On Wednesday (24-Jan-207) James O'Shea unveiled a major initiative "designed to expand the audience and revenue generated by the newspaper's website, saying the newspaper is in 'a fight to recoup threatened revenue that finances our news gathering'." He urged the The Times roughly 940 journalists to throw of a bunker mentality and view the latimes.com the primary channel for delivering news.
They LATimes received their wake-up call last autumn 2006, where the so called 'Spring Street committee found out (in a 7-page report) the LATimes "as a news organization, we are not web-savvy. If anything, we are web-stupid."
Some findings from this report:
- Understaffing. Latimes.com employs about 18 "talented and dedicated" editorial employees, only a fraction of the 200 employees at the Washington Post's website and the 50 employed by the New York Times' site.
- Creaky technology that has made it impossible for latimes.com to host live chats between readers and journalists and to let readers customize stock tables or weather reports.
- Failure to integrate the newspaper's large news staff into operations at the web, contributing to delays in posting breaking news.
- Latimes.com is rarely first to post news on the Internet
If your online operation is understaffed, you are rarely first putting news on the Net, use creaky technology, have not managed integration, ....
read this article by James Rainey
Editor James O'Shea unveils Web initiative at Times
and / or act swiftly to get out of the web-stupid corner.
Earlier post:
US Newspapers Show Further Declines in Latest ABC Circulation Report
"Los Angeles Times declined 8% daily to 775,766 and 6 % Sunday to 1,172,005"
