LA Times Downsizes

Posted on July 2, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized |

uh yeah, not enough time… that’s exactly why I don’t get a hardcopy newspaper anymore. I’ll sidestep the quality issues that have faced the LAT as well as the charges of liberal bias, and get to the core. The problem facing big metro newspapers isn’t too many stories (pages btw drive ad inventory, which makes this statement from the LAT a little incoherent), it’s the web and a regional footprint in a flat world.

The moves the LAT are making are good, merging the online/offline and downsizing the print side, but these are the symptoms. Better syndication, increasing the effectiveness of display ads, presenting related content from a variety of sources, and creating a social dimension through better profile management and community functions will all come together to do far more to turn the LAT around than simply reducing the amount of newsprint they put out each day.

Lastly, I would encourage any comments to be constructive instead of gloating about online beating offline. The fact remains that a lot of people are losing their jobs in an industry that simply is not growing new jobs.

“The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don’t have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day,” Stanton said. “We’re going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter.”

[From LA Times to cut 250 jobs, including 150 news jobs: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance]

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