The front page of Monday’s New York Times business page pays a backhanded compliment to its West Coast rival with the story “Despite Distinctions, Los Angeles Times Loses Standing at Home.” Despite its award-winning writing, thirteen (!) foreign bureaus, and consistently solid reporting “despite all the bloodletting” in the newsroom, the story says, the Times’s readers just aren’t happy.
An accompanying photo features a woman holding a newspaper with pursed lips. High up in the text of the article we learn the reason for her sourpuss:
On a recent weekday evening, Edie Frère, owner of a stationery store in the city’s quaint Larchmont Village section, wistfully recalled reading The Times as a young girl, captivated by the old Hollywood starlets and socialites who graced the society pages.
“We need a paper that’s more, and this is less,” said Ms. Frere, 66. “I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”
That pretty much sums up the argument for the paper’s “community relations” problem: a collection of comments and anecdotes from disgruntled and nostalgic Los Angeles Times readers. Another:
“When I came here back in ’74, it would take me all day to read the paper. Now it takes me 10 minutes — tops,” said Quintin Cheeseborough, 57, who is self-employed and comes to the Los Angeles Central Library occasionally to read The Times. On a recent morning, he was reading The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, but not The Los Angeles Times.
And another:
Harvey Levine, 48, a television stage manager who lives on the city’s West Side, ended his subscription after unread copies began piling up at home. “The L.A. Times should be the paper that I trust and go to daily, and it’s not,” said Mr. Levine, a native of Canada who as a young man dreamed of a career in Hollywood and bought copies of the weekend Times in Toronto.
“I know they have a lot of really good writers and they win lots of awards, but I thought it just wasn’t enough,” he said.
The story offers various reasons for readers’ dismay: the recent sale of the Times to a corporate owner from Chicago, the closing of several local versions across the city, and cutbacks in the founding family’s financial contributions to the city’s cultural life. But what’s the evidence that such a widespread feeling of resignation exists among the Times’s formerly loyal subscribers?
A halving of weekday circulation since 2000? That decline isn’t surprising, considering the changes to news reading habits in the past decades, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the paper’s readers all think it’s terrible. A letter of complaint from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors about an ad that appeared on the paper’s front page? Everyone who has worked at a newspaper knows that someone’s always sending in a letter of complaint about something. A handful of middle-aged readers who say their hometown paper “ain’t what it used to be”? Show me an institution somewhere, anywhere, that doesn’t inspire this kind of grumbling.
Update: The Times’s public editor Art Brisbane wrote a response to several complaints the paper received about this story.
No, it's really true. The NYT piece understates the tragic decline of the Los Angeles Times. Until 2003, I read the LA Times every day my entire life: it was one of America's great newspapers, and boasted some of the finest reporters, and finest investigative journalism in the world. They still have some of the finest journalists in the country. And, they still have their standards. The journos still have their bedrock standards, the ones who are left after the debacle of Sam Zell.
When the Trubune came to town -- David Hiller and his bunch -- the quality of the paper declined rapidly, that's when I gave up on the LAT, but Zell really destroyed the once-great newspaper. Those 13 foreign bureaus? Well they combined all of the Tribune's news bureaus and that's what is left. They do the work for all of the Trib papers. They closed up two of the three Washington bureaus, leaving one for all of Trib's holdings, but the Washington journos still put out a great product -- some of the very finest political and Congress reporting around. I think Paul Richter still heads up the Washington Bureau.
There's just less of it. Zell has fired most of the favorite local columnists who were read and loved by local residents for a lifetime, Michael Kinsley absolutely destroyed the Opinion section during his failed tenure, the Sunday paper is little more than pages and pages of ads. Gone are the local editions for Ventura County, Orange County, the Valley edition. Eddie Hartenstein has fired the copy editors and they print just amateurish, embarrasing typos and errors of fact. Hartenstein seems indifferent to accuracy and fact-checking.
The newspaper is now as thin and insubstantive as a Penny Saver throwaway. The newsprint itself is thin and cheap. They made the broadsheet narrower and they use larger font and put huge ads on the front page to disguise the lack of actual news on the front page real estate. The weekday paper is as thin as a small-town paper -- 15 pages in all, maybe -- and contains about that much news -- in this metropolis of almost 20 million people.
I understand your skepticism, but I don't know a single newspaper reader here in the Southland who isn't actually heartbroken about the demise of the the once-great Los Angeles Times. And that includes the few remaining journalists -- Zell confiscated their pension fund to finance his disastrous, now bankrupt takeover. It isn't just about cost-cutting, it is about owners who know nothing and care nothing about journalism and the printing of a great newspaper. It's a death spiral -- every cost-cutting measure, every compromise on quality, every fired journo and copywriter, every discontinued beat or feature loses more and more subscribers. They aren't even trying any more.
Luckily for us internet news readers, the New York Times has strengthened it's Los Angeles bureau -- sending Adam Nagourney out as bureau chief. So I often read better LA news in the NYT than we get locally. They have a ways to go, however.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 03:27 PM
I need a copy editor myself -- ..has strengthened its Los Angeles bureau...
#2 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 03:31 PM
Fair enough, James, thanks for the very substantive comment. They should have interviewed you for the NYT story...
#3 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 05:01 PM
Sam Zell has the Midas touch, for sure.
#4 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 05:38 PM
I don't have the same experience as James. I generally read the Los Angeles Times first, before I turn to the Wall Street Journal and then, if I have time, the New York times. I find the New York Times stories often use too many words and the writing is somehow more boring than the same story in the LA Times. I'm not sure how they do this, but the writers at the LA Times seem get more life into their stories than their compatriots in the East.
Since all three papers grace my breakfast table every morning, it is easy to compare their physical size and quality of paper, mentioned above by James. The LA Times, WSJ, and NY Times are roughly the same size, and the paper is newsprint. Newsprint IS thin and cheap. Duh! In addition to a copy editor, I think James needs a real editor.
#5 Posted by George, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 06:55 PM
Well, here's the LA Times front page for today:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=CA_LAT&ref_pge=lst
and here's the LA Times from March 2003. You be the judge.
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr_archive.asp?fpVname=CA_LAT&ref_pge=lst
In case those links don't work, they are Newseum shots of the LA Times front page today, and one from their archive from March 20, 2003 from the Newseum website.
While you are on the Newseum website, check out the front page for the New York Times today.
Yes, the New York Times *does* have a lot more words -words! in a newspaper! Imagine that!- which is exactly my point. I've always liked my newspapers to have lots and lots of words. I thought everyone did. Guess not.
Cheers.
#6 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 07:50 PM
By the way, @Lauren, thanks for the response. It is always much appreciated.
If you compare those two LAT front pages I linked, note that it isn't *just* the big font, or even the five vs six columns, or the huge banner to take up space. There's very little substantive news there. Note that in 2003 -- granted, a momentous day compared to today, but the archive only contains noteworthy days -- notice the datelines and bylines. In 2003 you had such fine journos as Paul Richter, Ed Chen -- double bylines by actual LA Times staff writers. Today's paper doesn't have comparable quality, and while I'm sure those jounos are competent, the news value is lacking, don't you think?
I'd like to know how they decided to put that front page together. The piece on the Hmong General was good, of local interest.The piece on Baghdad is also good, but above the fold? But the parking problem in Beijing and the piece on Spiderman belong in the Lifestyle section, and the local piece about Port Arthur Texas, I mean, front page worthy for Los Angeles?
Compare that with NYT today. Their piece on China was a substantive piece on the prospects of new leadership, while LAT was, well, go ahead and read. NYT also had some good pieces on the economy and Congress by Stohlberg and Morgenson, Zimbabwe, football, and some eye candy at the bottom. Just full of diverse, substantive news. Look at the news coverage on the LA Times front page from 2003. Diverse, substantive news. Look at it today. It's a sad, pathetic ghost of its former grandeur. It's amazing they still have 600,000 subscribers. They aren't getting their money's worth.
#7 Posted by James, CJR on Mon 24 Jan 2011 at 10:20 PM
It seems that you people have not lived in a real town like Vancouver. Ten minutes? It takes ten seconds to read The Province. It is the high quality tab here.
Perhaps you have not discovered the truth about The New York Times either. Why you will find that it takes a lot of words for an NYT reporter to say anything is because they are mostly failed Ivy League drones who need to camouflage the fact that they have nothing to say--except some crap about a canned sports or politics story--by larding up their texts with a lot of half-baked SAT vocab. That way, the dullards think they are getting value for their money.
What CJR should do is start testing The NYT reporters and editors. Take a serious subject--study minutely a couple of recent textbooks on memory--Baddeley 2009 and Schwartz 2011. Ask the NYT types to dig out the strengths and weaknesses of these books.
What you will find is what I have (by dogged effort). They have no idea. At all. They are just faking it by tread-milling old copy. There is not a single editor or reporter at the NYT with a mind.
However, they are skilled at getting away with it.
#8 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 12:46 AM
I read with interest the NYT piece on the LA Times and found that it confirmed my own experience with the paper, but, as pointed out in this post, it did so anecdotally. I pick up the NY Times first, the Journal second, and then the LA Times last. In my ten+ years as an Angeleno, I have never, and I mean not once, had to pay for a copy of the LA Times. Perhaps it's the low cover price.
Now it's a relatively quick read, and maybe it's that my fellow Angelenos have abbreviated attention spans. For me, there's little reason to hang onto the paper - unlike the NY Times and the Journal which tuck under my arm, half-read. Yet another Angeleno anecdotal observation to add to the article! If there exists data for an objective, quantitative comparison of the size of the newshole then and now, a quick analysis would help our discussion here.
There has been much hand-wringing about the changes to the LA Times, both in that paper's commentary and of course the blogs, so this substantive discussion is welcome. But isn't the bottom line making the paper compelling reading? The Times has largely turned its back on important regional news. When I hunger for serious digging into the deep context of pension shortfalls, questionable contracting, and now-brewing community redevelopment scandals, for example, I seldom find that covered in this paper. (Or any paper.)
While the Bell corruption story was great work, Bell is one of 88 incorporated municipalities in LA County, and surely it's not the only one nurturing headline-grabbing problems. These small crucibles for malfeasance go largely uncovered.
I'd suggest that the paper withdraw from the global stories and treat our LA region as what it is - a 15m person megalopolis that has enough news fit to print for the LA Times and a couple more like it.
#9 Posted by Mark, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 03:15 AM
What my last post needs is a copy editor!
#10 Posted by Mark, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 03:18 AM
Forget the book “O - A Presidential Novel” and the fake anonymous hype (who cares who wrote that boring book), instead read a real controversial BANNED book like “America Deceived II” by the ‘World’s Most Hated Author’, E.A. Blayre III.
Last link (before Google Books bans it also]:
http://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookDetail.aspx?BookId=SKU-000190526
#11 Posted by Dan, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 07:23 AM
As a New Yorker, I rarely read the LA Times, but the criticism of the NY Times' "coverage" of the LAT's decline seems on target. The NYT has less and less substance, more and more "he said she said" reporting and stories reprinted verbatim from newswires. Also many more silly stories about lifestyles in various Brooklyn neighborhoods.
#12 Posted by Joyce, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 12:05 PM
My concern about the NYT piece is that it ignored the growth and innovation happening at the LA Times website. If you are going to write about declining print circulation, what not mention the expansion of readership online?
#13 Posted by Andy Bechtel, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 12:32 PM
Here in the NY suburbs, we have watched The NY Times' coverage shrink from individual sections that once provided separate news and information on Long Island, Connecticut, Westchester and New Jersey into a single "Metropolitan" section that now seems to have trouble getting beyond Brooklyn topics on most weekends. Most recently, we have had severe delivery problems on Long Island, only to be informed by Times customer service reps that a reorganization has caused a mass exodus of delivery people and that there are weekends when the paper has a "wholesale shortage," essentially meaning that the company does not print enough complete Sunday editions to accommodate all of it subscribers. We don't have to look to Los Angeles to see shrinking journalistic resources.
#14 Posted by Dissatisfied, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 01:11 PM
The expansion of LA Times online? Please.
Take a look. http://www.latimes.com/
You will see the same paucity of substantive news online as you see in the ersatz newspaper. We are a metropolis of 20 million people, I'd remind you. We have a very new governor with some mammoth challenges, a governor who knows exactly where the skeletons are buried and means to take them on. The LAT website is pathetic. Where is the substance? Where is the updated news? Where is the reader interactivity? Where is the innovation? The website is every bit as thin as the newspaper. Please show me, @Prof Bechtel. And please, tell us all about the "expansion of readership online." Quantify that, please.
Compare with the NYT website which, in addition to posting all the news that's fit to print minute by minute, hosts I-don't-know-how-many very active and interactive blogs -- politics, local, economic, etc. -- where you can follow the minute by minute updates on the huge stories over the duration. They attract thousands of civil, intelligent comments daily in carefully moderated comment streams. They have been the innovators of interactive graphic and mapping displays -- many of them featured here at CJR -- and they have poached the biggest talents from the Washington Post, the LA Times, the blogging world to supplement their fine journalism. Their archives are available back to the 1800's. Just look at the rich diversity of material on the NY Times website
http://www.nytimes.com
To you NY Times readers: you have the last great American newspaper standing as your local newspaper. Everyone gripes and grouses about their local newspaper, but look around. What other newspaper in all of America hosts an equivalent quality journalism, diversity of material, consistent innovation, stringent journalistic standards, the sheer number of the biggest stars in journalism? No, really.
#15 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 01:44 PM
The piece about the LA Times was a disgrace: lazy, unsophisticated and dumb.
Yes, the paper is diminished--like every other newspaper in America. But it still manages to do great work. The NY Times reporter did not manage to include a single comment from any current LA Times editor or reporter.
None dare call this "journalism."
#16 Posted by Charles Kaiser, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 03:59 PM
If the publisher declined to speak, I am sure the message went down the line to everyone else. There is so much fear on Spring Street that it is no wonder there aren't current people talking on the record. That said, there's always off the record. And, overall, the NYT piece was lazy and outdated. I didn't know the NYT did hoary man-on-the-street pieces. Please NYT, bring back Felicity Barringer. You haven't had decent newspaper industry coverage since she left. Or at least get David Carr to take a few minutes from SWSX and write about people pumping up the coming Internet Bubble 2.0.
#17 Posted by HB, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 04:31 PM
Ditto the copy editor lament.
I meant SXSW
#18 Posted by HB, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 04:33 PM
Here's the perspective of one native Angelena who also spent six years in NYC and six in Vancouver (among many cities): the comments by James, Charles Kaiser, & HB are accurate. The Los Angeles Times is a pale shadow of its former self for all the reasons discussed above, and the New York Times, although a superior newspaper than the current incarnation of the LAT, repeatedly displays its journalistic shortcomings when writing about Los Angeles.
A more personal comment about the inane NYT article. Having known Edie Frere (“sourpuss “ in the original CJR Kicker post) for decades, I called Edie to ask about her quote since it seemed so hugely out of character given that she is a highly intelligent and accomplished businesswoman with multiple enterprises, a Stanford grad who worked for the State Department as a protocol expert at the US embassy in Paris, etc. Her assistant told me that she was out of town. So all I can state is that the odds are overwhelming that Edie referred to her childhood fascination with the LA Times’ society and Hollywood coverage as an early experience reading the paper, then criticized Zell’s recreation of that newspaper for the kinds of the deficiencies listed above. Yes, she probably said that quote about that decline of the paper, but not in reference to missing society page coverage.
Why does this matter? Lame journalism, manipulating coverage to push an angle. The NYT currently has far more financial resources than the LAT, but it mostly appears think “LA” stands for "Low Achievement." Did the writer choose and describe interview subjects (a guy who reads the paper in the library!) in a way to pander to a tedious rivalry? Or was he just lazy or ill-trained? Don’t know, but I’d have loved a good, in-depth NYT article about the LA Times, but not one that concludes the city is in decline because it rejected ridiculous rip-off deals to host a professional football team.
#19 Posted by E A Miller, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 07:07 PM
We are home subscribers of the LA Times and read it daily. I often find interesting local articles and enjoy the entertainment coverage, given that the industry is such a big part of our local economy. Each section might only have 8 or 16 pages, but the entire paper is at least 50+ pages a day. The overall tone of the NYT article was rather snarky about LA in general:
"Here in the city that has always strived to show how a sense of sophistication lies beneath the silicone and the superficial, The Times has joined the city’s impossible freeway traffic as a unifying force of complaint."
Must be the snow making the New Yorkers jealous of our 70-degree winter days.
#20 Posted by Sharona, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 09:45 PM
Well, I must say that I'm astonished by the overwhelming negative reaction to this piece. First of all, it was just a simple 1,200-word daily piece -- not every newspaper article has to be an in-depth, deeply researched 5,000-word investigative piece. The guy probably heard some rumblings about us Angelenos unhappy with our beloved newspaper, went out and interviewed some people, and wrote the thing up on a noon deadline. The piece actually has a nice synopsis of the history of the paper and the influence of Otis' and the Chandlers. It also details the revolving door of publishers since the buyout by Trib and the whole debacle. Read the thing again, please.
Secondly, when I read the piece, what I got was a largely sympathetic take on the travails of the Los Angeles Times journos having to put up with the demise of their newspaper -- the reporter detailed their recent triumphs high up in the story and pointed out the quality of their Pulitzer Prize-winning work and the strengths of the journalism. There was no snark there that I could see. Now, I get that journos are pretty thin-skinned and protective of their newspaper, but there's a serious overreaction here all around. Read the thing again, please.
You want to know what is a "disgrace"? Here is the disgrace: http://www.latimes.com/includes/sectionfronts/A1.pdf
Just look. Page A1 Column One two-column three quarters of the page on the front page of the Los Angeles Times -- a big story about hiring in reality television. You talk about fluffy crap, that's it right there. USA Today has nothing on the crap on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. What the hell is that atrocity doing on the front page of the Los Angeles Times?
Now, maybe a lot of people are happy with a McPaper like this. Or maybe this is just the kind of discussion that results from the hyperactivity on Twitter. I don't know. I'd like to hear from the reporter, Jeremy Peters and his boss.
@Lauren, how about it? What do they think about the hue and cry that they have wrought?
#21 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 25 Jan 2011 at 10:44 PM
Why is it that the NYTimes story failed to mention that the NYTimes has a vested economic interest in disparaging the LATimes? The NYTimes is aggressively pushing into the California market with its national edition: wouldn't that be worth just a sentence in the story? Nothing the NYTimes loves better than snooty movie industry types in LA who subscribe to the NYTimes rather than the LATimes as a way to burnish their elitist image. These folks who couldn't care less about what is happening in Bell. The NYT smear story only served to reinforce their narcissism.
#22 Posted by margot, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 12:31 AM
The NYT piece struck me as a lazy piece by a newspaper with an obvious axe to grind.
"James" is wrong to defend the NYT piece by saying "not every newspaper article has to be an in-depth, deeply researched 5,000-word investigative piece." Every newspaper article, it seems to me, has to provide evidence to support its premise. Evidence, not a few man-in-the-library quotes. There actually are experts on journalism that could have been interviewed, and reporter Peters definitely should have noted the NYT's own interests in undermining the LAT.
#23 Posted by Paul, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 02:12 PM
@James: Many of the things you say are valid, but I'd like to point out that the big layoffs of copy editors happened before Hartenstein's watch. What changed more recently are the deadlines. With everything due earlier, copy editors -- and line editors and reporters -- can do only so much.
http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2010/01/la_times_could_have_earli.php
#24 Posted by Copy editor, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 03:01 PM
Somehow, that link in the update isn't working.
I'm not defending it so much as expressing astonishment at the vehemence and outrage being expressed about a small-bore piece like this. It's under the "Media & Advertising" banner of the Business section, not a huge front page layout. This kind of routine piece is one of thousands produced every day by journalists all over the country.1) Get wind of something of passing interest 2) get a few facts and a little history of the issue, 3) go out and interview a few people 4) write the thing up 5) press Send. I doubt the reporter was expecting a Pulitzer for a small piece like this.
It's nice to know, I guess, that my LA Times has so many defenders. Maybe the radio hatchet man, Eddie Hartenstein from Chicago, will get wind of it and change his ways. Better yet, maybe the Chandler family, as has been rumored, will decide once and for all to buy back the paper and restore it to its former grandeur. I certainly hope so.
Meanwhile, people seem to have a very naive idea about how a newspaper operates.
#25 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 03:20 PM
@Copy editor,
Yes, I am aware. I think in one of my posts above I detailed how the decline of the LA Times happened before Hartenstein -- in fact, it was Hiller who started the dismantling of the LA Times -- firing Dean Baquet and going through a number of managing editors, lay off copy editors, reporters, firing long-time columnists in favor of the likes of lightweight Jonah Goldberg. Don't get me started on the abominable David Hiller's tenure.
And this thing about the deadlines -- well, I've only read about it on your blog LAOvserved, because I gave up on the LAT while Hiller was still there. Now they can't even publish Basketball or baseball game scores until the day after. Pathetic.
#26 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 03:28 PM
I should say, Mr. Copy Editor, that no one blames the journos and the staff for the tragic demise of the Times. I feel so bad for the remaining people in the newsroom who struggle valiantly to put out a good product every day. No one has anything bad to say about the journalism there; what remains is as good as it has ever been. This is purely a management problem, far, far beyond the general decline of the newspaper industry. I'm rooting for you, and many more in our fine city are as well.
#27 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 04:01 PM
James,
I too admire the NYT's website. It's the gold standard for newspaper sites.
I agree that the LAT site used to be mediocre. But the LAT has put a lot of effort into it in recent years, with more multimedia, blogs and database journalism. LAT staffers are active on social media such as Twitter as well.
Let's give credit where it's due. In 2010, the LAT site ranked 4th in traffic for newspaper sites:
http://blog.journalistics.com/2010/top-25-newspapers-by-website-traffic/
You'll see there that the LAT ranks 6th in Facebook "likes" and 4th in Twitter followers.
Like you, I believe that the problems at the LAT (and other newspapers, for that matter) involve bad management and heartless ownership. And like you, I am rooting for the LAT to succeed in print and online.
#28 Posted by Andy Bechtel, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 04:43 PM
@Professor Bechtel,
thank you for the links to the data, which I found very interesting. I am not, however, convinced that the number of "likes" on Facebook and the number of "followers" on Twitter is a measure of a newspaper's value to their community, especially when they number in the tens of thousands and not millions. Does that overcome issues like this:
May 9 2010 10:42 PM
Saturday night's game at Dodger Stadium had a 7 p.m. start time, did not go into extra innings, and only lasted 2:52 according to the box score. Times blogger Steve Dilbeck's rant about the loss has a time stamp of 10:07 p.m. Plenty of time to make the paper in past years. Yet there's no mention of the game in some (perhaps most?) Sunday print editions of the Los Angeles Times Sports section delivered within Los Angeles. There is a Farmer John ad on the front page of Sports where the story possibly went in some papers that were printed later.
Source: L.A. Times misses another Saturday night L.A. game - LA Observed
That has become a regular occurrence in the past year. Another issue:
It's been a tough week for readers of the print Los Angeles Times. Some got papers on Sunday without the final USC and UCLA football game scores, just as some have reported getting incomplete Dodgers and Angels results. Last week's San Bruno explosion led all the news shows but wasn't on the front page of the Times, relegated inside to the LATExtra section. Those were business-dictated deadline calls, but the next shock for readers will be strictly business: an upcoming ad campaign for "Law and Order: Los Angeles" that Weekly Variety says again blurs the line between editorial and advertising, similar to previous ads in the Times for "Southland" and the King Kong attraction at Universal Studios.
Next L.A. Times ad stunt for 'Law and Order: Los Angeles' - LA Observed
One might, I guess, try to make the case that the importance of delivering news and final scores of local team sports, and maintaining the strict separation between advertising and editorial isn't as important as presence on social media. I remain unconvinced.
#29 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 06:43 PM
James,
I agree with you about early deadlines. If I pick up the LAT on any given day during the MLB or NBA seasons, I should be able to get the scores and game stories for the Dodgers or Lakers.
That particular problem is even worse on the East Coast, where I live. The coverage of the national championship game of college football, for example, was relegated to a score and a short story in my metro daily because of early deadlines. And that much was possible only because the game didn't go into overtime:
http://blogs.newsobserver.com/editor/thanks-wes-byrum
My point is that the NYT story on the LA Times needs to mention its website. That's a hole in the story that I and several others have pointed out. To judge any news organization on its print edition only makes no sense in this day and age.
#30 Posted by Andy Bechtel, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 07:17 PM
Prof Bechtel,
Oh, I understand what you were getting at. I misunderstood you. Still, and perhaps I am setting too high a standard by comparing the LAT website to NYT, but I am singularly unimpressed with it. True, they did have a very nice "Balance the California Budget" feature similar to the one on the NYT.
But you see today that the topmost photo feature is a piece on Rahm Emanual from the Chicago Tribune. They have run a number of stories about Rahm Emanual on the front page. I wonder why Mr. Hartenstein, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, believes that citizens of Los Angeles are so interested in Rahm Emanual and his run for mayor of Chicago. Obviously, it is because the Tribune is producing a generic McPaper website that lacks very much Los Angeles news. I repeat, we are a metropolitan area with 20 million people. Los Angeles County has the 17th largest economy in the world (or did up until several years ago.) I expect better.
In my opinion, there is more to a news website than just number of page views. There's just not much substance there. Take a look. Los Angeles Times - California, national and world news - latimes.com
I'd be interested in your thoughts on the second link above -- where the LAT missed the San Bruno explosion, and its practice of presenting movie and TV show advertising as news stories on the front page.
Cheers.
#31 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 27 Jan 2011 at 07:53 PM
James,
That link is taking me to the homepage, so I can't comment on that. I do like the LAT's Data Desk area and its multimedia. I think you and I will just have to agree to disagree on how good the site is overall.
I firmly oppose any advertising that masquerades as news, especially on the front page. It creates confusion among readers and damages the credibility of the newsroom.
http://lat.ms/hzU8pJ
#32 Posted by Andy Bechtel, CJR on Fri 28 Jan 2011 at 09:18 AM
Prof Bechtel,
I agree that the Data Desk is a great feature, and I commend the LAT for doing good journalism with it. The data story they did on the salaries of top LA County officials was particularly good, and was the talk of the city for weeks. It's an example of the shining journalism that we in Los Angeles love about the Times at their best. And they have been dogged about following up on the City of Bell scandal. That's why it is heartbreaking to see how the newspaper has been diminished and how indifferent to the standards of journalism is the management of Hartenstein and Zell, and Tribune and Hiller before them -- your link to the scandalous King Kong affair is a prime example.
So, we'll agree to disagree on the quality of their website, but thanks for the dialogue. I enjoyed it.
Cheers.
#33 Posted by James, CJR on Fri 28 Jan 2011 at 01:24 PM