Speaking Up (Sorta) For the LA Times

Jeff Jarvis is -- as usual -- right on target with this post that pillories Los Angeles Times staffers for suing Tribune owner Sam Zell when their own complacency and hubris over the past 15+ years is at least as much to blame. Far too many journalists are whiny, arrogant, cynical and hyper-critical -- that hard-wired suspicion, pessimism and self-regard can be a huge help when channeled into thorough, dogged reporting, but it's a royal pain when it comes to life in the newsroom.

That said, it's worth noting that the LA Times actually has been an innovator and experimenter in the world of online journalism. Way back in the early 1990s -- when the paper was still the Times Mirror Corp. flagship -- it launched TimesLink, a subscription-based online news service on the Prodigy platform.

There wasn't a blogosphere or a link economy to engage then, but TimesLink embraced the interactivity of the day -- hosting live Q&A chats with newsmakers, incorporating maps and photo slideshows into the coverage, and going hyperlocal in a way the print paper never would. (I know, because as a young editor at the then-Times Mirror-owned National Journal, I helped develop TimesLink's member-by-member coverage of the Southern-California congressional delegation.)

Unlike most of the web startups that soon followed, TimesLink was staffed by a good-sized crew of LA Times veterans. (I was the junior exception that proved the rule.) And according to my editor there, TimesLink wasn't even their first foray into online publishing -- there was an attempt at a text-only news service back in the 80s, when a high-speed connection meant 900 baud.

That first attempt reportedly died a quick death, and TimesLink ultimately morphed into LATimes.com, which for years offered little more than the print edition on the web. (I left in 1995 to focus on National Journal's own web play.) And as Jarvis notes, the past 15 years have seen the LA Times first overreach, then slash its newsroom to the bone.

Maybe TimesLink never had the executive support that it needed to succeed. Or maybe it was the old-media thinking about having to charge a subscription that kept it from evolving and flourishing. But it might also be that the Times was just too soon to the party. And by the time the technology and the culture combined to allow the newsphere to flourish, it could be that the LA Times' true believers had already burned themselves out.

But once upon a time, they did try.