The Los Angeles Times is doing what a lot of drain-circling newspapers are doing, i.e., spewing content onto the web, in the vague hope that it will somehow add up to a full-scale transition from one medium to another. But they’ve made a crucial mistake, one that undermines not only their old (dead trees) brand, but their new (online) one as well. Let me demonstrate.
Here’s a screen grab of the latimes.com home page for this morning (November 9, 2009). As you can see, I’m about to click on a story: ‘Bling ring’ burglaries put websites in spotlight.
Here’s where my click takes me: to a blog! In fact, of the eighteen stories listed on the prime “above the fold” portion of the homepage (visible without scrolling down on most monitor), ten do not take you further into latimes.com, but into the subsite latimesblogs.latimes.com. Apparently, LAT management has decided that “blog” is equivalent to “beat”–if they can categorize a story, they might as well turn that category into a entity. read more »
11.11.09 § 0
