Civic Catalyst Newsletter
Winter 1999

Reaching New Readers at the L.A. Times

Mark Willes takes questions.

On Oct. 15, the Pew Center and The Atlantic Monthly hosted "Journalism into the Next Century: Mark Willes on the L.A. Times" before a high-level gathering of media representatives in New York City. The publisher of the Times answered a wide range of questions about his stewardship in Los Angeles and as chief executive officer of Times Mirror Co. Here are excerpts:

In the Los Angeles Times, we have 500,000 women who read us on Sunday, who don't read us during the week. That's a fact. We don't have that differential with our male readers. Systemwide, for all of our newspapers, we have one million women who read us on the weekend and don't read us during the week. That seems to me to be a staggering opportunity.

The largest segment of our market in Los Angeles is now Hispanic. Our penetration in that segment is about 18 percent. Our penetration in the Asian American market, as a counterpoint, is 39 percent. Therefore, we have an enormous challenge, an opportunity, to find ways to reach into what is the most rapidly growing and now the largest segment in our market. That's why we have talked openly and unabashedly about finding ways to be more successful in reaching the Latino market.

Local News
One of the reasons (some readers) don't take us during the week is that we're not sufficiently high priority for them to be willing to take the time to read the paper. And one of the reasons they're not is because they take the local paper during the week. And they take the local paper because they find out where all the local meetings are and they get to see their kids' pictures in the paper and all these other things that small newspapers do and thrive on and a large newspaper like ours has an enormous difficulty doing.

Therefore, we've started a thing called Our Times. We now have five of these in various versions across our marketplace. They have their own editor. They have their own reporters. They have their own photographer. Those reporters typically live right in that area. They know the neighborhoods, they know the people and, when you go to an opening party when we launch one of these, it's fascinating just to stand there and watch what happens. They'll pick up the thing. They'll see the picture of themselves or their neighbor or their friend, or their mayor or the police chief or whoever it is, and all of a sudden, they start to say, "My goodness, the Los Angeles Times knows I exist.

Diversity
We can't possibly reach out to those communities unless they honestly believe, because of what we put in the paper, that we know them, understand them and take them seriously. And, therefore, you see across all of our papers, I think, increasing success. We were good before. We're getting much, much better in reflecting that kind of diversity in our newspapers.

That's one reason why we announced É the formation of a Latino desk headed up by a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, Frank del Olmo. We will allocate 10 reporters to that desk. They will be located within specific sections. We'll have a labor reporter in business, for example. We'll have a couple of entertainment reporters in the calendar section. I think we're going to have one in the Washington Bureau who will pay particular attention to Mexico. They're going to have their own budget. They're going to get together to talk about story ideas. They're going to make sure that we have the kinds of things going on that catalyze our coverage of that most significant segment of our market.

Activism
We intend to do everything we can in Baltimore, and now we've started in Los Angeles this fall, to make sure kids learn how to read. In our marketplace in southern California, there are 250,000 second and third graders who don't read at grade level. That means that over the next five years, unless we can cause significant change, there will be a million kids whose lives will be permanently impaired, because we didn't teach them how to read. It is inconceivable to us that we can stand by and not do something about that.

And so we're going to. And it means we're going to have articles in the paper. It means we're going to have editorials. It means we're going to help set up tutoring programs. It means we're going to help raise money to give recognition or rewards to teachers and students.

Internet
If you talk about the editorial side of a newspaper business, I think the Internet is going to be good for the newspaper business . . . It is going to put an increasing premium on the editorial function because the Internet by definition is just information overload . . . If the quality of the editorial product is scanning all of that information out there and saying, "This is what's important! Here's the information you need to understand it," I think that will be increasingly important. And I think if we do it right, it will drive people more to newspapers, rather than away from them. And in this case, I'm talking about a newspaper either in ink-on-paper form or the electronic form.

If a newspaper is known as a place of integrity, if it's known as a place where if I'm a busy person and I want to know what's going on in the world that day, or if I want to know what's going on in my neighborhood that day, I can look at the paper and get enough, that is enormous brand power.

And it is precisely why, if we find ways to take advantage of that, rather than being a declining industry, we really ought to be a growth industry. And I think we will.