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#i do my lucky numbers and i do a multi draw (does the next ten drawings w the same numbers) so that i dont gotta
whilomm · 4 months
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note: pollmaker is thinking of the USAmerican lottery system (powerball, mega millions, state lottos, scratchoffs, etc), but poll applies to other countries lotteries systems so long as its still the same concept of "big ol state sponsered gambling shit", but not like casino style gambling. u know what i mean, Lottos.
questions for the tags: how regularly, what stuff you play, if you have limits for yourself, if you feel like its a Problem for you, and for funsies the usual 'first thing youd do if you won the lottery' shit
reblog to have absolutely zero effect on your luck either way. just like, absolutely no change in luck whether you reblog this or scroll past. this is the luck neutral post reblog in the next 30 seconds or dont who give a shit
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hope-for-olicity · 6 years
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Fabulous Olicity Fanfic Friday - September 21st, 2018
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Happy Friday! So this is my attempt to both thank awesome fanfic writers for their amazing work and offer my recommendations to anyone who is interested. Here are the fantastic fanfic stories I read this week! They are posted in the order I read them.
Hard To Find Love multi-chapter WIP by Mellowyellowdiamonds - Through a tragic twist of fate Felicity finds herself left with an orphaned young William Clayton. Keeping her promise to her friend, Felicity raises William diligently, loving him as if he were her own child, only to have Moira Queen storm into their lives several years later demanding custody of her grandson. Locked in a war with Moira Queen, things get complicated when Felicity finds herself developing unwanted feelings for William's biological father, Oliver Queen. At the same time she must try to manage her meddling 13 year old son, who has it in his head that if Felicity would just cooperate and fall for his father, everything would be right in the world. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15941786/chapters/37173917
In These Dreams That Are Nightmares by @geneshaven - Oliver's dreams while he's in prison.  https://geneshaven.tumblr.com/post/178003134119/in-these-dreams-that-are-nightmares
The Predator multi-chapter WIP by @supersillyanddorky06 - Oliver Queen is the one anomaly in the Chicago Outfit. He is the only non-blooded member to be a part of the high circle in the family. His reputation precedes him and he is their best hunter. Felicity Smoak, daughter of the Starling boss, infiltrates his house, intent on killing him. But a startling encounter tips the scales. He goes on the prowl and she escapes. Hate, heat, and friction. Sparks. But something bigger is happening in their world. And despite their disagreements, only they can fight it down. Mob AU. Not Bratva. Enemies-lovers.  http://archiveofourown.org/works/5077885/chapters/21891689
When the Stillness Bends (All the Places We Touch) by @allimariexf - She looked up and met his eyes for the first time. “You’re lucky.” The warning in her voice let him know she wasn’t only talking about the depth of his stab wounds. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15973835
And So The Adventure Begins multi-chapter WIP by @mindramblingsfics - Felicity spent her first year of college focused solely on her studies. In year two, with the convincing of her best friends Iris and Sara, she lets her hair down a bit. Oliver spent his first year partying with his wingman Tommy and living up to the status that came with his last name. He realizes he should buckle down focus on the most important part: actual school. Oliver and Felicity meet, and even though they are on different ends of the spectrum, they don't realize that they can each bring out hidden parts of one another. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15800025/chapters/36771018
Pieces of Always multi-chapter WIP by @so-caffeinated and @dust2dust34 - Life continues after Forever is Composed of Nows. Ongoing non-linear collection of family moments for the Queens. http://archiveofourown.org/works/8220479/chapters/18840356
Thursday multi-chapter Complete by @someonesaidcake - There is something about the girl next door that Oliver Queen is only now noticing... Felicity is moving to college just down the road from where Oliver is a senior.  He suddenly becomes very protective of the girl next door.  Thursday night dinners might not ever be the same again. This story gets better and better! http://archiveofourown.org/works/10688658/chapters/23670255
My Thoughts on You multi-chapter WIP by rachelrenalove -Felicity Smoak is sure of 3 things: 1. She's a badass and she is damn good at what she does. 2. She hates the man in the green hood. 3. Oliver Queen is a pain in her ass and she cannot wait until the day she can quit her job at Queen Consolidated. Or Felicity Smoak goes undercover at Queen Consolidated and meets Oliver Queen. She quickly realizes that she doesn't like him and wishes she was never chosen for this mission. Outside of QC, she is dealing with her hatred towards the man in the green hood that has found out exactly which buttons of hers to press in order to piss her off. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089954/chapters/34989344
In a Perfect World multi-chapter WIP by @smoaking-greenarrow - Based on a prompt: "What if Oliver (being cut off from Queens billions) follows his true passion - photography, meets Felicity and they become THE internet famous family of the world?" Oliver fell inlove with photography after he received his first camera at sixteen years old. Now, he spends his time alone, traveling around the worldand capturing breathtaking moments- like the beautiful woman he meets on a beach one night. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15758463/chapters/36651615
Home To You multi-chapter WIP by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Oliver Queen has never done what his family expected of him. He took a gap year after high school instead of going to college right away. He quit his fraternity sophomore year to join the student newspaper, switching his major from business to journalism. He became a photojournalist for a wire service instead of taking a place at Queen Consolidated. He went missing after six months instead of coming home for his sister’s twenty-first birthday. He survived five years of captivity in a war zone when everyone thought he was dead. He came home. But home didn’t have a place for him in it anymore. His parents were both dead, casualties of their own mistakes and a city they had turned against them. His sister was all grown up, the CEO of Queen Consolidated with a fiancé and a dog and a life of her own. Oliver didn’t belong in his old life, but there was nowhere else for him to go. He was a man without a home, without any way of finding one, until he stopped by the IT department of his sister’s company to get files off an old, battered memory card, and found a woman with curly blonde hair and bright, intelligent eyes chewing on a bright red pen and swearing at a computer screen. https://archiveofourown.org/works/12613188/chapters/28734552
Falling for an Angel multi-chapter WIP by @missafairy - What happens if an angel falls from the sky? Oliver Queen is a respected club owner in his hometown - Starling City. His life abruptly changes when one night he finds a beautiful girl claiming to have fallen from heaven. With her wings tucked into a jacket he helps her navigate her now human life while trying not to fall in love. Nothing can go wrong even if she drinks all of his coffee and cries in the shower, right? http://archiveofourown.org/works/9368912/chapters/21209975
The Queen's Mage multi-chapter WIP by @the-shy-and-anxious-fangirl - Words have power, and mages, those with the aptitude to draw on that power, are few in number. Thus, their services are highly sought after by anyone who has exhausted all mundane means of solving whatever problem is plaguing them. Felicity is reminded of this fact the hard way when she is hired by Moira Queen, the Lady Starling, to find and return to her son Oliver, who fled his family home five years ago following the death of his father. With a threat hanging over her should she return without Robert Queen's heir, Felicity begins her search. When she finds Oliver, and ends up joining his vigilante crusade while she waits for him to decide whether to return home, the last thing she expects to do is fall in love with him. https://archiveofourown.org/works/14617068/chapters/33781269
Fragments multi-chapter WIP by @alexiablackbriar13 - A collection of various arrow and olicity ficlets from my drafts folder, partially completed. some AU, some canon related. many related to established verses I've created, although do not need to read those verses to read these fics. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15906561/chapters/37075926
Time for a Story multi-chapter WIP by @smkkbert - This fic shows Olicity and their life as a (married) couple with family. Although Olicity (and their kids) are the protagonists, other characters of Arrow and Flash make appearances. YOU NEED THIS STORY IN YOUR LIFE. http://archiveofourown.org/works/3912157/chapters/8757172
Back to Start multi-chapter WIP by @laurabelle2930 - Felicity left home almost ten years ago. She missed her family, the land that she'd always felt bonded to and, the boy who was not only her best friend but, also her true love. Now with the help of her family she's about to see if the boy she left behind is still just as in love with as she still is with him. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16043321/chapters/37451873
Angel multi-chapter WIP by @it-was-a-red-heeler - Oliver encounters a stripper by the name of Angel and is blown away. https://archiveofourown.org/works/15961898/chapters/37227686#workskin
// @emmaamelia95 // @mel-loves-all // @oliverfel4 // @green-arrows-of-karamel // @coal000 // @miriam1779 // @memcjo// @captainolicitysbedroom // @tdgal1 // @spaztronautwriter // @lalawo1// @quiveringbunny // @wrongshipper // @thebookjumper // @vaelisamaza // @myhauntedblacksoul // @lovelycssefan // @laurabelle2930 //
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giancarlonicoli · 6 years
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Newsonomics: Inside the new L.A. Times, a 100-year vision that bets on tech and top-notch journalism
It’s a few years behind its East Coast brethren in New York and Washington. But tens of millions in new investment and ambitious digital plans are showing a path back to its former prominence — and beyond.By
KEN DOCTOR
@kdoctor
March 27, 2019, 2:05 p.m.
Look past the view of the 105. Beyond it is the unfolding of the 21st century, delayed but now in full force at the Los Angeles Times.
That’s my big takeaway from a visit to Patrick Soon-Shiong’s new temple to next-stage journalism. Last summer, he moved his just-purchased L.A. Times (whose lease was expiring) to one of the sprawling L.A.’s least glamorous addresses: 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245. (Google’s satellite view is revealing.) That move stirred some newsroom complaints early on, though the new address seems to have receded as an issue as Soon-Shiong and editor-in-chief Norm Pearlstine have laid out their fast-paced, if still incremental, visions of a new Times.
The visions are big enough, but they stand out even more dramatically in a newspaper business still cutting its way to the future, looking to mergers and acquisitions as a short-term lifeline in the cash-poor trade. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, the new L.A. Times wants to tell a contrarian story: Investment in the daily press underlines a deep belief in the power of journalism, optimism that it can make both readers’ lives and their democracy run better amid the gobsmacking rate of political and technological change.
“So my concern was editorial, the newsroom. That was my very, very, very first concern,” Soon-Shiong told me in a two-hour interview. “I knew that that’s where I needed to go as my first and highest priority. My second priority now is the business model, but the business model, sadly — and I don’t mean this to sound in any way arrogant — has to be consistent with this next generation, not with the past generation,” says the 66-year-old Soon-Shiong. He’s put his money behind his ideas, taking a loss of about $50 million this year as he marches the Times forward.
Soon-Shiong has been a man of some mystery in the news trade, his entry having been midwifed clumsily by one-time Tronc chairman Michael Ferro. In our wide-ranging interview — to be published in full here tomorrow — the med-tech billionaire connects many of the missing dots that have characterized coverage of him over the last several years.
The Times’ turnaround from those bad old days (actually quite recent!) of the Tronc/Tribune/Ferro reign is nothing less than remarkable.
The Times’ newsroom had unionized as Tronc’s tragicomic handling of its properties reached a denouement, and Ferro made Soon-Shiong an offer he figured he shouldn’t refuse. Soon-Shiong believes that had Tronc/Tribune kept title to the Times, it would have cut as many as another 100 jobs in the newsroom in short order.
His June 2018 purchase stopped any new cuts in their tracks.
Norm Pearlstine, one of America’s top editors whose career had been built at The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. and Bloomberg, inherited a newsroom of about 440, including part-timers and contractors. That still ranked among the largest in the country; The New York Times counts 1,550, The Washington Post about half that number.
Want a number that symbolizes the Soon-Shiong era? That 440 less than a year ago stands today at 535 newsroom employees.
Many in the business thought that Pearlstine, 76, would play something of a caretaker role — a short opening stint to help orient Soon-Shiong in this business and then stepping aside to pick a younger successor. But Soon-Shiong told me Monday that he’s signed Pearlstine to a new multi-year contract extending his term as executive editor.
“When Norm agreed to come out of retirement and become the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, we were thrilled,” he said. “He has a long, impeccable track record as a journalist and as a media executive. He is truly enjoying the challenge of guiding the L.A. Times through the transition and positioning the company to succeed. As part of that, he is developing a diverse team of managers and possible successors. We are moving forward in a very positive direction and Norm and I have agreed to a multi-year extension of his term as executive editor. I could not be more pleased.”
How does Pearlstine now look at this almost unique turnaround opportunity? “I’m a little bit torn because I don’t think I’ve ever met an executive who did a turnaround who looked back and said, ‘I went too fast,'” he said. “So the pressure intention is to want to move quickly. But that said, I think we need a pause to just catch our breath and integrate…If you think about [Soon-Shiong’s] ambitions and what the brand lets you do, we need to do additional hiring as we roll out some of these products that we think will induce people to pay for content. What we’ve done over the last eight months has been to fill critical vacancies that had resulted from either layoff, buyouts, or attrition.”
Pearlstine described his Times journey so far in depth in two additional hours of conversations. (We’ll run a transcript of that interviews, like my one with Soon-Shiong, later this week here at Nieman Lab.)
It’s not just the number that matters — it’s also the kind of hires Pearlstine is making, near the top of the newsroom and throughout it. In leadership, he lured away from the East Coast both The New York Times’ Sewell Chan, who heads the news desk and is also responsible for audience engagement, and Slate’s top editor Julia Turner, who is creating the Times’ playbook for upping its arts and entertainment game. In this hiring binge, Pearlstine aims to do both the basic blocking and tackling required to heal an ailing news enterprise and to draw from the new world of digital journalism. His key hires of food critic Bill Addison from Eater and Peter Meehan from Lucky Peach signal an appreciation of journalism that comes from beyond old “newspaper” formulas.
But even that almost 25 percent headcount increase in less than a year marks just the beginning of the Times’ expansion ambitions.
Behold the fifth floor
Among the projects soon to get more attention is on the fifth floor. There, Soon-Shiong says, about 100 new staffers — about 80 of them still to be hired — will operate what he calls a new transmedia operation. The idea — in video, TV, audio, VR, games, and plain old-fashioned social management — is multiplication.
The strategy: Even as fundamental newsroom resources are being rebuilt, magnify their impact across all the means of distribution and audience engagement that technology now enables. Which will work and which will prove to be experiments to retire? Soon-Shiong is the first to say he’s not sure. (A previous transmedia company he backed, Fourth Wall Studios, closed in 2012.) But while his optimism about applying his Nant medical tech to journalism was sometimes lampooned when he first bought into Tronc three years ago, he’s undaunted in explaining tomorrow’s potential.
Take another number: 157,000. That’s the number of digital subscriptions the L.A. Times has today. It’s roughly doubled over the past two tumultuous Times years. The growth rate is significant, as is the fact that it’s more than any other “local” daily in the U.S. But Soon-Shiong sees it as just the first handhold on a towering mountain. He wants to get to 1 million quickly and has a stretch target of 4 million over the next four years.
That quest for fast scale helps explain the Times’ decision to become a major partner of Apple in this week’s launch of the Apple News Plus subscription package. It’s another step in increasing reader revenue. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post declined to join Apple’s service, it makes more sense for Soon-Shiong’s paper. The L.A. Times wants to do everything it can to get “discovered” by new readers, and it has much less to fear from the cannibalization of existing direct digital subscribers. Says Soon-Shiong of the deal: “Apple News editors will be able to curate current and recent coverage from all of our sections…We are delighted to be one of just two U.S. newspapers selected to participate at launch and to share in the revenue from the premium subscription service, which will help fund our journalism.” (Some content, such as the paper’s archives, won’t be accessible through Apple News Plus.)
As for Soon-Shiong’s stretch goal, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson’s recently setting of a 10 million subscriber total by 2025 is instructive. Thompson had laid out that seemingly impossible number two years ago, but back then, he didn’t put a date on it. Now, having reached 4.3 million total subscribers, no one laughs at the 10 million aspiration anymore. That tells us a lot about the digital news business and all the ground Soon-Shiong’s paper will have to make up quickly.
How far is his paper behind The Washington Post or that other Times? (“You mean The New York Times,” he notes several times in our conversation, as if to emphasize there is another Times back in the national media conversation.) Jeff Bezos faced a similar challenge when he bought the Post six years ago, and the paper’s ascent since then has surprised even the most skeptical about the chances of journalistic rebirth. (Amazingly, when Bezos bought the Post, its newsroom staff was smaller than the L.A. Times’.)
Figure the L.A. Times is 6 to 10 years behind its East Coast models, the “papers” it once called its brethren and would like to again.
As it retools, the L.A. Times faces new competition — including from that other Times. The New York Times is intently focused on California, home to 40 million people. It has more digital subscribers in California than in the state of New York. Its California Today newsletter is its Trojan Horse into the Golden State, competing with the L.A. Times’ “Essential California” newsletter. Even as the L.A. Times works to maintain its claim on food coverage, The New York Times went and hired its first-ever California restaurant critic.
Maybe the meaning of the geographic identifiers in these two “newspaper” brands will be something quite different in the years ahead.
Why the long turnaround?
Why might it take the L.A. Times a half decade or more — and continued reinvestment — to enjoy success similar that of The New York Times or The Washington Post?
While any keen Angeleno will tell you that the Times’ troubles began when the Chandler family sold it (and the rest of Times Mirror) to Tribune Company in 2000, it’s been the past decade that inflicted the most pain to what was once one of the most powerful and influential of American press institutions. Certainly, the Chicagoans who ran Tribune — and often tried to run the Times from Chicago — never quite got it right, but it was the seizure of Tribune by bottom-feeder financier Sam Zell in 2007 that sent it into a deepening tailspin.
Throughout it all — Zell’s reign, his five-year “bankruptcy from hell,”Tribune’s split into newspaper and broadcast companies, new management, and then the company’s second legal seizure by the arrivisteFerro in 2016 — the Times resisted. That resistance was both staunch and at times comical. The L.A. Times newsroom would come to be known, rightly or wrongly, as the toughest room in the country.
Amid the turmoil, the L.A. Times was more a punchline than a setter of the news agenda, even though its newsroom through the years (and still today) has produced among the highest-quality newspaper reporting and writing in the country.
There was the midnight firing of publisher Austin Beutner by then-CEO Jack Griffin — who himself was dispatched just five months later by Ferro. Who can forget the three-month tenure of Lewis D’Vorkin as editor-in-chief, after longtime Timesman Davan Maharaj was axed? Or Maharaj’s secret taping of Ferro, chronicled in David Folkenflik’s watchdog reporting on Tronc excess for NPR and giving us the wonderful headline: “Tribune, Tronc And Beyond: A Slur, A Secret Payout And A Looming Sale“? Or the cameo appearances of serial CEO Ross Levinsohn and his sidekick Mickie Rosen in the farce? It all makes the Times’ breakout true-crime podcast Dirty John seem fairly tame. (Anyone written the Times’ screenplay yet?) Keen industry observer Tom Rosenstiel calls the Times, at the time Soon-Shiong bought it, “the most degraded major metro in the country.”
That environment is just part of what Soon-Shiong inherited when he decided to buy. (Ferro had given him a weekend to decide whether he wanted his hometown paper so much that he’d pay a half a billion dollars for it — not allowing him to do much due diligence. In our interview, Soon-Shiong also tells the story of how he entered into a “partnership” after a first whirlwind weekend courtship.)
Soon-Shiong, Pearlstine, COO Chris Argentieri, and the emerging new order of management also inherited a broken technology stack. As Tribune/Tronc reeled for a decade, it had both centralized its operational systems and technologies — and failed to sufficiently invest in them to keep them up to date.
Argentieri describes what taking back the Times from Tronc/Tribune meant operationally: “Tribune operated with a number of functions shared across the company over the last couple of years — well beyond your typical shared services of finance, IT, HR. More than just the back office — so consumer marketing, circulation, national sales. Really, in Los Angeles at the end of Tribune’s ownership, we were essentially left with the newsroom and local advertising — and virtually everything else, including manufacturing, distribution, was all centralized.”
As Soon-Shiong told me, “With regard to the technology, I found it was non-existent. Not even…to fix. Just non-existent. I worried about the systems to the extent that I was worried: Could I run this paper with these systems that are so archaic?”
So even as the L.A. Times became “independent,” it remained — and still remains, roughly through the end of this year — stuck in part on aging, fatigued systems. Observers who wondered why Soon-Shiong signed a “standstill” agreement in January — allowing Tribune to commit to a merger or sale without his assent — have their answer. It was all that old tech that the Times still needs to publish (until its fast-paced plan to replace it all is complete) that was responsible. Soon-Shiong agreed to the standstill — which should make it possible for Tribune to merge with a McClatchy or otherwise sell itself — and in return got his “transition services agreement” extended until June 2020.
There are still many decisions to be made as the clock runs toward that date. Among them: Will the Times keep or replace Arc, The Washington Post’s fast-emerging new newspaper platform standard? Does it believe that Arc can rise to the occasion and help power Soon-Shiong’s expansive vision for the Times?
Overall, says Argentieri, the Times is “probably 40% there, I would say, through transitioning of services.” The big remaining piece, he says, “is to stand up our own traditional IT infrastructure — so our own HRISsystem, our own ERP system, our own infrastructure from a hosting standpoint. All are underway and will happen in 2019.”
Argentieri notes the unique perspective Soon-Shiong brings to the beleaguered newspaper industry. If Jeff Bezos brought the best consumer marketing chops, Soon-Shiong brings his own highly profitable experience.
“Nant [Soon-Shiong’s collection of tech enterprises] brings a pretty deep understanding from a technology standpoint. It’s a little different than how certainly we had looked at things…They look at things from fiber in the ground all the way up through the technology stats. Most, particularly legacy media companies have looked at IT as a major cost center, and put every bit of investment they could make into ‘digital business.’ We’re trying to look at it more holistically, because storage is cheaper, the infrastructure, there’s more things you can do today to have a site and app load faster, and all that leads to better user experience — where we just wouldn’t have focused on moving an infrastructure off servers in a data center in Chicago to somewhere else.”
After the buy and the building, $50 million
All of this transition — in hiring and in technology — comes at a hefty price. Which brings us to the third noteworthy number about the Times: $50 million. That’s the amount Soon-Shiong will have spent on the new Times in his first year of ownership.
How much more investment may be possible? Says Soon-Shiong: “I’m willing to continue to make an investment and collectively, as a collective, to work together” — mindful of the first contract with the News Guild, which unionized the place the week before he took title.
Like most other people of great wealth — Soon-Shiong’s fortune has been reported at over $7 billion — he’s not one to throw money around. Like Bezos, he’ll invest, but “he’s focused on where every dollar goes,” one insider says. As at The Washington Post, good ideas can get funded, but they’re approved by Soon-Shiong on an initiative-by-initiative basis.
How has that tough (and “abused,” as Soon-Shiong puts it) newsroom responded? Conversations with several staffers suggest a wary optimism — about as good as it gets in any newsroom. When the first union contract is concluded, staffers will see raises that mark a clear departure from the experience of their brethren at other dailies, including those still residing within Tribune. Those raises should add up to at least a 10 percent increase over the next three years.
“For staff who are over scale, they would see a 5 percent raise in year 1, 2.5 percent in year 2, 2.5 percent in year 3 under the company’s offer,” says Matt Pearce, a News Guild leader at the Times. “So in other words, pretty much the worst you can do is a guaranteed 10 percent raise across three years. It’s not quite enough to get us to match the pay standards at our East Coast competitors, and doesn’t repair the 10 years the newsroom went without regular raises, but it’s a decent bite out of the apple.”
For those who had been “underpaid,” the impact will be greater. “The company’s last/best/final offer on pay creates a series of pay minimums that would lift up some underpaid staffers fairly dramatically — in some cases, we’re talking raises of 30 percent or more on ratification,” says Pearce.
In addition to wanting a piece of the intellectual property action involved in Soon-Shiong’s multimedia adventures (which Soon-Shiong discusses in our interview), the contract addresses the usual issues: severance, jurisdiction, and seniority. It could be a month or two away from completion.
The guild, representing a workforce still recovering from shellshock, wants to add another clause to the new contract, one on “successorship.” Pearce: “So the contract survives, in the hopefully remote scenario that Patrick decides to sell the paper sometime in the next three years.” Just. In. Case.
Not yet defining the new L.A. Times
If you are reading this hoping to hear the new Times’ leadership clearly outline its strategy for the years ahead — sorry to disappoint you. Ever since Soon-Shiong bought the Times and pledged to rebuild it, people have been wondering about the big strategic questions.
Will the new L.A. Times be more national, expanding still further a fairly robust and re-energized D.C. bureau? More global, seizing the opportunity of the “Asian century” and its spot on the Pacific Rim? More California-centric, seeing a “nation” of 40 million to serve? Or will it be happy to focus on dominating the large and wealthy southern California market?
In other words, what category does the Times fit in now — or will it fit in in a few years? Is it America’s largest local newspaper in the country or its smallest national one?
(In Monday’s keynote, Apple split the difference, calling it “the country’s largest metropolitan newspaper and a rising star.”)
It’s both and neither at the same time, and that makes classifying it tough. “It’s probably safe to say if we’re trying to get to a million digital subscribers over a number of years, we will start with local. But we’ll have to evolve into California stories that have a global relevance,” Argentieri told me. (Former publisher Austin Beutner hired Argentieri, a magazine veteran, back in 2014, and through all the Tronc turmoil, he somehow managed to keep his head down. He widely receives plaudits for his steady hand.) “I think we’ll reach a point of penetration with people that are, you know, ferociously into local content, and we’ll have to go beyond that in some areas that travel better.”
The reality is that the Times is creating the building blocks that could easily be used across multiple strategies and target audiences. For now at least, instead of worrying about classification, let’s watch what’s in at the new L.A. Times. Its ownership is only nine months old, but Soon-Shiong talks about a 100-year vision — there’ll be plenty of time to classify later.
POSTED    
March 27, 2019, 2:05 p.m.
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