LA Notes: LA Times To Aggregate External Content On New Site

At the PSFK Conference Los Angeles, Jason Oberfest, Head of Digital Strategy at the Los Angeles Times, revealed how the newspaper plans to release a number of micro-projects that will be quickly developed in just 3 to 6 months and updated frequently to keep with up with content usage trends. To reach a wider audience the content will be available off-site through mechanics like widgets.

Oberfest admitted that although the LA Times website had between 5 and 10 million unique viewers a month, this figure was worrying below other local sites and in fact made the LA Times online invisible to the local population. To counter this, A number of sites are being rolled out including The Guide. The Guide would allow readers to browse local content by neighborhood, category, lifestyle theme and date. One of the key features of the site is that it would employ content aggregation as much as content creation. Extracts of content from other sites will be manually and dynamically included on the Guide.

Readers will also be able to add their own content to the Guide and this content will be treated “as equal” as the content created by Los Angeles Times writers. The content would be weighted though by the number of comments and the volume of traffic to that page.

Oberfest said:

“Content aggregation is as important for readers as content creation. We need to recognize that fact… and move from the print paradigm”

LA Times