LA Times Plans to Stop Being "Web-Stupid"

The dead tree media has really taken a beating in the last few years as more and more people are turning to the internet for their news and information and shunning the print media. Why? by the time the newspaper hits your driveway most of the stories are at least 12 hours old, and many older. There's not much I see in my paper that I haven't already read somewhere else.

The LA Times, facing destruction if it doesn't figure out a way to change, is embarking on a new approach to their news reporting as indicated in this story:

Los Angeles Times Editor James E. O’Shea unveiled a major initiative Wednesday to combine operations of the newspaper and its Internet site — a change he said was critical to ensuring that The Times remains a premier news outlet.

O’Shea employed dire statistics on declining advertising to urge The Times’ roughly 940 journalists to throw off a “bunker mentality” against change and to begin viewing latimes.com as the paper’s primary vehicle for delivering news.

The changes announced Wednesday by O’Shea were driven by a committee of the paper’s journalists who were appointed in October by O’Shea’s predecessor, Dean Baquet.

The Spring Street committee, named for the Times’ downtown address, produced a scathing report that has been seen by only a few of the newspapers top editors and executives. “To put it bluntly,” the seven-page report found, “as a news organization, we are not web-savvy. If anything, we are web-stupid.”

Of course, the downside of that is why should anyone subscribe if they can just read it on the web? Right now most of the LA Times content is available to anyone who completes a free registration on the website. They can generate some web advertising income from that, but certainly not as much as they can in the print version.

The real question is whether this change will make any fundamental difference in how people look for news on the web. Will they start looking to the LATimes.com as a primary source of breaking news, or will they just continue using the sources they've been using for awhile? Given the lefty slant of the Times political and social coverage (which caused me to drop my print subscription years ago), I won't be expecting anything new from them.