Convergence Surgery

The last 2 weeks of my fellowship have been hectic and different as I got my first byline since arriving to the United States in Los Angeles Times.

As a result of my cooperation with the international desk in LA Times I wrote 2 posts in Babylon and Beyond blog on the newspaper’s website, this was a good chance for me to practice writing and aggregating information with links that can be useful to the reader.

Writing for LA Times readers about Egypt made me understand to a great extent the role of a foreign correspondent and how to write about issues that his readers may know about it for the first times even if these issues are so common where he is reporting.

Another useful discussion I had this week was during a personal meeting with Russ Stanton the editor in chief of LA Times who was the head of the innovation department in his newspaper before being promoted to his current job.

Stanton explained to me his vision about converting LA Times from a print only newsroom into a modern converged news center feeding both print and online editions of the paper.

The first step done by Stanton was to move the responsibility of web pages on latimes.com from the web team into the newspaper departments.

Every department is responsible for feeding their page online while the web team responsibility is to manage the content and organize the home page and spend more time on improving the website user’s experience.

For the first time in 25 years LA Times made a list of responsibilities of journalists working for it, the list included providing the website with news.

As a result of these steps taken by the editor in chief the LA Times laid off about 400 journalists and hired new 75 young ones, the main reason of this turnover was bringing fresh blood and people who are more familiar with technology and getting rid of those who refused to be part of the future by not learning the new required skills.

One other point explained to me by Stanton that change in newspapers requires the highest authority in the media organization to require this change and this simply means that new editors in chief should fully understand the requirements of the age of the web to be able to lead their newspapers into big change.

One of the other lessons I learned during the last 2 weeks was inside the photo desk in LA Times by working with Steve Straud the photo editor.

Picking photo for the newspaper from the wires feed or from the local photographers collections is a process that requires alot of time and scanning every single photo.

At the end of my first day i was able to understand values that make a good photo better than another and how big papers choose photos to publish in their first page.