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| Larry in 2010, recipient of the Courageous Citizens Award. |
I am heartbroken by this news: The LA Times has put the axe to The Daily Mirror blog. For those who never went, The Daily Mirror was a massive daily blog featuring articles scanned from the archives of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. Every day you could read several entries spanning over 100 years of articles from the Times for that date. Every day would feature columnists, photos, comic strips, history, lost LA buildings, mysteries, advertisements, anything that appeared on the printed page would and could be posted.
Larry Harnisch began blogging for the Mirror in April of 2007, but I didn’t find the blog until a couple of years later. And that’s a shame, too, because the first page of Larry’s entries shows so much passion for LA’s history. That passion would continue, of course, but it’s undeniable that the blog became a huge time sink. Yet Larry went out of his way, unasked, to provide me with copies of hundreds (possibly thousands) of LA Times archived articles about Marie Prevost. I could never possibly repay that kindness, or even begin to measure the amount I learned about Hollywood through the Movieland Mystery Photos and all the other articles over the years.
It never occurred to me that such a huge blog with so many fans would be turned off because it wasn’t popular enough, yet here we are. It’s an amazing resource, always interesting, and one of the few really great places to go on the Internet.
I’d like to publicly thank Larry for everything over the years, all the hard work and all the camaraderie that the blog fostered. He’s a good egg, and The Daily Mirror is a good blog, gone far before its time.
I hope that Larry can direct his passion into another project.
I’m impressed by the amount of research that went into that labour of love.
And I’m impressed by anyone who features Franklin Pangborn.
I have always loved that picture, I’d love a copy of it without the background editing.
Larry is well known for his research on the Black Dahlia case, and has basically shown that all the books written about it thus far have some serious research and factual errors.
http://www.lmharnisch.com/
Dreadful news for those of us into Los Angeles history. I at least hope the Times will keep the archives available.
OTOH, this is a perfect time for anyone interested in that subject (and with the resources to do it) to create a replacement.
I caught that blog several times and loved it…just loved it. Why, in the day of digital webdom, a company would stop a service of such quality is a mystery to me.