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LATimes.com: Rearranging Deck Chairs?
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 Kevin Roderick posts this morning about an anonymous flame written against LA. Times management over their firing of Richard Core, longtime editor of LATimes.com.
The flamer, "Cassandra Doright", makes a few good points - and misses a huge one entirely ...
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We recall that under Mr. Core's leadership, the website worked long hours to explore valid new methods of journalistic storytelling. Now, it seems that there is little more than a kind of knee jerk response to latest trends. Have blogs, for example, done anything more than to allow a few third string analysts to ramble? Does anyone think for an instant that such digital masturbation has added to public discourse? Wikitorials were a motherfucking disaster. Podcasts of travel pieces? Please. In the end, the great contribution of current management is to have increased the girth of the site-- an admirable goal to be sure, but one that has little to do with journalism. Donde es Enrique?
No doubt our talented and well-meaning new boss will speak often of editorial focus and group hugs with the print side. And he will tell us that he has much to learn. How right he will be! In their celestial wisdom, management has opted to dispense with a decade of institutional memory and technical expertise. We recall that Mr. Core was actually capable of, you know, doing stuff on the site. This is clearly not a prerequisite for management. But it certainly comes in handy when there is, you know, actual news. Cassandra is right to worry that the loss of Core's technical and interactive expertise will hurt the site's fluidity, speed and direction in "new methods of journalistic storytelling."
Without someone directly at the helm who truly understands the medium at a hands-on level, the site could certainly suffer.
But while the blogs have been of questionable value, and wikitorials were a "motherfucking disaster" - this has been largely because the Times is still struggling with a central difference between simply delivering news content and communicating directly with web users' appetites and methods of engagement.
The paper is talking at, not with its audience.
Doright misses the point of the Times' onward, sometimes stumbling progress into upgrading its website, as right as she is about the willy-nilly and experimental nature of those efforts.
The paper is trying - as best as its collective intelligence and insight into the necessary steps of evolution will allow - to become a successful new media company. The readership and ad money that prop up its rapidly obsolescing and hideously expensive print operations are headed down like a holed nuclear submarine, and it's all hands to all pumps, connected to anything that'll take a hose.
The chief reason for the site's difficulties in making this transition so far has been the paper's unwillingness to give its readers a solid, broad platform for engagement and interactivity - essentially its failure to trust them and create a comfortable community space for them somewhere between the authoritarian delivery of news content and the random brawl of anonymous message boards.
Rather than building authenticated, real-name-only message boards around citizen-moderators and allowing time for the moderators and users to grow a culture in which obscenity, spam and ad-hominem attacks are forbidden, the editors killed the boards they had.
The wikitorial experiment was actually a terrific success for the first 200-plus revisions. As you read back through the versions of the wikitorial on Iraq, you could see not only a diversity of opinion, but a conversation among people of differing viewpoints and a steady, if stutter-step progress toward several flavors of consensus on several sides of the issue.
It was invigorating to watch and - from the point of view of an inveterate user of online news and community spaces - extremely cool.
But when someone posted the cartoonishly obscene Goatse in the wikitorial space barely 48 hours later, the paper chickened out and admitted failure. Rather than simply deleting the obscenity, declaring the most recent "safe" version - and the experiment - a success, publishing it and the link to it in the paper and then launching a fresh wikitorial a few days later on a new topic, the editors allowed the mediasphere to stomp all over them.
Here, IMHO, they botched a tremendous opportunity to build something new, fresh and engaging - and to win a legion of dedicated web users.
In the end, the Times has so far lacked the will to build a welcoming, dynamic environment in which its audience can grow their own interactive culture (with nominal editorial guidance to keep discourse on track) and thus, spurned an online community that is devoted to and actively, regularly engaged with the news the Times delivers so well.
By repeatedly denying their web audience this relationship, they've kept the site's audience growth - and ultimately profit potential - from advancing much beyond the level of a dead tree paper online with some artful webby storytelling and a few useful tools such as Calendar search, real estate and classified ads and traffic maps.
The LiveCurrent blog on the Supreme Court may be the one ray of light in this otherwise forbidding atmosphere. A cadre of legal pundits has been posting regular updates on the replacements for Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist - and users have been allowed to comment on these points of view.
It's interesting to note that in the last few Supreme Court blog posts, the one garnering the most comments was not a pundit's point of view, but an unsigned, "open-thread" item.
As Dan Gillmor said over the weekend at a blogging panel I also sat on, the days of the mainstream media "lecturing to" its public are drawing to a close. As much as web users desperately need reliable news, compellingly delivered, they also crave a stake in and room for their voices in the news-space. Since they're the heart of the Times' nascent new-media business, they deserve at least that much.
If LATimes.com doesn't take the risk of trying to deliver that evolution, then the abrupt shuffling of web-experienced personnel will have been completely for naught.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Monday, October 17, 2005 - 11:18 AM
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