Pictured above: The Los Angeles Times' new website
It’s been seven months since the Los Angeles Times redesigned and re-launched their website. The site’s traffic is up, its reporters are writing digital-first stories, and readers are viewing the site easily on any device. Clearly things are going well. But, getting to this point was about more than a new user experience. After nearly 133 years as a print publication, The Los Angeles Times rethought the way it produced the news.
“It’s been a long very drawn out process to get this thing off the ground,” said Los Angeles Times media manager Paul Olund. “We started the design in 2012 and decided to wipe the slate clean.”
Before the redesign, the L.A. Times had a website like most traditional newspapers – a digital arm for a declining print business. Since the mid-1990’s The Los Angeles Times’ daily circulation has declined from a high of 1.2 million to about 690,000 today. Readers used to pay for local newspaper subscriptions to learn about the world. Now they get their news online for free.
So what’s a print publication to do? The L.A. Times had to answer a tough question: “Do we continue doing what we did in the past, which was very print centric, or do we embrace this identity of being digital first?” said Olund.
A new medium
They chose digital first. That meant more than a new user interface, it meant rethinking the way the L.A. Times puts the news online.
The L.A. Times breaks a lot of news. In the past, that news didn’t break until a paper bundle hit your front step. But in the Internet age, you break news as soon as you have it and the L.A. Times' old content management system wasn’t designed to keep up.
“Producing content quickly and efficiently was always a challenge,” said Olund. “It may take 10 to 15 minutes to produce a story in the past.” (That is the time to get a story online, not including reporting and writing it.)
“Now it takes two to three minutes,” said Olund. “That’s a positive fallout from the reconstruction of our CMS system.”
Now, “everything is edited created and written within our web interface,” said Olund. “The level of efficiency has improved dramatically.”
When you’re publishing 200 to 300 news articles per day that adds up to significant time saved. Speed combined with a superior editorial process, gives the L.A. Times an edge.
“We’ve also launched a real time desk,” said Olund. “Pre-redesign, we didn't have the technical ability to produce at the rate needed to deliver content to our readers effectively. New tools integrated into our publishing system have alleviated most of these shortcomings, allowing our RealTime writers to focus on one thing: reporting the most important news stories of the moment.”
The L.A. Times anywhere
Industry trends show that most readers now get their “news stories of the moment” on their mobile devices.
“Because our site is now responsive, all previous UX principles have been scrapped, and new ones conceived, with one goal in mind: make it universal,” said Olund. “Each project needs to function in every viewing experience. In a lot of ways, this is freeing. Because mobile matters, we now conceptualize products from small to large screen, which forces us to think differently about how we create applications.”
For example, the newspaper’s California Cookbook recipe site “allows users to mark their favorites and track needed ingredients, and revisit by phone while shopping at the supermarket,” said Olund. “This mobile-first feature may have never made it into the final product in the desktop-first era.”
Now, nearly 50 percent of L.A. Times views come from mobile.
“We are very, very close to reaching the tipping point [over 50 percent],” said Olund. “One of the reasons for the design was to help goose that and encourage that. We saw a pretty big shift to users accessing the site on mobile.”
Finding value close to home
To measure the effect of all of this, the L.A. Times is taking a more forward-looking approach to metrics. While page views since the redesign are up 66 percent, the L.A. Times said its focus is elsewhere.
“The most important metric for us, bar none, was engagement,” said Olund. “There’s been a lessening of importance of the value of page views.” Olund declined to disclose numbers, but said engagement was also up.
More and more, engagement for the L.A. Times seems to mean hyper-local news coverage. As part of the website redesign the newspaper has launched “neighborhoods” sections that focus closely on hyper-local news. Readers can drill down on an interactive map of Los Angeles for news specific to their neighborhood.
Neighborhoods are a good beat for a city paper like the Los Angeles Times. They are tough to duplicate at volume, so advertising supported publishers can’t compete, and the hard journalism skills that are required for gathering local news are right up the alley of traditional newspapers.
“The launch of the neighborhoods channel is really a push back to our meat and potatoes coverage, which is covering L.A. and covering it well,” said Olund.
By using its site redesign to better serve its core readers the L.A. Times appears to have come full circle. The L.A. Times is coming back to publishing what it has done well all along: reporting the news in Los Angeles. Maybe the Internet age isn’t so different.
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