Here are highlights from a presentation on their efforts delivered by Meredith Artley, exec editor LA Times.com; Aaron Curtis, the paper's innovation editor (with whom I competed in chasing sirens in the Valley when we were young bucks); and Russ Stanton, the paper's relatively new editor.
- LAT.com has 20 million uniques a month. Page views are 106% year over year. It has 50 staff-written blogs. One of them, Top of the Ticket, is the 72nd most-read blog in the world
- Artley said you need an experimental approach, need to not be overly scared of making mistakes. Need to have a broader reach in the local audience, more local than national, because
local spends more time on the site and is more engaged.
- We have a chance to create one news operation, a lot of folks wanting to help but don't know how. Need to be organized and tactical: focused on internal training/education. Stressing visual journalism. Need to have clear goals and tracking progress. Need to get he right people in right spots.
- Stanton: breaking down silos, increasing communication, identifying legacy practices and assumptions no longer needed.
On training:
- Times is rolling out 40 in-house courses, including 360-degree storytelling, search engine-friendly headline writing, using the blogging software, video training, web graphics, copyediting for the Web and online legal issues. The basic class for everyone is on how the web works, what is changing.
- Times has 800 people in newsroom, and they don't want to give everyone same training. Different classes are required for different skills.
- Web-friendly headlines have been behind burst in traffic.
- LAT has a morning meeting talking about only the web. They look for story ideas on Google trends to kick off the day.
- Blog editor tells folks that if they have a good post to tell at least five people about it to get word out. Artley: "We do everything we can to get the word out in guerrilla marketing."
On restructuring:- one visual desk photo + video, trained photos on flash and video.,
- one data desk : print and web database and print and web graphics guys.
- KTLA will have assign desk in our newsroom.
- now hiring more specialists , as we already have a lot of journalists who can be generalists
- Hope to set up more topic-oriented teams.
- Artley said it's alright to say, "We're don't know yet, and that's OK. And you have to live with ambiguity. Were tyring so many things we don't want to lock it down and say this is the end."
- The dirty word is "control," Curtis said.
Rally the troops:
- Send out a daily email stats blast, widely distributed, showing what's doing well.
- Set monthly goals. "Let's set something high and see if they can reach it," Artley said.
- Pay attention to top search terms on the site, what are people searching for? They noticed it was immigraton, and set up a topic page in response.
I asked what tanked, what didn't work well. Artley said some blogs just didn't take off, that they give a blog three months to prove itself and then pull the plug if it doesn't draw an audience.
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