Tribune may be taking its time figuring out where it plans to be a year from now, but Editor James O’Shea at its largest paper, the Los Angeles Times, is taking its future into his own hands.
The Web will now be the LAT’s primary vehicle for news, reflecting a need to boost sales at what many people see as the future of news delivery and to try to fight what Editor Publisher called “an increasingly difficult economic climate for newspaper publishers.”Here’s the LAT in its own words: “O’Shea employed dire statistics on declining print advertising revenue to urge The Times’ 940 journalists to throw off a ‘bunker mentality’ and view latimes.com as the paper’s primary vehicle for delivering news.”
How? Again, to the LAT: “O’Shea named Business Editor Russ Stanton to the innovation post and said the ‘Internet 101′ course would teach reporters, editors and photographers to become ’savvy multimedia journalists,’ able to enhance their writing with audio and video reports. He emphasized the need for speed in reforming an operation that he called ‘woefully behind’ the competition.”