LATimes.com's New Thang: Will THE ENVELOPE Please?*
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It won't launch officially for another few hours, but you can see the L.A. Times' new buzz-happy entertainment site The Envelope wringing out its last few kinks.
The site is cleanly designed (though the gold-and-burgundy color job isn't for everyone) and packed with interesting, useful and engaging content - much of which seems to have been acquired by buying, licensing or assimilating in Borg-like fashion the bulk of GoldDerby.com.
That now-invisible, award-obsessed site (it's hidden behind a password, but you'll find a cached version here) is distributed seamlessly throughout The Envelope, but there's not much information online about the relationship between GD and LAT.com . (* UPDATE: LAT.com general manager Robertson Barrett confirms: "We bought it - it lives on The Envelope, but it's all there, uncensored ...")...
This said, The Envelope's looking pretty interesting - in an obsessive, goggle-eyed autograph-hound sort of way.
As I'm overly fond of paraphrasing the Kaiser on occasions like this, "There are two things one should never watch being made - sausage and the law. Three things, really - add web sites to the list."
At 11:42 p.m. there are still broken images in the rollover navigation, but that appears to be the worst of their opening-night jitters. Here's what's on board:
The Times pulled (bought? licensed?) the brain-bogglingly comprehensive LostMind database (cached version here) of nominees and winners for every single year of virtually every entertainment awards show ever produced - and made it available here
They wrote an early breakdown of the contenders for Best Picture(TM).
The Style desk put together a fashion preview on what several thousand ridiculously highly paid actors will be wearing for a few hours one night next year
James Bates writes in the first "Behind the Screens" space a pretty wry bit about Disney's doomed plan to send out Academy screener discs that can only be played on special Cinea players that are then registered online or by phone:
The Cinea device works like a key to unlock the movie so it can be viewed, and any bootleg versions can be traced to the machine that played it. It goes beyond the watermarking method that can help track leaks via an electronic fingerprint.
All you have to do to set up the player is plug the thing in, then register it online or via phone.
That sounds easy, and it probably is. But it violates one basic entertainment industry rule: don't ask people in Hollywood to do the kinds of tasks most of us accept as routine.
And finally, they launched not one but three blogs:
Perhaps most promising for the purpose of building a dedicated audience are the entertainment forums which - again - seem to have been plucked wholesale from GoldDerby. I'm looking into the Times/GoldDerby deal and will report back if I learn anything more.
All of which is to say the site seems destined to make a lot of trivia fans, movie geeks and self-obsessed stars happy - and may actually suck in a very active cinephile community to boot.
It's the first sign the Times' new-media folk are heading in the right direction - toward building a new-media audience out of interactive, info-hungry communities instead of relying too heavily for growth on cross-pollination from their customary user-base of passive news junkies, half of whom live outside Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, the Times is still the Times, and once again manages to bury the most magnetic tools it has for building loyal repeat-visit audiences behind a wall of expensive, (albeit entertaining), single-use content.
The question is whether they'll be willing to give up text-block real estate for the most obivous fixes: Bring the database out front with a small search interface. Pump a feed of the latest forum posts onto the page - or even RSS feeds from the blogs.
What about adding a box with a weekly poll? Anyone? Bueller?
Of course, to paraphrase Ernie Kovacs: The Internet - a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well-done. Let's hope the editors keep this one on the broiler a while longer.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Monday, October 31, 2005 - 11:20 PM
