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LA.com - It's ooooh, so "groovy"
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6275 Reads
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Somewhere beneath the surface of L.A.'s roiling cyberstew, an enormous, rather pungent bubble of over-perfumed and disappointingly airheaded grrrl-power, backed by the huge Gannett chain and Media News Group (parent of the L.A. Daily News), is poised to burst forth.
LA.com has been under development for more than a year under the guidance of former new media think-tanker Lynda Keeler and - more recently, the editorial direction of Laurie Pike, who bailed from leading Tribune's up-scaly and rather ossified Distinction magazine right around the time it was to launch.
According to an extremely reliable source, MNG and Gannett spent nearly half a million bucks on the domain name. But who did they rather mystifyingly choose to target with that 800-pound gorilla of a URL?
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Nineteen- to 26-year-old women, that's who.
Early views of the site - still awaiting official launch with a likely advertising blitz - show it to be heavy with celebrity froth, "hipster" information on L.A. clubs and eateries and, in general, candy-flavored visual noise.
It even boasts a blog called LAcomfidential which has been rather obsessed with star-spottings at Sundance lately, and completely unoriginal, non-L.A. posts like the one quoting Matt Welch's take on Howard Dean's meltdown.
Don't get me wrong - LA has needed a snappy, comprehensive high-profile Web-only city guide since the dumbing-down of Citysearch, the 2001 demise of LAinsider.com and the recent monetizing of LAtimes.com's arts content.
(Full disclosure - I oversaw development, launch, operation and, ultimately, the folding of LAinsider's content after Cox Interactive Media pulled the plug in the face of the internet ad market implosion. I also applied unsuccessfully for Pike's position before realizing how suicidally narrow LA.com's builders wanted to make its target market. In short, I'm glad I didn't get the job).
And indeed, the site is rather attractive in a blinky-blinky sort of way, and will certainly hit its target smack in the saccharine tooth.
But "LA.com???"
You have to question the psychiatric stability of major media engines that decide to turn away from the vast storehouses of pre-fab Los Angeles-related information and armies of fact-hounds at their fingertips, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the bling-bling Hummer of all domain names, pay untold millions for - clearly - professional development time, resources and talent, and then decide on this:- A travel-and-entertainment-oriented Web site (in a decidedly bearish internet ad market)
- geared toward an extremely narrow and - compared with a broader, more affluent unisex 18-35 demographic - poorer target audience
- with apparently little more on its mind about the dazzlingly rich cultural mecca in which it actually lives than who wore what in Park City, Utah last week.
If I were feeling churlish, I'd ask, "Where's the beef?" although they seem to have answered that with a fluffy little article on tapas at Veneto.
Instead, I wonder - with the all the staggering tonnage of local media invested in Los Angeles - are itty-bitty entities like LAvoice.org the only places online where real Angelenos will be able to read (and write) about the forces and events that shape their lives and their neighborhoods?
Or am I just bitter that I'm not a 21-year-old Mini-driving Angelena with an endless line of credit and not a care in the world but my next shopping spree?
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, January 22, 2004 - 04:54 PM
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