
The L.A. Times’ disappointing digital numbers - heyyyouu
https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/the-l-a-times-disappointing-digital-numbers-show-the-games-not-just-about-drawing-in-subscribers-its-about-keeping-them/
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windowtoss
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.

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kbenson
> 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.

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projectileboy
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.

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secabeen
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.

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tedunangst
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.

~~~
pandaman
~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?"

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IvyMike
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".

~~~
IvyMike
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.

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anilshanbhag
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 ?

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sambroner
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?

~~~
kbenson
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.

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Yhippa
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?

~~~
heyyyouu
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.

~~~
addicted
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.

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

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baggy_trough
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.

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kevindong
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/](https://www.arcpublishing.com/products/)

[2]: [https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-the-
washington...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/09/newsonomics-the-washington-
posts-ambitions-for-arc-have-grown-to-a-bezosian-scale/)

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godzillabrennus
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.

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Merrill
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.

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mark-r
$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.

