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All of us at LA Observed Tower congratulate Veronique de Turenne, doyenne of Here in Malibu, who will join the Los Angeles Times staff after the New Year as a full-time blogger. Details will come from the Times, but I do know she will blog about SoCal news in a new role for the paper. Veronique has written extensively for the Times' state desk, and contributed to Calendar, Outdoors, Home, and the Book Review. She's been a staff reporter at the Daily News, OC Register, Star-News and Ventura County Star, in addition to her NPR book reviews and freelance writing. (Bio) We're still talking about the future of Here in Malibu, but for this week Veronique will be here on the front page while I relocate to Maui for a few days of intermittent posting.
Congratulations also to Tony Pierce, the editor of LAist — he's been hired to coordinate the couple of dozen blogs the Times already publishes, and to help launch more. He will report to Meredith Artley, executive editor of LATimes.com. Tony deserves the credit for developing LAist into a big-traffic blog, adding a bunch of talented contributors and new content such as coverage of nightlife, regular reports on sports, food and books, more video and putting more effort into roundups of news links. Easy links to Digg and other sharing sites has helped to boost traffic.
Over at LAist, Tony does the Q-A about his hopes for the new job. In an interview at Blogging.la, he explains how it came about:
My friend Matt Welch recently announced that he was leaving the Times to be the Editor in Chief of Reason magazine - he was the Times' associate opinions page editor.So I congratulated him and said, but bro you were my "in" at the Times. He said for what? I said "I want to run the Times' blogs." He said, "Why? LAist gets 4x the hits as our best blog." I said, I know, I love the underdog.
So he said, write Meredith and say, "I know I'm crazy but check it out..." So I quoted him, gave her the pitch, got the interview which led to a second interview.
And then I got an offer.
I gather Tony isn't the humblest of guys, and his announcement set off a flurry of less than complimentary comments this weekend at Blogging.la. He responded with a long defensive rant directed at the rival site and its writer, and declared Los Angeles a blog wasteland: "The high point of LA blogs is there are some really good taco ones. And of course, some amazing gossip ones. Other than that, this could be Kansas." Sean Bonner, the creator of Blogging.la, snarked right back. And so it goes.
All that aside, his hiring should be an interesting experiment for the Times. Tony's in his mid thirties, but his blogging rep was built partly on entertaining posts about being a fanboy to his favorite bands, getting high and conquering babes, real and fictional. Pot and porn are part of the mix at LAist too. How his style will play at the Times is anyone's guess — for sure there'll be no more free junkets to Amsterdam. He used to openly pine on his blog for a job at the LAT, and now he has one. I wish him the best.
Snippets of the Pierce philosophy, from the coverage of his hiring and a comment he posted this weekend, after the jump:
- On day one I would like to throw out a bunch of ideas to my new boss and find out which ones she likes and which ones she thinks are lame. And then I would like to do the cool ones that we agree on. But I'm not insane, the Times is an old, established, successful organization.
- People are starting to make money blogging, which has launched blogs about making money while blogging. I sorta hate those blogs. Because to me, blogging should be something you do out of love.
- I believe that newspaper blogs will dominate the Technorati Top 100 in the next 5 years. Simply due to the fact that they have the best writers, they are the ones actually gathering news, and they have the best photographers, and the tightest infastructure. They're doomed for success as long as they stop fighting the inevitable. So I am looking forward to working with real pros.
- asking bloggers to be mature and professional is a lost cause. just keep it simple. ask us not to lie, and if we're caught in a lie to be wise enough to correct it. also we dont want to be treated as respected journalists because we're not journalists. we want to be treated as respected humans.
- Q: Exactly how many girls have you made out with, or slept this, based on your blog cred? A: Now thats a great question. Lets just say that I am very well received in Canada. And its not because of anything other than my blogging. Which is why today I wrote an email to the Jasons and Ev formerly of Blogger and i thanked them for inventing this thing, because i would not have had the rockstar experiences that O have been blessed to have if I was still writing in my diary in secret. And I'm pretty sure that most newswriters are not getting nudes in their in box, nudes from girls way out of their league, intended only for them, of hot chicks in miniskirts and nothing more, who then follow it up with love in the flesh.
- I think anyone who has paid attention to the Web in the last 6 years is familiar with me and probably respects me, which is probably one reason I got the gig.