site but on paper through NewspaperDirect, which sends editions electronically to distributors who can download, print and deliver them to places like hotels.
NewspaperDirect makes scores of newspapers available in dozens of countries that way. The version it prints is more or less identical to the one that appears in Los Angeles and offers local as well as national and international news.
