Being Los Angeles locals and part of an ever more select group of people who still subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, Independent Sources has been grated by the sad state of the LAT Business Section. California’s economy is greater than most countries, yet the paper seems to have had a difficult time finding things to write about. It has depended far too much on day-old stock quotes and rewritten company press releases to fill its pages. In a modern and connected world, these are as relevant as day old traffic reports and the paper’s circulation woes show it.

Last October in a post entitled “Los Angeles Times Going out of Business (Section)”, Independent Sources wrote:

Earlier in our post “Keyword Search “Duh”; LA Times Business Section Hits Bottom,” we wrote:

The 6/18 Business section totals a minuscule eight pages and that includes four pages of stock quotes as well as several advertisements. The section also includes the notably disappointing “Search for a Bubble Heats Up on the Net” by Times staff writer Annette Haddad .

And still earlier in “LA Times Business Section Gets Thinner Still,” we had this to say:

The best current columnist at the LA Times, James Flanigan, is leaving the paper at the end of the month. This edges the Lohan-esque thin Business section of the paper even farther toward irrelevancy to the hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of investors and employed people living in the region.

As you can see, Independent Sources has not been very happy with that section of the paper which is why we were quite pleased to see this story in this morning’s edition:

Next week The Times’ Business section will consolidate its listings of stocks and mutual funds and introduce a series of features to improve coverage of Southern California’s diverse economy.

The daily tables of stock and mutual fund prices will be condensed to one page starting March 14. The page will include a listing of each day’s 1,300 most heavily traded stocks and an expanded list of publicly traded companies based in Southern California.

The change recognizes that most investors monitor daily stock prices via the Internet. It also will reduce newsprint costs.

Who says that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? The Times seems to finally recognize that people can and do use the Internet for obtaining time-sensitive information like stock quotes and box scores, etc. and that insightful reporting and analysis are what people want from a modern paper. Google news, Google Alerts, news blogs, and other tools are making it so that by the time people are opening up the morning paper, they already know the gist of what has happened in areas that are important to them. What they want from the paper are the “hows & whys” of these events–something that was never going to be accomplished by reprinting stock quotes or rewording press releases.

Now if the editors can just get its columnists like Hiltzik to stick to writing about business, the paper may just have a chance holding on to local readers who’ve had to turn to papers like the WSJ or the Internet for business information of substance.

Update: Insider woke up this morning feeling a little less cantankerous than when he wrote the paragraph immediately above late last night. It isn’t realistic to expect to agree with everything he or any columnist writes and while there is much that I disagree with in his approach, he is doing a number of things that I do agree with. First, over the past several months there have been several articles I’ve quite enjoyed (particularly the AOL fraud story which was as good as Steve Lopez’s first-person identity theft column a few weeks before). Second, Hiltzik is leveraging the Internet in a way that we wish more mainstream media outlets did. He maintains a blog, accepts comments, and even has podcasts (though I haven’t listened to those yet). The blog postings either cover topics not in his column or add information that for various reasons was not included in the column–both are significant value-ads. While we will continue to write about is columns, if the Business Section gains more heft then our primary concern about the relevancy of his column topics wanes.

tags: los angeles times LA Times hiltzik

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 11:50 pm by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.