The LA Times recorded 127 million page views last month – breaking its previous record of 120 million.
The site attracted 19 million unique users in July, a memo from the paper’s Meredith Artley, executive editor for interactive, said.
While the recent Californian earthquake was a contributing factor to the traffic surge, new SEO techniques and growing popularity on social bookmarking sites have had a significant impact, Artley said.
Blog traffic also grew last month rising to 12 million page views. The most popular blog, in terms of traffic, was Top of the Ticket, which recorded 1,800,770 views, according to the paper’s figures.
Tags: LA Times, Meredith ArtleyAgence France-Presse (AFP) has retracted a photo of Iranian missile tests published this morning, stating the image had been ‘apparently digitally altered’ by Iran’s state media, the New York Times’ Lede section reports.
It was too late for the print editions of the LA Times, Financial Times, Chicago Tribune and others, who ran the pic on the front page, and for the BBC, New York Times and Yahoo News websites.
Below - spot the difference between 1) the AFP’s image…
…and 2) an image later obtained by the Associated Press:
According to the Lede’s report, the agency said the fourth missile may have been added to mask a grounded missile that failed to launch during the test.
Tags: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, BBC, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, LA Times, new york times, the New York Times, YahooAnalysis of the LA Times’ most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia on its website shows a correlation between platforms and the topic of content.
For example, blogs on the site attract politically interested readers while the news channel is increasingly focused on ’soft’ and entertainment news.
Tags: LA TimesThe Chicago Tribune is to follow the LA Times by culling newsroom jobs and reducing the number of pages in its printed editions.
Around 80 of its 578 newsroom posts are expected to be culled with further cuts appearing in non-journalistic positions.
The printed edition of the Tribune is expected to reduce the number of pages it publishes by 13 or 14 per cent each week.
Management began informing staff of the changes late on Tuesady, the Tribune itself reported.
This is the fourth round of staff cuts since 2005, when the paper had nearly 700 newsroom staff on its books. In real terms the paper expects to lose around 55 people as positions made vacant in recent months have remained unfilled.
Last week, The Los Angeles Times, another Tribune Company newspaper, announced that it would reduce the number of pages it published each week by 15 per cent anddo away with 250 staff roles, 150 of them from the newsroom.
Tags: Chicago Tribune, LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Tribune companyLast week LA Times, one of the biggest employers of journalists in the US, announced that it would be dispensing with the services of 150 of them as part of a total 250 job losses at the paper.
Yesterday afternoon it emerged that two more journalists would likely be leaving the LA Times, but not as a direct result of the editorial cuts.
According to LA Observed, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber will be leaving the paper later in the summer to join the not-for-profit investigative start up ProPublica.
“It’s another big morale blow in the newsroom, which used to be a place where journalists aspired to reach and stay to do their best work. With new deep cutbacks coming and [LA Times owner] Sam Zell’s outbursts making many of the best journalists feel the Times’ commitment to serious news is precarious, it’s no longer surprising to see stars like Ornstein and Weber flee,” wrote Kevin Roderick.
Last week’s editorial staff cuts, which amounts to roughly 17 per cent of the employees, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ web operations.
Those cuts led to this fascinating quote from Times editor Russ Stanton:
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” he wrote said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
One hundred and fifty losses job losses against two hires doesn’t really make a great case for the internet as a growth medium for the employment of journalists, but nonetheless the growth of ProPublica and its journalistic modus operandi online marks a neat stab at Stanton’s paradox.
The ProPublica site will be fully operational later this year and plans to have almost 30 investigative reporters working on in-depth stories (it helps that self-made billionaire Herb Sandler has set up the site with a donation of $10m a year from his foundation and that it’s under the watchful eye of former WSJ editor Paul Steiger).
ProPublica will conduct investigations, largely online, in areas of significant public interest. It will also use TV documentaries to reveal on that large canvas issues that will be followed up extensively online.
It’s first major project, an investigation into US-backed Arabic language TV network Alhurra, ran on 60 Minutes two weeks ago.
Zell say that newspapers have to slim down and become more economically viable. Newspaper’s are about money, not news, that’s fairly self-evident. Little wonder then that Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber decided to walk and pursue their investigations elsewhere.
What awaits them at ProPublica?
A philanthropic backer claiming no editorial interference. No desire for profits. No ads on the site. Where almost all resources will be poured into journalism (what no free CD give away?).
The journalistic equivalent to Willy Wonka’s ‘golden ticket’, it seems.
Tags: LA Times, United StatesThe LA Times announced yesterday that it will cut 250 jobs - 150 editorial positions - across the company in a latest effort to curb spending as reveunes plummet.
In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15 per cent.
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the staff.
“Thanks to the internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
Tags: LA TimesThe LA Times has created two great interactive features online: the first allows users to see different voting outcomes of November’s presidential election on a map of the US.
Using data from the 2004 election, states on the map can be assigned to either Obama or McCain, showing users how a winning these constituencies will affect the candidates’ chances overall.
The second marks the Californian soldiers who have lost their lives in the Iraq conflict.
Video, image galleries and a searchable database of soldiers’ profiles have been created, accompanied by moving text tributes from family members
Tags: Iraq, LA Times, United StatesThe Los Angeles Times has integrate its print and web picture desks and video operations into a new visual journalism department.
The move is the next phase in the Times’ alignment of its web and print operations, which will see mergers across the continuous news desk and main metro news desk this month.
The new department will be headed by Colin Crawford, who has been promoted to deputy managing editor for photography.
“Combining these three departments under the umbrella of visual journalism will improve our ability to present multimedia storytelling in an even more engaging way, and take greater advantage of our outstanding photo staff,” editor Ross Stanton said in a memo to staff.
Tags: Colin Crawford, LA Times, Ross Stanton, The Los Angeles Times, The Times, web picture desksLatimes.com recorded 101,364,530 page views last month, according to an email to staff from executive editor Meredith Artley - shown in full on Mediabistro.
And they’re not stopping there: Artley says plans are underway to redesign the site’s local section and add more blogs to its repertoire.
Her note also details traffic to the site’s blogs with February attracting a record 5,764,230 of page views to this area.
“[T]raffic is up across the board due to great efforts by the Web and print teams (a distinction that gets blurrier every day), and not just because of one news event or a few well-placed links from big traffic-driving sites like Drudge,” Artley writes.
Tags: LA Times, Meredith Artley
Main news from Journalism.co.uk