L.A. Times: Enough change, or too little, too late?

The good news is, LATimes.com is getting 20 million uniques a month — and that is “about double what it was this time last year,” according to Meredith Artley, executive editor, LATimes.com.

The bad news is, they still haven’t fully merged the newsrooms (and the financial crisis might drive Sam Zell to do something drastic, but that’s another story).

Russ Stanton, editor of the Los Angeles Times, said multiple silos interfere. Right now they are “trying to eliminate vertical silos and make them more horizontal,” he said. The Times’s newsrooms are on three floors, with the Web alone on one — but the Web newsroom is going to move into the two other newsrooms.

Overlapping staffs — especially in travel, entertainment, and autos — will have to be, well … no one said “cut back,” but it was clear that Stanton can’t support two journalists doing basically the same work. The biggest overlaps are in entertainment, spanning the business section, calendar and Web.

“We’re looking at combining all of them into one group that works for online, print, and TV,” Stanton said.

They can’t just mash everything together, though.

“If you just knock over a silo, it tends to squish stuff,” Aaron Curtiss, deputy innovation editor for LATimes.com.

Artley, Stanton, and Curtiss were on a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference (Sept. 13), where they explained how they’re using internal training and education in efforts to integrate the newsrooms.

“It took 18 months, but we’re finally ready to move in together,” Curtiss said.

He said that 18 months ago, a lot of people in the newsroom “didn’t know how to get from A to B,” even if their intentions were good. So they started with a basic class — for everyone — about how the Web works and how the news business is changing. “It sounds basic, but it was necessary,” Curtiss said.

Eventually they set up a 40-class training program with modular topics including storytelling, SEO headline writing (”a lot of people took that one,” Curtiss said), TypePad, and video.

Some of the changes:

• Copy editors have taken over a lot of the day-to-day production of the Web site.
• The Times still needs to “get organized” on visual journalism and “pump that up,” Artley said. They have resized some things (to make them bigger), “and we’ll be doing more of that,” she said. They’ve also been working on doing more with video. “You need to do unique stand-alone video that shines,” she acknowledged.
• They pull up Google Trends on a big screen and look at what is popular. Reporters find story ideas from doing so. “We’re not letting Google tell us what to do,” Artley cautioned. “We’re finding out what people are talking about.”
• Looking at their own metrics showed them what their site visitors are looking for. A large number of people, for example, come to the home page and type the word immigration into search box, Artley said. When Times journalists tried that, they saw that what they got was “a mishmash of random articles about immigration.” By learning what people want from you, you can deliver something better to them, she said — like a curated index of immigration stories. (Too bad you still don’t get this when you type the word immigration into search box!)

Although video is improving the stickiness of the site (”It’s making people stay longer,” Stanton said), it’s not alway a sure bet. Curtiss pointed out that some great stories in the newspaper fall flat online — and video is the same. “Some are going to hit, and some are going to miss,” he said.

When Artley joined the Times a year and a half ago, she “got to hire a few new folks,” including a blog editor. They now have 50 blogs on a wide range of topics. “Most are written by our print reporters, and most post more than once a day,” she said. Their “Top of the Ticket” politics blog is ranked No. 72 on Technorati.

Being fast and being good is what matters most, Stanton said. The platform doesn’t really matter now.That is, it doesn’t matter which platform posts, publishes, or airs first — and it doesn’t matter which platform a reporter used to identify with.

Curtiss said they are trying not to distinguish between print and online so much. “Reporters are just reporters, not print or online,” he said.

“If you’re going to change the way you do things, you’re going to have to change the infrastructure to support that,” Stanton said.

“That’s the million-dollar trick,” Curtiss added. With three platforms pulling from the same pool of content, the challenge is to recognize what kind of story it is, and who is the best person to cover it. A fire requires one kind of coverage. A press briefing at the Pentagon requires something else. This means not only which reporter, but which reporter using which tools.

And in spite of the remark that platform doesn’t matter, Curtiss acknowledged that “What you expect on TV is different from what you expect in a newspaper like the Los Angeles Times.”

But “are we going to send three reporters? Of course not,” he said.

In hiring, Artley said, they used to look for general producers. “We find we can train a lot of people we already have to do that work,” she said. “I am hiring less generalists and more specialists. People with topic areas. People who get the Web and also understand one topic very well — a database specialist, or somebody who’s great in social media.”

What has failed, so far? “We’ve had a lot of blogs that we tried and that just didn’t take off,” Artley said. Some journalists just didn’t get the hang of how to blog properly.

What challenges remain? They need to do a lot more with reader engagement, Artley said. How to deal with the massive amount of stuff coming in from users remains a question. (In another venue on Sept. 26, Stanton told an audience that the L.A. Times still moderates every comment. Whoa.)

The changes are continuing. “We don’t want to lock it down and say this is the exact structure and it’s not going to change,” Artley said.