FishbowlLA was in attendance last Friday afternoon for the Social Media Week LA panel “How Social Media is Transforming Journalism.” Because of the Pacific time zone, this event turned out to be the very last one across the worldwide network of SMW hubs.

We were particularly struck by the comments of LA Times executive producer, interactive video Michelle Maltais regarding the paper’s recent foray into regularly scheduled Google hangouts. The paper officially started streaming the discussions a few months ago.

Maltais confirmed that the sessions have proven to be a very effective tool for both enhancing news coverage and dynamically engaging LAT website visitors. If you have not yet sampled these, they can be found live or archived at latimes.com/conversations and youtube.com/lathangouts. The future is now.