LA Streetsblog Scalps LA Times’ Bottleneck Blog
[Update: The Overhead Wire (TOW) suggests in comments that the Bottleneck Blog is not actually going away, just moving locations/changing forms - and that's probably correct, strictly speaking. A 'folding in' of a blog is not the same as an outright 'kill' - as happened with the Times' Emerald City blog. I was too aggressive with the 'is folding' phrase, and should have used 'is folding in' or 'is folding into another blog' - just to maintain the necessary nuance. Article corrected. Thanks, TOW!]
Hot on the heels of my ‘Should Streetsblog Go Commercial?‘ post, we find out that the LA Times’ transportation blog, Bottleneck Blog, is folding into another blog [changed from 'is folding' to 'is folding into another blog']. Just a few months ago the Times killed their green blog, Emerald City - it, too, covered some transportation issues. A day or two ago some other newspaper transportation blog announced its shutdown - I can’t remember which. This process is likely to continue over the next several months, at least.
And all of this is happening in the face of what will probably be one of the largest financial stimulation packages in U.S. history - and it will be a transportation-focused package. There is also a renewed national interest in mass transit and smart urban planning. Newspapers always complain about ‘losing money’ - though that was more often than not a euphemism for ‘not being able to achieve the spectacular 35% profits we are used to.’ Now, things might be different.
Did the growing success and influence of LA Streetsblog have something to do with the demise of the Bottleneck Blog? It’s tough to say - major newspapers have been providing such low-quality coverage for so long - maybe this was inevitable. And now an international financial crisis has caught them with their pants down. By not representing everyday working-class people, and by cutting investigative reporting, what can newspapers actually provide that professionally-run blogs can’t? Nothing. And, often, it seems that professionally-run blogs can offer much better coverage.
There’s blood in the water.
Leave comment (2)[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm
It actually looks like the blog is just moving to a new location inside the paper. Its sad actually because I don’t want to have to cut through other people’s BS posts to get tranpo specific posts for LA. Steve does a great job. It’s too bad he can’t just saddle up with Damien and do some hard hitting reports over at Streetsblog LA.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm
i see what you’re saying, TOW, and you would appear to be right - especially if we take the Times at their word. But promises and good intentions have nothing to do with the bottom line. i’m more than a bit skeptical that this move means anything other than unimaginative cost-cutting that will most likely result in eventually termination of bottleneck blog, or at least one of the people who writes for the combined operation.
blogs are blogs and have personalities and all that. i never go to sfist to get my transpo news, for instance - unless they happen to be the source (or referenced source) for a story/info - that place is creepy.
maybe the Times is going to try to steal back some of their audience that moved over to laist.com?
if there’s really nothing more to this ‘folding in’ than ‘folding in,’ then it should really be no problem for the Times to offer a bottleneck-blog-specific RSS feed. take a programmer a day to do it, tops - develop, test, deploy. if they don’t offer that feed, then they’ll probably just lose some die-hard transportation readers. up to them.
article corrected!