LA Times: Buy our paper, please!
So, as you may have heard, The Los Angeles Times has hauled itself onto the auction block and is trying to entice a wealthy zillionaire to buy the ailing newspaper. Its buyout at the end of the dotcom era by the Chicago Tribune hasn’t worked out well, to put it mildly, and the paper has been losing readers faster than its LA rivals and the paper just lost its editor in a major squabble between wings of the newspaper empire.
I didn’t grow up with the LA Times as “the paper” — as my family’s orbit swung us in around DC multiple times over the years, the Washington Post holds that role in my life — but I can understand how people would feel frustrated at what they see is a degradation of the paper they grew up reading.
I worked at the LA Times Syndicate when Tribune Media bought the Times, and merged the syndicate into the Tribune Media Syndicate and even then, it was obvious Chicago wasn’t entirely interested in what would be the best strategies for the newly merged company.
At the time, I was working in the LATS’ Internet services division, repackaging print content that we had the rights to (like Sydney Omarr’s horoscope) as products that could be placed on the Web sites of small newspapers, giving them high-end content that even small papers could afford. (In other words, what syndicates do for newspapers, just online.) We were a small division, with four people initially, later growing to five once Shylo came on board in her footy pajamas. At the division’s peak, we had maybe eight or nine products, including movie reviews, horoscopes, golf news, relationship advice and a few products I’m forgetting.
Chicago also had such a division, after a fashion. It was two or three times as big, staff-wise, but it had fewer products and we were beating the pants off them, making something like two or three times as much money as them. So, we figured, when the divisions merge, we’ll be OK. Clearly the smart play is to combine the product offerings and lay off (or reassign) the folks in the less-profitable division.
That would have been the logical way to go. Unfortunately, the head of the merged Internet division had his kids in private school in Chicago and didn’t want to uproot them to LA. So, instead, the folks who hadn’t been able to compete with a larger staff came in, learned what we were doing, and set about serving the clients for the rest of their contracts, at which time they’d be pushed towards Chicago’s already-failed products or let go. I was actually the last person in the division to be let go (other than the head man, who bounced over to another upper middle management position, in the way of upper middle managers everywhere). The top floor of the LA Times Building on Spring Street was practically a ghost town by this point, as most of the others had been laid off or left months before.
About a year after I left the LATS (or it left me), I looked online and none of the products, from LA or Chicago, were even available any more. Chicago had decided to stick with their losers for reasons the shareholders would have screamed about, had they known, and had promptly run the whole shebang into the ground.
Now, it wasn’t like things were going wonderfully prior to that, which seems to be getting lost in the current hubbub: Shortly before the buyout, the Staples Center scandal broke, where advertising turned out to not just be calling the shots in the LAT newsroom, it was so enmeshed, it was impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began. Reporters and editors quit in droves: I’d ride the elevator down to the ground floor and share it with a seemingly endless procession of journalists with their worldly possessions in a photocopy paper box. The journalists were furious at the black eye the paper had gotten and weren’t going to stick around to deal with the damage that had been done.
That said, if it’s true that the LA Times staff is resenting the notion that, first and foremost, they need to be a really good local paper, they’re screwed. As unpolitic as it may be to say to their faces, the truth is, most readers do prefer to get their international news from the Internet nowadays. The Times has unparalleled access to local news in the nation’s second-largest city, one of the world’s most important cities. To not leverage that is to doom themselves to increasing irrelevance.
As Tip O’Neill might say, in the Internet era, all news is local.
