Congrats to Deirdre Edgar

Been meaning to post a congrats to fellow American Copy Editors Society member Deirdre Edgar, with whom I've had the pleasure of working with as a presenter at several ACES conferences.

Edgar was named the new readers' representative at the L.A. Times last month. (A Q and A on Andy Bechtel's blog reminded me how slothful I'd been on that.)

I did get a kick out of one of her early posts -- how the Times is dropping the use of "today" because who knows when you'll read this in the Internet age. How wire service of them (ha!).

Good luck, Deirdre.

Mutter on why NYT may have to go private

If you want the straight dope on the business end of media, Alan Mutter's Reflections of a Newsosaur blog is one place you have to stop regularly.

First, I recommend to you his latest post on why the New York Times may have to go private, even though it is likely to balloon the company's debt load. As Mutter notes: The more properties the company sells, the more it could reduce its debt and the less it would be forced to cut operating expenses at the New York Times. Thus, the future of the crown jewel of American journalism may well depend on how many other jewels the family is willing to sell.

Earlier he did a thorough job of dissecting the Tribune deal and the employee stock ownership plan to be created.

While you're at it, add Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0 to your reading. Hey, you've gotta feel superior to the ad folks at some point, right. Yeah, right ...

LA Times

I'm not sure there's a lot to be added to what Los Angeles Times Editor James O'Shea told his staff this week that the Times pretty much will focus on the Web for breaking news and seriously reposition the way it thinks about the paper as an analysis and explanatory vehicle (Accompanying story.)

It's about as blunt as it gets (subtext -- lead, follow or get the hell out of here). A few excerpts follow. The industry clearly is beginning to panic; its demands for change will soon be felt in the academy (far beyond whatever we've done so far, which pretty much amounts to dipping our toes in the water in most places).

The Spring Street group's conclusion about our progress online is brutally honest and it doesn't paint a pretty picture. We're woefully behind.

I know that our natural inclination as journalists is to ask why. Who is responsible, whose fault is it, who is to blame?

And the answer to that question is: It's everyone's fault.

Every editor, reporter, photographer, artist, everyone who works here everyone who is in this room and everyone who is not here.

Everyone who has ever come up with an excuse as to why we can't do something new and different, it is your fault just as much as anyone's. ...

As an organization and a business, we are in a fight to recoup threatened revenue that finances our newsgathering.

Ad revenue across the board is under challenge but let me share just one category to demonstrate how fast our world is changing and the dimensions of this changing financial dynamic.

In 2004, automotive print advertising at the Los Angeles Times totaled $102 million. And what will it be this year? $55 million.

That is $47 million gone, unavailable to pay salaries and expenses. We made some of that up online. Online auto classified in 2004 totaled only $7 million. But by 2007, it climbed to $31 million, or $24 million up. But notice what is happening here – we lost $47 million in print and only recovered $24 million online. For every $2 we lost, we are recouping only about $1.

The story is similar in other areas. Some categories, such as real estate, are doing well but it is just a matter of time that it too will go south unless we can build online readership faster while keeping print readers. We have to get better.

At this rate, those double-digit profit margins everyone cites will be single digits and then be gone. ...

By virtue of its lightning speed and undisciplined nature, the Internet poses unique challenges to the way we practice journalism. Change is coming; it has to.

One of Russ's first assignments is to set up a training regimen for everyone in the newsroom to develop an expertise on the Internet and become savvy multi-media journalists.

A whole new world in out there -- video, photo galleries, chat rooms, landing pages. And to disprove the adage that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, I am going to be one of his first students. This training is mandatory for everyone.

Currently we have a newspaper staff and an latimes.com staff. No more. From now on, there are no two staffs, there is just one. And we will function as one. One of Russ's first jobs will be to help set up that newsroom. Leo Wolinsky is already working on a plan and details will be coming soon.

Latimes.com will become our primary vehicle for breaking news 24 hours a day. Reporters now enter the newsroom and tell editors what kind of a story they will write for the newspaper the next day.

Then -- we tend to think what can we do for the Internet, as if it were some kind of journalistic orphan.

That kind of thinking must change if we want to remain competitive.

We need to enter the newsroom and think about how we are going to break news on the Internet.

And then what we are going to do that will be different for the newspaper, which will become an even stronger vehicle for tightly-written context, analysis, interpretation and expertise. There is no better example of that than this morning front page story by John Horn and Gina Piccalo's piece on the Oscar's, a sohpisticaed analysis of the international forces driving the decisions of the judges. ...

Just as a blog is not a God-given right to inflict ignorance on an unsuspecting public, there's no journalistic birthright for print reporters to write an 80 inch story when 30 inches will do.

The newspaper is the medium in which we must use editing and journalistic discipline to channel that online reservoir and funnel it into a pipeline that leads to our reader's doorsteps.