If you live outside of L.A., this paper has no actual value to your news intake for the day. IMO it seems their entire focus is California and that’s it — yes.. it is the “LA TIMES” but they have many different sections.
For example, if you visit ~/Science/Medicine, you’ll see they went almost an entire month without one post on this topic — June 26th to July 15th.
Do you want to see what’s happening around the world? ~/World section was recently stripped of all subsections — Mexico, Middle East — and instead all posts fall under the general umbrella on the main page.
Not to mention, a lot of their articles are borderline tabloid-TMZesque. Do you want to read about Heidi Klum’s Bel-Air home she recently put on the market? The business section is prime reading for you.
In all reality, once the L.A. Times’ formed their guild, many writers found employment elsewhere, and those that have stayed are constantly bailing water out of their sinking ship.
Check your notes, folks. There were layoffs at the behest of good ol' Tronc (the famously mismanaged Chicago Tribune conglomerate) but it appears that very few writers left the LAT of their own volition after unionization -- on the order of 1. (https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/la-times-cuts-layoffs.p...)
I'm not sure I can fault them much for this. I imagine most that care for national news care enough to get it from some more well known agency, like WaPo, NYT, etc. You can either try to compete with the likes of them, or focus on what they can't easily provide, which is more local news.
This is just what the Internet does, consolidate services into the few players that do it best. It would be interesting if their were bundled subscriptions for local papers. If there was an integrated offering such that you could buy NYT or WaPo with LA Times, or SF Chronicle, or whatever your local paper was tacked on for a moderate fee, I imagine a lot of people would opt for that. Enough that it might be beneficial for both agencies.
NYT and WaPo definitely have the online resources and talent to do something like that, and if they did it well, they could offer a platform for newspapers to use for publishing that allowed enough branding that they could probably make quite a bit of money while making it trivial to combine articles between sources very smoothly.
...eh? Which LA Times writers quit because the newsroom unionized?
Similar reasons for subscribing digitally and the same lack of other stories I would find interesting. I'm sure it's great for LA but a lesson learned - subscribe digitally to national or local.
Cannot fault the LA Times for their focus but there is a real concern with the way they do business when it comes to these digital subscriptions. You can sign up easily enough yet when you want to cancel, you have to call in and spend 10 minutes on the phone. Plus, you're given multiple sales pitches for lower-priced offerings when cancelling.
This type of dark pattern for a well-known newspaper could itself be a tech news story.
What could be worrisome is this kind of difficult cancellation process will put people off from supporting other news organizations via subscription.
Could the case be made that finance and politics grip the nation far more than tech and Hollywood?
Also, the recent magazine like articles they’ve had have been exceptional in the tech, while not messing with the default browser behaviors too much (such as overriding scrolls).
That’s gotta be the direction the news orgs have to take. They have to increasingly become tech companies.
I have a friend working there as a SWE/data viz contributor, and he’s really excited about the editorial and data viz staff.
That being said, it does sound (from article and friend) like they just got out of the technical woods with the release of their revamped website. They obviously still have work to do based on these churn numbers.
The price is high though. I subscribe to NYT, so do I need another?
Does the LA Times really have a chance of competing with NYT or WaPo? At this point I'm not sure why they should try, other than hubris.
This is literally a scam and would be bad for any business but 10x worse for a newspaper. "Hey, would you like to get your news from scammers like us?"
I'm never going to sit down and read the LA Times website like it was a newspaper. That ship has sailed. I will, however, occasionally check it for the breaking news of the day. I'm definitely going to read their annual 100 LA Essential restaurant list, and I will also visit articles that my friends post to facebook. That being said, I know from experience that there will be entire weeks that I will not visit once. In the end, it's just not worth $100 to me.
I know there's someone at the times screaming "But look at what you get", but that same person is ignoring my cries of "but look at what I actually use".
[1]: https://www.arcpublishing.com/products/
[2]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-the-washington...
Website readership might be a better indication of relative health for these newspapers.
The other factor in success is whether they have been quick enough to shed costs of production and distribution of print.
