LA Times: Not Valuing the Embeds?
So our very own LA Times pulled off something of a coup Friday morning. The paper got a shout out in that other Times newspaper, when Richard Oppel credited our local rag for having an embed on the scene at Thursday's brutal suicide bombing in Ramadi.
As a newspaper editor, you pray for a scoop like this. Major world news, and you are the only newspaper outlet with a reporter on the scene. It was Louise Roug, who had two dramatic and truly admirable stories datelined Iraq, including one human-focused story that she knocked out of the park because she was embedded, and on the ground.
Roug, it should be noted, is a fantastic reporter for the Times who uncovered a lot of shenanigans while on the Getty Center beat, and who you'd expect to get top billing in Friday's LA Times.
Wrong.
As almost a clear example of why the LA Times' Column One feature doesn't work, Friday's Times not only dropped the Iraq story nearly below the fold...it put it below a Dave McKibben trend piece on tennis. Roug's piece, which provides color that no other paper got, is demoted to A4. Could be its no longer even a sidebar, but is now just buried.
It would be funny, if it weren't so pathetic.
We know the LA Times is trying to match the Wall Street Journal's esteemed and Pulitzer Prize-winning Page One columns (requires registration). But the Journal has an advantage — it doesn't have to go four columns with the news of the day: it relegates that news to the single-column What's News.
So, on a day like Friday, where the Times rightly goes four-columns with the Guvernator's State of the State, it has no headline space for the international story of the day, and when it has an eyewitness that no other paper's do.
Couldn't the Column One be setup, so where on a day like Friday, it can be kicked down to below-the-fold? Why — why oh why — does this nobody-loves-tennis piece have to be top-left in the paper?