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The Los Angeles Times in recent years has been more willing than most big newspapers to let advertisers dictate — remember all the movie campaigns that featured mock front pages, and the section front takeovers. The LAT website is one of the few news sites I go to that now forces me to kill time while a video ad plays, with no option to skip or cancel. This morning's memo from LAT president Kathy Thomson, about a forthcoming web redesign, sounds like it's preparing the staff for more ad innovation: "We rethought how we present our journalism online and how advertising is integrated. We knew we needed to more fully engage our readers, attract new audiences and better serve our advertisers’ needs." Emphasis added.
From: Thomson, Kathy K
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 08:37 AM
To: AllLosAngelesTimesEmployees
Subject: latimes.com redesign
Colleagues – buzz about the rapidly approaching launch of the new latimes.com is increasing and I want to fill you in on the overarching philosophy, key objectives and business rationale behind our bold and ambitious project.
This redesign is a big step in our continuing digital advancement. It will give us tremendous flexibility in how we deliver our news, information and advertising. In building the new site we tasked ourselves to challenge every fundamental and traditional assumption by which we’ve previously operated. We rethought how we present our journalism online and how advertising is integrated. We knew we needed to more fully engage our readers, attract new audiences and better serve our advertisers’ needs. Our design needed to be informed by how news is consumed digitally throughout the day and how stories break and build.
The site delivers. When we roll out a little later this fall, latimes.com will be the largest fully responsive news site ever built.
The Times will be the first Tribune Publishing site to launch with this new framework, followed shortly by chicagotribune.com and then by the rest of our publishing units. We will all be well poised to meet the challenges of the mobile future and offer the best counterparts to our print editions.
Look for more detailed information in the coming weeks. Initial meetings and training begin today to enable the seamless transition of news delivery and advance planning with our clients.
Kathy
I've also heard complaints from readers about how this anti-Obama ad campaign in the top right corner of the LA Times website doesn't immediately look like an ad, especially to casual readers.
