The irony is too delicious: The L.A. Times, owned by an Illinois-based corporation and led by a man with little feel for newspapers or this state, is about to fold its storied California section into the front of its book. (Okay, many of us still call it "Metro," but that section covering local news has probably been around, in one form or another, since they lowered Harrison Otis into the ground.)

The page consolidation was first leaked this morning by L.A. Observed, which then followed up with the news that the Times was cutting 300 more jobs -- with 70 of those falling in the paper's vaunted newsroom. It seems only a matter of time before all editorial appears in just two sections, with hard news appearing in Section A and, to borrow from James M. Cain, the rest of it spilled any way they could get it in, in a Section B.

The reaction has been swift and furious, from lamentations on Patterico's Pontifications to FishBowlLA, which features map sort of showing the death of print journalism by a thousand paper cuts. See, also, Veronique de Turenne's  thoughts on "How to Kill a Newspaper."