its our group blog written by the staff writers and editors on the Health desk.

it has been quite a pleasure working with all of these journalists who have more than embraced blogging. lots of people said that i would be met with all this resistance but im telling you, i havent seen hardly any.

everyone gets it that blogging is merely an extension of the writing that theyve been doing their whole life. maybe it took some of them a while to get to this realization, but theyre here.

since ive been at the Times the hits on our blogs have doubled. im not sure that i had a lot to do with that, but it is nice to be at the right place at the right time for a change.

most of the credit has to go to my boss who has given me so much freedom. it also has to go to the entire building who have been very welcoming to me and extremely open to my ideas. and i have some crazy ones.

Funny Pages 2.0 was an idea that i didnt think would come to fruition for a year. and i really didnt think that theyd let me use Christie to do it. but to have that blog written by her within just a few months of me being here is a huge confidence boost to me.

this weekend the La Plaza blog was the most popular page on the site and that popularity spilled over to today. you will also see some changes over at the UCLA blog, the USC blog, and as the Lakers get into the playoffs expect to see some cool things happening on the Laker Blog and the Kareem blog.

its so hard to believe that a year ago today, or even six months ago today i would have never expected that i would be writing you those things from my office at the LA Times.

tomorrow i have to go to LAX to cover The Donnas playing at a gate at Virgin Airlines. apparently the carrier has never had an LAX to Seattle nonstop route before and to celebrate the Donnas are gonna play at the gate and Cisco Addler and some others are gonna play on the freakin plane, and then the Donnas will play up in Seattle.

id take the rock plane if i didnt have a gazillion things happening here at the office but i will have pics and video from their LAX concert tomorrow afternoon for your ass. and for the LAT Travel Blog.

we can make shortcut urls at the Times, so the shortcut for Booster Shots is
latimes.com/healthblog

and the shortcut urls for Unleashed is either latimes.com/woof or latimes.com/meow

the first blog is one that i didn’t think would take off so quickly, but there was a lot of energy and love behind it. and its being written by some pretty excellent people.

when i first came to the Times and i was talking about what i liked and didnt like on the LAT blog roll, someone joked about an animal blog. i laughed but then i was all, wait whats so funny? they said oh its just something that the people at the Metro desk wanna put together but, you know, it’ll never happen.

apparently the good folks on Metro would come across wild, crazy, or just somewhat intriguing stories about pets and animals that they’d email each other, but they knew the paper had no room for.

after a few meetings with several editors, with my boss, with metro and their editors, we all decided to see if Unleashed could happen. as they “blogged in the dark” it turned out that there was story after story that could fit into the blog, and it turned out that it didn’t take all that much time to write the post, find a pic, have it edited and posted.

so today we officially launch L.A. Unleashed, a blog that all you animal lovers, like you Mr. Zell, will love, im sure.

the other new blog i will announce in a few