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. In this case, local news gets dumped into a blog called “L.A. News”, which is woefully misnamed as it also encompasses the San Diego metro area (note the “Fox 5 San Diego” logo), as well as news from Sacramento.

Dumb names aside, this is a big mistake. Here’s why: take a look at the links within the blog page itself. None–absolutely none–take you to stories in latimes.com. There are links to the blog’s Facebook, Twitter and RSS feeds, and links to other blog postings. Scroll down and you’ll get recent posts, recent comments, a category cloud, and even links to local coverage in other media: conveniently, they offer headlines from LAist.com and several TV stations. This is a tad further down the page:

You’ll note that these are feeds listing headlines elsewhere. What about headlines within the L.A. Times? Nope. The blog, as formatted, does a good job of driving you away from latimes.com. If fact, if you want to get back into the “newspaper” content, your only choice is to take potluck on the category listings at the very top (or use the link to the homepage, hidden in the logo). None of these include headlines, and several of them lead directly to–more blogs.

In fact, the L.A. Times has gone blog crazy. Check out this list of in-house blogs, taken from the very same page.

A few glaringly ridiculous aspects of this directory. There’s no description of what the blogs are about. Just cutesy titles that either illuminate nothing (did you think that Ticket to Vancouver is a blog about the next Olympics?) or blur into each other: in addition to the inaccurately-named L.A. Now, there’s L.A. Land (real estate), L.A. at Home (architecture/decor) and L.A. Unleashed (not dogs, but “All Things Animal”). Several of them are redundant, or at the very least blatantly overlapping: sports gets covered with Angels Unplugged, Dodger Thoughts and the starkly-named Lakers, but there’s also Fabulous Forum, which purports to be “The Who, What, Where, When, Why—and Why Not—of L.A. Sports.” If that’s not confusing enough, there’s The Daily Dish (on food) and The Dish Rag (on show-biz gossip).

The reign of cutsey titles is all-pervasive. What would you call a blog of “Observations from Iraq, Iran, Israel, The Arab World and Beyond” Probably not Babylon & Beyond. What does Booster Shots convey to you–maybe parenting? Nope, it’s “Oddities, Musings and News from the World of Health.” A blog called Top of the Ticket is about presidential elections, right? Maybe it used to be; now it’s “Politics and Commentary, Coast to Coast.”

The entertainment industry gets the most coy and fractured treatment of all. Gold Derby? A blog just about industry and festival awards. Not to be confused with The Circuit, a blog about the awards and festivals themselves. Neither should be confused with Notes on a Season, a blog devoted to speculation about awards and festivals. You’d think that would corner the market, but no: a fifth blog called Buzzmeter is where “Expert Panelists Select Top Awards Contenders.”

The confusion compounds. All five awards blogs are consolidated into a metasite named The Envelope. Once you enter The Envelope, you’ve reached a dead-end: there’s not a single direct link to any other L.A. Times content. If you want reportage about the actual entertainment industry, you’ll have to jump back to the LAT Entertainment section–where the home page promotes yet more cutsey-named blogs with overlapping missions. The Big Picture (“On the Collision of Entertainment, Media and Pop Culture”), Show Tracker (“What You’re Watching”), Company Town (“The Business Behind the Show”).

Other newspapers, most notably the New York Times, have made blogs an integral part of both their news cycle and their feature offerings. The NYT has two kinds of blogs: those that augment, running parallel to (and commenting upon) the development of full-fledged articles, such as The Lede and Paper Cuts, and those that extend the newsprint edition, with coverage that’s not feasible (for niche or geographic reasons) to get into print. And these blogs are clearly labeled as such–their place on the NYT homepage is under the banner “On the Blogs”, or in the index simply as “Blogs”. The demarcation is intentional, and clear.

In contrast, the LAT blogs are the coverage, and you’re dumped into them without your prior knowledge.

No related posts.

11.11.09 § 0