Whatever happened to KTTV's John Beard?

Truth be told, I'm not much of a KTTV Channel 11 news viewer, so I didn't really know John Beard was gone, but gone he is. He has a Web site at which viewers can catch up with him (the photo above, of Beard in Yosemite, comes from there). I saw his name as a follower of the Daily News Twitter feed and clicked through his own Twitter feed (he's got 627 followers, which in case you're wondering, is a lot).

I did watch Channel 11 news enough in L.A. — and saw him for years before that on KNBC (Channel 4) — to know that Beard is one of the best. His is one of the defining anchor voices in Los Angeles, and it's a proverbial and all-to-common shame not to have him on the air here.

On the Web site, he gets straight to the reason for his departure from KTTV — "My contract wasn't renewed."

Now Beard is writing a murder mystery and splitting his time between California and his native North Carolina.

Not so coincidentally, he hints at possibly returning to the air ... in North Carolina.

If you want to contact John Beard, there's a way to do it through the Web site, and you could also be ultra-modern about it and reach him via Twitter (his account is @jb111).