Distinctive fall.

The Los Angeles Times' recently announced shuttering of Distinction, an 85,000 circulation bi-monthly magazine aimed at high-income Southern California residents, is part of a larger move by the paper to focus on products that can more effectively build the Times' brand name and add subscribers and advertisers. The glossy magazine's last issue will be May/June.

Distinction launched in September 2003 by the Times' advertising department, but quickly found itself competing for readers and advertisers with a growing number of upscale regional titles, such as Brentwood, C, Angeleno, Calabasas, Santa Barbara and Variety's VLife, the latter of which also recently shut down.

"Our priorities are focused on growing our presence in the broad online, travel and entertainment sectors--areas where we see the greatest growth potential in terms of revenue and readership," said Times spokesman David Garcia. "Distinction magazine was a niche publication and did not fit this strategy."

In comparison to Distinction's fate, the Times decided to buck a trend by major metro papers to drop their Sunday magazines, by instead investing in an extensive redesign of Los Angeles Times Magazine and renaming it West.

West, which began appearing in the Sunday Times in February, provides a distinctive forum for West Coast-focused features, fiction and essays by noted contributing writers and Times staff, said West Editor Rich Wartzman.

"We really want to distinguish the voice of West and give readers styles of writing they won't find in the regular pages of the Times," said Wartzman, citing staff writer and San Joaquin Valley native Mark Arax's Feb. 5 cover story on the impact of the war on terror on his home town of Fresno.