Marc Cooper noted on Monday, and I noticed as well but didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screenshot, how the LA Times had very little coverage of the city-wide election yesterday. Observe the front page website, from March 2nd:

The Mayor of the second largest city in the United States was being elected, and we don’t get even one major article on this? I’ve heard it said that politics and newspapers are at their best when they’re local. Too bad neither newspapers nor their political subjects are holding up their sides of the equation here in LA.

The blogosphere and twittersphere have been, um, a-twitter this week about the future of the newspaper world. The Chicago Tribune is going tabloid. Gasp! The Atlantic says the NY Times could be out of business by May. Oh no! The Seattle PI is going to either close or be sold. Oh my! BlogTalkRadio purchases a controlling interest in Julius Genachowski’s FCC? Not yet…

New media guru Jason Preston of Eat, Sleep, Publish and the Parnassus Group, stops by to talk this week’s madness. Can newspapers, like the Seattle PI, survive as online only? What’s the future model for advertising? Can they change the approach to gathering content, even including – and paying for – writing from users (a.k.a. crowdsourcing)? How can advertisers and newspapers engage with social media to actually speak to their readers? And what are the WSJ and the Financial Times doing right, so they can charge for their content?

Ted Johnson, our usual moderator, is out this week, taken ill by a rare strain of “I’m going to the Inauguration in DC and I need to get better!” Look for next week’s awesome show Wednesday with both Ted and Maegan live from our nation’s capital, while Teresa infiltrates the CNN-Facebook inaugural experience.

Listen to the show here, subscribe to the iTunes podcast, or use the Blog Talk Radio player:

Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.