These are great quotes from James O’Shea’s address to Los Angeles Times staff (bolds are mine):
With our industry in turmoil, our company for sale and our futures uncertain, it’s easy to forget that journalism is a great calling.
Today I am going to outline how the Los Angeles Times is going to transform itself from being a great newspaper to becoming an awesome, relentless, powerful story-telling machine online and in print.
The genesis for this, of course, is the Spring Street project launched by my predecessor and friend, Dean Baquet.
Over the last several months, a group of your colleagues, editors and reporters from this newsroom, fanned out across the country and the world to interview some of the world’s best minds and organizations trying to figure out how newspapers should adapt to thrive in this brave new universe.
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.
I am new to this newsroom.
As I said in my initial remarks last November, I came here because I thought I could help. And the best way for me to help is to tell you the truth.
This is an excellent newsroom teeming with talent, integrity and ambition. It is a paragon of journalistic excellence. We have good strong ethics and solid standards.
But the newsroom can also be a cold, defensive, insular and conservative place, plagued by a bunker mentality that hides behind tradition and treats change as a threat.
We’ve all heard about our readership troubles and the dangers they pose to our future so I won’t belabor that. But let me take a few moments to share some alarming data on our finances.
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.
But we can’t hide from the fact that smart competitors such as Google and Craigslist are stealing readers and advertisers from us through innovative strategies that are undermining the business model we’ve relied on for decades.
So what are we going to do about it?
Number One: By working with our online colleagues, we are going to integrate our online and print newsrooms to become the best news gathering organization in the world, giving readers who live in Southern California the best source of locally-edited news they can get anywhere.
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 is 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.
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.
The newspaper is the edited medium, the place where we make choices about what is crucial to a story and what is not, where we use our sources and expertise to make editorial decisions that save our readers time, that capitalize on our journalistic experience and expertise to help people negotiate a tricky and confusing world, where we focus on the personalities behind the news and where we exercise literary and journalistic discipline to tell people what we think they need to know and not necessarily everything that we as journalists know about a subject.
The standards for online news are different from the newspaper; the placement of ads is different, too. What is unacceptable in one medium is standard practice in another.
We need new standards for what we will publish online that preserves our greatest asset – the integrity of our newspaper.
Live chats can let readers communicate directly with our people in the field. Pictures, video, graphics and words all enhance a reader’s experience and help build interest in the edited stories in the newspaper each day.
The future is in our hands as great storytellers, the one constant in our ever-changing universe.
We have a good story to tell so let’s start telling it and telling it well. Let’s make our great journalism available to an even wider audience; let’s show the world that newspapers and the journalists that create them are not dead. We are alive, well and fighting back.
