The L.A. Times, They Are A'Changin'

LAist.com blog editor Tony Pierce takes over the Times’ online kingdom

By Peter Gilstrap
Published: Feb 15, 2008

In what could be one small step for man, but a giant leap for bloggerkind, LAist editor Tony Pierce has been hired by the Los Angeles Times to oversee the paper’s 25 blogs. After a 17-month tenure at LAist.com that saw the free-wheeling, all-things-Los Angeles blog (part of a nationwide, seven city-specific chain) reach to new heights, Pierce is jumping into the ruptured belly of the newly Sam Zell-owned beast. His traditional journalism background consists of working on the school paper at UC Santa Barbara; he’s an admitted outsider to the ways of dailies.

Is it Dylan going electric? Is it a savvy move that will bring a fresh, localized awareness to the paper’s online presence via a man who knows from whence he speaks? Or will our non-mainstream hero’s edge get crushed by the machine? It all remains to be seen. Here’s what Pierce has to say about the move.

Do you have a sense of going into the belly of the beast? Is this wise for you, given your agenda?
It’s not wise at all, but hardly anything I do is wise. But it’s my dream, and I also think that someone is going to end up in the belly of the beast anyway, and it might as well be, someone that I trust. Right now the only person I trust is me.

When I started at LAist I was their first paid editor outside of New York. My whole drive was, I don’t want to fuck it up for the next bloggers. I didn’t want to be an example of what happens when you give money to a blogger, they get drunk and lay on the couch. I feel that same kind of self-pressure going into the Times, because I think the bloggers have the answer to the problems that mainstream media has in adjusting to online world. If your problem is blogging, hire a blogger.

I really look forward to working with professionals. LAist was a team of mostly amateurs, and to work with 20 and 30-year veterans at the Times is something that is better than my fear of going into the belly of the beast. I just have really high respect for journalists, and I didn’t want bloggers trying to pretend to be journalists, because we aren’t.

Is LAist a tough job to give up? You had tremendous freedom there.
It’s really hard. Being editor of LAist is such a great situation because there’s so many stories you can write about. Plus, my boss is the greatest. He’d stuck to what he’d said: ‘Fuck what you do, just give me hits, don’t get us sued and write about LA.’

With the move to the Times, how do you relate to print, and the idea that the Internet is the death of print?
Unlike a lot of bloggers, I have a lot of respect for print and for journalists, and I think I have a clearer understanding of the big picture of blogging. Most of the best blogging stories have always led back to a mainstream source. If you look at a lot of the big blogs out there, they’re always sourcing something. They’re not gathering the news themselves, they’re linking to a mainstream source. So when people say it’s the death of newspapers, I don’t think they understand who the bloggers are linking to.

One of the things I want to show to people at the Times is, you’re gathering the news, but the traffic is coming back home, so what do you want to do with that traffic? Do you want it to just end at the story they’re linking to? Also, journalists can go places that no one else can go to, they have access. The tools that real journalists can use can’t be matched by citizen journalists.

The LAist’s main demographic is 25 to 34. How does that figure with who the Times expects you to bring in?
I think one reason they’re bringing me in—as opposed to someone who’s older than me—is they wanna go younger. I think right now, their average readership is 51, and if you go to the second floor of the newsroom that’s the average age there too, so it makes sense that they’re speaking to their peers. But if you go upstairs to the 5th floor, the new media floor, the average is in their 20’s. So I don’t think it’ll difficult to hit that audience.

How will you do that?
Instead of showing one picture of the KROQ acoustic Christmas, how about showing 20 or 30? That’s what would lure me in to latimes.com if I was in college or high school. Not just one token photo, but an actual photo essay and some excitement behind it and a writer who understands the difference between Bad Religion and Linkin Park, and isn’t afraid of dissing both of them.

Unfortunately, I grew up reading the Times and reading Robert Hilburn, who was older than my father. It drove me crazy because I knew exactly what he was going to say about the Springtseen show before Bruce even hit the stage. I knew he was going to kiss his butt, and do the same with Public Enemy and U2, and it was really boring for me. I wished they’d put younger reporters on those stories, because I don’t want to know what the review is going to be like before I read it. I want them to challenge me as a reader, and the artists should be challenged.