Barry Parr suggests that Los Angeles presents a great opportunity to a disruptive innovator who can see that it's really a patchwork of neighborhoods, each underserved by the troubled Los Angeles Times. And he suggests the answer is Web first, print second, with the Web a primary news platform and print the primary advertising/marketing vehicle.
I agree -- so long as the definition of "news" gets blown up in the process, and the Web strategy is built around public conversation through which news may flow naturally, without being under the control of traditional journalism processes. That is the model of BlufftonToday.com, which I described when we launched it as flipping the newspaper site model upside down, and it's a model that drives extraordinary readership of print while also driving extraordinary reach and frequency on the Web.
The way you scale up such a concept is not to just make it bigger, but rather to create a "quilt" of hyperlocal print/web products. The art is to identify natural communities -- places where people already identify themselves as living, or can be induced to do so.
Dean Singleton's Los Angeles Newspaper Group network isn't quite there -- the papers are too big to be genuinely hyperlocal, and its websites are horseless carriages, but it's worth noting that LANG is growing while the Los Angeles Times is teetering.
LAT actually already has eight hyperlocal newspapers in its metro footprint, some of them daily. Elaine Zinngrabe, former GM at LATimes.com, is the publisher of several of them. But you'd never know it from looking at the LATimes.com website. I couldn't find any mention of them by browsing, but Google eventually turned up a one-page summary. All their websites appear to be down today, so I won't be linking to them.
Tee Miller called me at work the other day. He's a Washington-based investigative reporter for the Times, author of Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq and part of the Times' Manhattan Project team. We talked a lot about Bluffton and Savannah. (Turns out he's from Charleston.) One of the things I told him was that the rock on which big newspapers will founder is this lack of respect for anything small and suburban.
Small and suburban is where most of us live. And newspapers should be about us.