The Los Angeles Times was a pioneer in cyberspace.
In October 1984, The Times' parent company, Times Mirror, launched Gateway, which provided news from The Times as well as advertising, shopping and banking services, directly to home computer users in Los Angeles and Orange counties. But Gateway never attracted more than 3,000 subscribers, and after 15 months of commercial trials and what securities analysts estimated was a $15-million loss, Times Mirror shut it down.
In October 1994, The Times launched TimesLink, an online, interactive service offering news, information and transaction services over the Prodigy network. TimesLink was named the best online publication of that year by Interactive Publishing Alert, an electronic newsletter that tracks trends in online publishing, and within eight months, TimesLink had 20,000 subscribers.
But like many newspaper companies that experimented with early electronic newspapers, Times Mirror decided that the Internet offered a much better opportunity for online publication than did Prodigy. In December 1995, TimesLink was closed.
Now, like most major newspapers, The Times has its own Web site, launched in April 1996. But so far, The Times' latest venture in cyberspace has been considerably less ambitious than those of most of its competitors.
The Times has 22 people on its online staff. The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle, among many others, have online staffs of 30 to 40 each. The New York Times has 60, the Wall Street Journal 75 and USA Today 83. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today each has more than 40 news and editorial staffers; the Los Angeles Times has eight.
At most major papers, the editor in charge of the online edition does that job full time. But Terry Schwadron, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and supervisor of the paper's Web site, has divided his time between that job, being editor of the Life & Style section and overseeing the paper's editorial library, among other chores.
"Somewhat to my chagrin, this is not something we are pursuing with great gusto," Schwadron said in an interview earlier this year. "It's discouraging. We should be getting people on a learning curve. We don't know how to deal with sound, how to tell a story with this new medium, how to deal with the two very different cultures of online and print.
