The L.A. Times’ disappointing digital numbers | Hacker News Reader

The L.A. Times’ disappointing digital numbers

niemanlab.org

43 pointsheyyyouu27 comments

Last year the L.A. Times was offering a 3-month subscription for free, so I signed up. I wanted to support “independent journalism” so I let it keep renewing until last week — honestly, though, I just forgot to cancel it in February. Anyway, I finally cancelled my digital sub this week.

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.

They're called the la slimes for a reason

> once the L.A. Times’ formed their guild, many writers found employment elsewhere

...eh? Which LA Times writers quit because the newsroom unionized?

> 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.

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.

I very much agree. There’s no real reason for the second tier city newspapers to do much beyond local - that’s actually what I want them to do. When I want national or world news, I look at a short list (NYT, WSJ, Economist, maybe WaPo) that other newspapers just are not going to be able to compete with. But what’s going on in my neighborhood? St Paul Pioneer Press has it covered.

> 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...)

Wow, it's strange that I could've written this same post.

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.

Part of the problem is also that LAT just costs more. I can get the WaPo through Amazon for $4/month, and the NYT is about $6/month on an educational discount. LAT has no obvious digital discounts, and their base price is $8/month. If they dropped that down to the WaPo price, I'd seriously consider it, just to get the state and local coverage for SoCal.

No fucking kidding. I subscribed, and then they sent me email newsletters all the time. Unsubscribe; they invent a new one the next week. Cancel, cancel, cancel, never resubscribe, tell everyone I know to never subscribe.

~10 years ago it was worse. They would just subscribe you themselves to the actual newspaper and then bill you. If you lived in a multi-unit building you wouldn't even know you had been receiving LAT for several months before the bill came!

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 wonder if there's a missing subscription model that allows for casual, not devoted, subscribers.

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".

Another thing: for every digital subscription service, I always wonder if someone has tried a "the more subscribers, the cheaper the subscription" model. For example, I imagine a "If we get 1 million digital subscribers, we'll knock $10 off the annual price for EVERYONE" promo.

The LA times website looks more like a boutique apparel store than a newspaper - there is blue sale signs on a while background. What were they thinking ?

Second LA Times related article I’ve seen on here recently. The former was published by the LA Times: a piece on global warming with a corresponding game. I’d say the HN commentary was quite positive.

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?

At this point I'm just wondering why some major online news player hasn't made a platform good enough that these papers don't feel the need to make their own. It could also make bundled subscriptions trivial and a way to get good national and local coverage while reducing cost.

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.

I have family in LA and they subscribe to the NY Times over LA Times.

Those numbers are a shame. I really like how well-researched and informative the LAT articles seem to be.

Could the case be made that finance and politics grip the nation far more than tech and Hollywood?

It could. If you read deep-down in the article you can also see that the NYT and WSJ are making massive efforts to keep new subscribers, but the LA Times doesn't appear to be investing much at all. It's possible that could be the biggest factor.

The NYT at least has been investing a lot into tech (and reporting) and the results are evident in some of the really cool stuff they produce. I remember they were amongst the first who really got into D3 and some of their charts at the time were superior to pretty much any other .org.

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.

Those overproduced tech demo articles are a big waste of time, in my opinion. Harder to read and annoying.

They're not focusing on retention. The author offers admittedly anecdotal evidence, but it's telling. Lots of these pubs that are "implementing paywall" like it's a feature that'll print consumer revenue may experience the same thing, especially the ones that start at $5/year and increase to $50/year on year two.

It's offered as part of Apple News+, but I can't figure out if that means all the articles are offered or only some bastardized "curated" subset.

The Washington Post has a 'Arc Publishing' division (essentially, from what I can gather, a digital news delivery as a service company [1]). One of their clients is the LA Times [2]. In other words, the quality of the LA Times's digital platforms, in theory, is (or is near) equivalent to the Washington Post's.

[1]: https://www.arcpublishing.com/products/

[2]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-the-washington...

They should follow Forbes and start “Councils” that professionals pay to belong to. That should more than offset the revenue issues they have if people still value the brand.

But how are their digital advertising revenues doing? Aren't digital ads the main revenue source for most newspaper web sites beyond the "big 3" in digital subscriptions?

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.

$2 per week? Even if I lived in LA I doubt I could find that kind of value in it, but I don't. If they think they'll get substantial subscription rates, they're dreaming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com