Entries tagged 'los angeles times'

L.A. Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida to step down - Los Angeles Times

The Times has fallen well short of its digital subscriber goals and needs a revenue boost to sustain the operation

As a reader (and subscriber), I find the app and website for the LAT disappointing. The front page the app presents is very picture heavy and only has headlines, and sometimes the photos are terribly cropped. It feels like it presents so very little of what is being published. I’m also disappointed that they seem to have given up on posting to their Mastodon account. The digital experience just isn’t very good, so no surprise they aren’t drawing more subscribers. The actual journalism is top-notch.

Their real mistake, of course, is that they left the gorgeous LA Times Building in DTLA and set up shop in El Segundo.

as reported when editor dean baquet was ousted, the los angeles times enjoys a 20% operating profit:

The Los Angeles Times reported that its operating profit margin was 20 percent, higher than that of the average Fortune 500 company.

david geffen made a $2 billion offer for the paper, but all i can do is look at the price tag and think how much more sense it would make to just start a new paper with that. don’t for a big-bang launch, but ramp up the editorial production over a couple of years (web-only, at first). i suspect that if there is room for the los angeles times to grow, there’s no reason that another player couldn’t grow into that space. and both papers would be better for the competition.

if he really wants to leave a legacy, geffen should found a los angeles version of the poynter institute.

reporting about david geffen’s apparent bid for the los angeles times, nikki finke says “He’ll ratchet up the Web site (even though he hates how prohibitively expensive it is to do that).”

prohibitively expensive? i guess there is still a lot of stupid money flowing into web properties. i’m in the wrong line of work.

a strange little side-note: mysql’s website gets more traffic than latimes.com, according to alexa.

i’ve been poking around in the historical archives (pre-1985) of the los angeles times. here’s an interesting factoid: “los angeles was the first city in the united states to entirely abandon gas for street lighting and replace it by electricity, which was done january 1, 1888.”

and here’s a great blurb from the august 10, 1886 “briefs” column: “officer fonck brought in a man, last night, from los angeles street, who was dead drunk, and so filthy that it caused the officer to lose his four-bit dinner.”

one of the reasons i’ve been digging around is that in this obituary for james pulliam, i noticed that the writer claimed there was some renovation of the central library that was completed in 1987. i thought this was obviously wrong, because the two fires in the central library were in 1986, and the renovation of the library was not completed until 1993. looking at the articles where pulliam is quoted in 1979, they are about a renovation project that was never done. charles luckman, another los angeles architect, had proposed a renovation that would have added two new wings to the library, and had elevators in the central rotunda. the city council killed that plan in september 1979, and plans for the renovation that did happen did not start to gel until a few years later.

the person with the times who first responded to my correction appears to be on vacation for a few days, so maybe they’ll correct the obituary after my latest volley. (or not, and in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very big deal.)

this piece in the new york times looks at how people appear on the news are getting out their side of the story, and one thing it astutely points out is that an advantage that organizations like the discovery institute or people like me have is that our content doesn’t disappear inside a pay-for-access archive after a few weeks. for the foreseeable future, you’ll be able to come back to this entry to see what i’ve said. this article is something i linked to in the los angeles times almost five years ago (here). the link doesn’t even offer to sell me the article, it just wants me to contact their archive department who may or may not be able to figure out what the article actually was. as a counter-example, here’s a new york times article where i’m offered an archive copy of the article. and here’s an even older one that is still freely available.

kevin roderick passes on the old news that the los angeles times is working with another company to build an rss aggregator. what a terrible idea. the first step for the times should be to publish their own damn rss/atom feeds.

when i graduated college (ten years ago!), one of the places i applied to work was the times. they didn’t get back to me before i had found a job. while at the gym this morning, all that was going through my head is how much of a blast i could have at a place like the times if simply given a mandate to kick ass. (another is that i am probably way more qualified to do that now than i would be even if i had been working at the times for that last ten years.)

if it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur, it should also be a great time for everyone trying to do kick-ass things on the web. if i were at the times, and the team at a paper from a small town in kansas was continuously out-innovating me, i’d go nuts. especially when they have have released their web-building framework as open-source, and the best thing i’ve got going is an rss aggregator that is going to suck being built by an external company.