MollysBrother.com

An Open Letter to the Los Angeles Times

Dear Mr. Hiller,

Today you had Russ Stanton announce 250 job cuts at the Los Angeles Times. It is a shame that you have not been able to stem the financial bleeding that has been happening at your newspaper for too long. Every day, I wake up eager to read the newspaper that continues to be delivered to my front door. And every day, the newspaper feels lighter and thinner in my hands. I have frequented the LATimes.com more recently in the past few months, but have found the webpage static, unoriginal, and uninviting. Here are some suggestions I have that may help you with your bottom line:

• Advertising Space — Take a page from the NYTimes.com. A quick visit to their site showed FIVE (5) “above-the-fold” advertising opportunities. The LATimes.com displays one (1). Even online outlets for smaller newspapers have more advertising opportunities. SFGate.com and the MercuryNews.com have two ads each. Isn’t it in your interest to optimize advertising space? Isn’t that how you make money?
• Relevant News – We are no longer on a 24-hour news cycle, but I don’t need to tell you that. Or maybe I do. Your website updates too infrequently. Again, look at CNN.com, ABCNews.com, MSNBC.com, and the NYTimes.com. Each venue provides minute-to-minute updates.
• Your Layout – I know I shouldn’t be throwing stones here, but I don’t have nearly the budget you do. Your layout–in a word–sucks. It is boring and lacks the kinetic energy that websites should provide these days. Again, look to your competitors (especially broadcast media online outlets–MSNBC.com is an excellent example).
• Return to Your Roots — You have forgotten that, at your core, you are LA’s newspaper. Stop the corporate, cost-cutting attempts coming from Tribune headquarters.
• Call on “the New Media” — This paper exists in the same city as MySpace HQ. Even though MySpace has floundered a bit to its Facebook rival, there might be much to learn from their knowledge approach. Take some meetings. Learn the law of the land. Write your articles so Google and Yahoo can actually find them.
• Value Your Employees — At the end of the day, value your employees. I detest supporting a newspaper that devalues its colleagues to the extent that the LA Times has recently. Favorite columnists have disappeared. Or, a long-time reader favorite like Al Martinez, reappears and is relegated to a part-time schedule in an ill-fitting section of the newspaper. But my heart goes out to the army of nameless men and women who work (or worked) tirelessly behind the scenes to get this newspaper out the door each and every day. Knowing that they are losing their jobs because of constant mismanagement angers me. Almost to the point of a permanent subscription cancellation. (Don’t be fooled: It is coming soon. Just keep up the cutbacks and the mismanagement. Especially since I don’t hear about pay cuts for the top corporate earners.)

It is time to understand that the internet presence and the real-world presence have to go hand-in-hand. You can “blame” the influence of the internet for your lack of ad dollars. You can blame your own mishandling of your website. It’s not like the internet came out of nowhere and sneaked up on you. We’ve been dealing with the internet for over a decade now. It’s time to stop lamenting its presence and to start earning money from it.

But, like a lot of advice given to the LA Times recently, I feel like this, too, will fall on deaf ears.

Signed,

A Reader on the Subscription Bubble