Tag Archives: Washington Post

Fake LA Times staffers better than real LA Times staffers

Former and current LA Times staffers have taken it upon themselves to not only blame but also sue Sam Zell for their current predicament.

As if it was Zell’s hubris that led them to think they were a national (international?!?!) paper. As if it was Zell’s ignorance that led the Times to have a horrible Web product for years. As if it was Zell’s leadership that thought endless jumps on meandering stories was a good idea.

Jeff Jarvis suggests that LA Times staffers should sue themselves instead of Sam Zell:

The Times veterans should not be suing Zell. They should be suing themselves. Oh, I, too, am angry at the state of newspapers in America but I’m angry at the right people. The LA Times’ problems — like those of other papers — were caused by by decades of egotistical and willfully ignorant neglect by the owners, managers — and staff — at the paper.

When more than one editorial regime had the hubris to think that they should turn the Times into a national – even international – paper, opening bureaus all over the globe and insisting on writing every commodity news stories under their own bylines while letting local coverage suffer, did you protest, litigators? No, those bylines and bureaus were yours.

Honestly, who is more to blame for the current situation at the Times? Sam Zell who is trying to rescue a sinking ship (even if he is doing a very poor job at it and has some bad ideas) or the former captains and shipmates who drove that ship into an iceberg?

If I was the LA Times, I’d consider firing a bunch of do-nothing employees and hire this guy or gal over at Not the LA Times who ruthlessly satired the ridiculous LA Times lawsuit:

On the heels of a class-action lawsuit accusing L.A. Times owner Sam Zell of wrecking the newspaper, dissident Times writers are now suing 425,000 former subscribers for “failing to appreciate our bodacious journalism.”

“By recklessly canceling their subscriptions, these morons have caused irreparable harm to the newspaper, breached their civic duty to stay fully informed, and missed some totally awesome articles by Pulitzer Prize-winning auto columnist Dan Neil, as well as money-saving Sunday coupons that could easily offset the subscription price,” the lawsuit alleges.

Additional efforts to entice subscribers included frequent use of the word schadenfreude, a front-page redesign that made the paper look like a ransom note, and gutting the Sports section, according to the lawsuit.

Times employees contend they did everything possible to maintain a relationship with the former readers. “In January 2005, to cite just one example, we published a 2,600-word Home section cover story on decorating your house in the Viennese Secession style of Art Nouveau,” the lawsuit said. “You can’t get more in touch with average readers than that!”

At least this person gets what’s going on. Zell may not being doing a great job, but it wasn’t him he drove the Times to the edge of this precipice.

Let’s get a few things straight here, shall we?

  1. The LA Times is not The New York Times or The Washington Post. The only time the LA Times should be mentioned in the same sentence as those two is when people are generically talking about large papers. Something like, “Why has the LA Times Web presence sucked so long when other large papers like the NY Times and Post have been much more innovative?” Or something like, “What papers have Times in their names?”
  2. The LA Times has willfully neglected the Web for years. I realize that Russ Stanton has breathed life into the Web presence of the Times, but it’s probably a little too late. Still, the Times’ Web presence is behind a lot of other U.S. news operations.
  3. The Tribune board accepted Sam Zell’s offer on April 2, 2007. He didn’t take the company private until December 20, 2007. The LA Times was in very bad shape prior to then. It’s not like magically the bottom fell out of the Times in the last year.
  4. If things were going so well at the Times, how come prior to Stanton being named executive editor, the Times had three editors in less than three years?

LoudounExtra, a hyperlocal failure for the Washington Post?

It’s depressing.

It feels like my girlfriend broke up with me and took my dog with her. Yes, I’m talking about The Wall Street Journal’s assessment of the failure of LoudounExtra.com. Maybe failure is a little harsh, but according to Rob Curley, his sites in Lawrence, Kan. got better traffic than LoudounExtra.com.

For those keeping score, Lawrence has about 80,000 residents, while Loudoun County has about 270,000 residents. And it’s not that LoudounExtra.com is a complete failure, it’s just that it’s not what it could have been or what was expected of it when it launched (it probably has lost a bit of money too).

And of course Curley and his team have left for Las Vegas, which doesn’t give me a lot of faith that LoudounExtra will be getting much better anytime soon. All the Web talent and vision are gone now — so, who is going to innovate on their forthcoming hyperlocal ventures?

To be fair, LoudounExtra is a site with a lot of information, databases and stories. It does cover Loudoun County better than the Post could have ever dreamed of before. But the site doesn’t have a lot of the user-generated content features that were envisioned when the project was announced, and it never really engaged the community.

Simply put: the return on investment wasn’t very good, and there was a hell of an investment in this site. There appears to be a fundamental divide between the Post itself and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and that may have been a large part of why this site is failing (and why the Post may not be able to do hyperlocal properly):

Though LoudounExtra.com seemed to promise an ideal combination of innovation and marketing muscle, it has failed to benefit from the reach of Washingtonpost.com. Mr. Curley says whenever a big story breaks involving Loudoun County, the Post typically publishes it on Washingtonpost.com without a link to LoudounExtra. That deprives LoudounExtra of potential traffic. Nor does the Washingtonpost’s own dedicated Loudoun County page send visitors directly to its online sibling. In September, when Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit announced it was moving its headquarters from Dulles, Va., to New York, the Post linked to the story on LoudounExtra.com for a couple hours before moving the story back to its own site. That window of promotion fueled the Loudoun site’s best traffic day to date, Mr. Curley says.

The Post couldn’t even link to LoudounExtra.com? That’s absurd. The Post site doesn’t interact well with LoudounExtra.com either (there is a separate Loudoun County page at washingtonpost.com that is a hold over from before LoudounExtra.com, which steals traffic from the hyperlocal project).

The mere act of linking to LoudounExtra.com with every story about Loudoun that was posted at washingtonpost.com would have brought in huge amounts of traffic to the fledgling hyperlocal project. It’s called free marketing. It’s also called synergy.

This may be a symptom of a larger problem at the Post — namely the divide between WPNI and the Post. WPNI is in Virginia, while the Post is in D.C. Obviously, that makes combing cultures into a unified newsroom (ala The New York Times) very difficult.

The future of news is a unified operation with the Web (and mobile) taking a lead roll. Currently, the majority of staff resources are still at the print destination in D.C. The Washington City paper had a scathing article about the huge rift between the two operations:

The geographic separation takes its toll on the Post in two ways. It causes frequent communication breakdowns whose remedies invariably involve costly investments in training and outreach, and it creates overlapping functions in which both the print and online operations assign reporters to the same beats. The result is waste, a luxury that no newspaper, including the Post, can afford in this era of slumping print circulation and advertising.

Other newspapers have begun to realize that the idea of separate newsrooms makes little sense. It’s a 1990s-era anachronism when people thought that the Web product would be a rehash of the print product with some Web exclusives filled in. Now people realize that news operations have to be platform agnostic — from the publisher on down to every reporter:

Other papers, meanwhile, have abandoned the Post’s separate-but-unequal model. A year ago, the Los Angeles Times integrated its news and Web functions after an internal report called the paper “Web-stupid.” The New York Times began combining its Web-paper operations in August 2005 and accelerated the process when it moved to a new building last spring. “It’s very much a two-way street,” says Jonathan Landman, the Times’ deputy managing editor and top editorial voice on the Web site.

It doesn’t sound like the Post will be rethinking its separate staffs model, but it will have to rethink how it does hyperlocal if it wants to be successful in that arena. It is going to need to dedicate more reporters to the areas it wants to cover, require its reporters to live in the local areas they are covering at a hyperlocal level, build up a grass roots following, allow for much greater user interaction (allow your local assets to improve your project and become invested in it) and, finally, the Post may have to reconsider its county model altogether.

The D.C. region is largely comprised of transplants like me who have little history in the area. I still consider Ohio my home and probably will be out of D.C. in under five years. D.C. is a very poor area to try to establish a local project, ala small-town Kansas.

But I do think hyperlocal projects can succeed. How about a project dedicated to politics and the political elite/junkies in D.C.? How about a site dedicated to the Redskins? Those are areas the Post could really clean up in.

I do not have high hopes for FairfaxExtra (the second hyperlocal site from the Post has coming this summer), unless the model is drastically changed. We’ll know soon enough if the Post is mixing things up with hyperlocal.

Curley, on the other hand, will probably find Vegas a much better place for his innovative brand of journalism. Honestly, it was probably a good move for his sanity, happiness and career. He told me he is going to work harder than ever in Vegas to make successful products, and I think he will. It sounds like he has gotten a lot of inspiration from what transpired at the Post.

In a year or two the dust will finally settle on the Post’s hyperlocal efforts, and maybe they will be successful with some tweaks and hard work. Or maybe WSJ will write an even more negative piece about the Post’s efforts.

Pushing the needle forward

Rob Curley said at the E&P Interactive Media Conference that he tries to only work on projects that “move the needle.”

If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards, because your competitors are always trying to outdo you. With the Web, everyone is a competitor.

Pushing the needle forward means not asking “what have we done in the past,” but instead asking, “what can we do in the future?” How can we innovate?

How can we make something better? Pushing the needle forward means realizing that your last project will never be your best project, because you’ll always be trying to make things better.

That’s why I think everyone should constantly be working to improve themselves (it’s individuals who allow companies to rest on their laurels). With that in mind, I’ve been using Lynda.com for the past month, and I have to say it’s been a complete pleasure.

I’m using the premium version, which is $375 a year (non-premium versions cost less but don’t come with exercise files). That may seem like a lot in the abstract, but it’s actually quite a bargain if you use it every week. One class at a community college could easily be that much.

So far I’ve been watching the PHP/MySQL videos (and doing the exercises along with them) and watching videos on SEO. Both have been great resources so far. The SEO videos are particularly great because I can just veg out and watch a few when I get home from work.

Unlike the PHP/MySQL videos, they don’t really require a lot of work while watching the videos. I occasionally make tweaks to my personal site and write down notes while I watch the videos. I have already seen some real SEO gains from the tips I have learned. I now am the No. 1 result for both Pat Thornton and Patrick Thornton under Google.

There are so many other subjects I plan on exploring in the next year with Lynda.com. If I’m not learning something new, or honing an existing skill, I’m moving backwards.

Journalism needs people who are constantly pushing the needle forward. I’m convinced that The Washington Post will suffer much more from Curley leaving for the Las Vegas Sun than vice versa. He is the kind of person who is always looking to push the needle forward and keep innovating.

And every employee was dedicated to pushing the needle forward, we wouldn’t have to worry about disruptive technologies and new competitors. We would be one step ahead already.

Journalism needs people who are never satisfied. The kinds of people who never, ever say, “but that’s how we’ve always done things.”

It doesn’t matter how you used to do something. It matters how you’re going to do something.

P.S. The JI set a new record in May for traffic. It’ll be a letdown if June isn’t a new record as well.

I can’t wait for the future of print newspapers

I don’t believe print is dead.

Far from it. I just believe, however, that most print products are trying to compete with online products. The fundamental problem with most print products is that they are trying to do it all (especially breaking news), instead of concentrating on what they do best — analysis pieces and enterprise stories.

Print can be a great medium when it concentrates on its strengths. The Economist does a fantastic job of this. It is not trying to break news — print can no longer do that — but rather it is trying to take a look back at the news and provide context.

Too many print products want to be a recap of yesterday’s news. Anyone who truly follows the news has already seen and heard the big news. Smart print products don’t try to outdo the Internet and mobile — that’s a losing proposition.

I subscribe to National Geographic, and it works really well as a print product because it is filled with in-depth enterprise and analysis pieces (and much of what I read in NG I don’t regularly come across in other news outlets). It’s the very kind of content that makes perfect sense in print. I don’t like reading long stories on my computer (let alone mobile device), and it’s those pieces that National Geographic does best.

I also subscribe to the Sunday Washington Post. It’s a good product. It’s not great, and it’s not an Economist or National Geographic-class print product.

I enjoy sitting down with the Sunday Post and reading the enterprise and feature stories in it, but it’s a still a product predicated on the other six days of the Post. There just aren’t that many analysis pieces, and it’s not the most serious piece of journalism.

That’s why I have a proposal. The Post (and all dailies) should make a second Sunday paper. Instead of being like the Sunday Post or Times, it should be like the Economist. This is an edition for people who get their news online, Monday-Saturday.

This edition’s mission is to provide analysis and context. It’s not going to be filled with light-weight feature stories. It’s not about the Sunday Comics or all those circulars.

This edition is about giving people a different level of news that they don’t get on a daily basis. It’s a serious edition. In fact, most Sunday editions are rather light and fluffy when it comes to news, and a lot of the stories really aren’t that important.

I firmly believe, however, this new, second Sunday edition is the future of printed products for newspaper organizations. It’s an edition that recognizes that people primarily get news online and know what is going on in the world. This edition is not a recap of old news — it’s providing depth, context and new information that gets missed in a rapid-fire news world.

I do think much like the Economist, this new edition would work better in magazine form. It’s a radical idea, but it’s the kind of idea that makes sense in an online world, and it’s the kind of product that would grow — not shrink — circulation.

One day this will be the future for smart newspapers, and eventually it replace the original Sunday paper. And then eventually it will be the only print product produced by newspapers.

I’m never going to subscribe to a daily newspaper again, but I would be the first to subscribe to a product like this. It’s a product that recognizes the reality on the ground and embraces change.

The Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism. When more journalists and publishers recognize that, we’ll start making print products that really matter and work for people.