The single most clarifying document about what happened to the Los Angeles Times across the 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s is the seven-page internal memo a committee of Times journalists handed to incoming editor James O’Shea on December 1, 2006. FishbowlLA published the full text in January 2007. Almost every prediction in it came true. The newsroom mostly did not act on the recommendations.
Then
In late 2006, outgoing LA Times editor Dean Baquet — who would later land at the New York Times and edit it for a decade — had appointed an internal committee to study the paper’s web operation. James O’Shea took over as editor that fall. The committee, calling itself the Spring Street Project, produced an early findings report on the website specifically, on the theory that those findings were urgent enough to warrant separation from the broader year-end recommendations.
The committee was sixteen people deep: Vernon Loeb, Aaron Curtiss, Richard Rushfield, Michalene Busico, Doug Smith, Henry Weinstein, Julie Bowles, Michelle Maltais, Glenn Bunting, Chris Gaither, T. Christian Miller, Janet Lundblad, David Pierson, Marilyn Thompson, Simon Li, and Marc Duvoisin. They had interviewed staff at the Times, visited peer newspapers’ web operations, talked with executives at Yahoo, AOL, Technorati, and with Craig Newmark of Craigslist. The report was thorough.
The findings, in summary, were brutal. Latimes.com had been founded in April 1996 and had failed to become an indispensable Southern California information utility. ComScore traffic was down 9% year over year while NYTimes.com was up 10%, Yahoo News up 15%, AOL News up 11%. Alexa ranked latimes.com 766th in the world; nytimes.com was 95th, washingtonpost.com 264th. Average visit length was 11.9 minutes — less than half what Yahoo News or NYTimes.com saw, one-third what CNN.com or MSNBC.com did. Even within Southern California, latimes.com was being lapped by MSNBC, Yahoo News, and the New York Times.
The diagnostic part of the memo was a sequence of specific failures. The website had 18 editorial employees and was running on shifts of three or four. Two programmers maintained the site and were overwhelmed. Nobody was assigned to search optimization. The site wasn’t readable on Blackberrys. The home page showed downtown LA weather regardless of the user’s registered zip code. The TV listings replacement made readers re-enter cable provider on every visit. The site couldn’t host live chats because the platform couldn’t support them; chats existed only on the affiliated Envelope site on a separate stack. The Tribune Interactive central-control structure required Chicago approval for any meaningful technical change, with long waits for Tribune Interactive technicians to “build” the request.
The committee’s diagnosis of the content side was even sharper. Real-time news was largely absent. The Hollywood Freeway hay-truck fire that filled the LA sky with smoke and triggered terrorism speculation among commuters was an example the memo cited specifically: nothing appeared on the website all day; the paper told readers the next morning. Blogs at the Times — with the exception of the Lakers blog and Bob Sipchen’s School Me — were not enlivened with frequent links and updates. “If anything, we are web-stupid,” the report wrote, in a sentence that would become widely quoted afterward.
The website-newsroom relationship was the structural problem. Reporters and editors on the third-floor newsroom did not know how to find the website’s fifth-floor offices or how to contact their counterparts. The newsroom treated the website as a place to dress up print work; the website couldn’t get timely web-appropriate content. Initiatives died in the planning phase against newsroom resistance.
The recommendations, again in summary: the editor and publisher must publicly take responsibility for website success; the editor must kick-start newsroom-website integration as an urgent priority; the website needed major staffing expansion in editorial, technical, and video production; all Times journalists needed a crash course in basic web journalism; at least one pilot hyper-local news site should be developed within latimes.com immediately; a special assistant for innovation should be appointed to lead an in-house ideas lab.
The framing was apocalyptic: “By some informed estimates, major dailies such as The Times have at most two to three years to reinvent themselves as multimedia news and information providers.” That estimate was, generously, optimistic.
Now
The Spring Street Project memo is now, twenty years on, one of the most prescient newsroom self-assessments produced in American daily journalism. Almost every diagnostic claim in it proved accurate. Almost none of the recommendations were sustained.
The narrative of what happened to the Los Angeles Times after the December 2006 report is well documented. James O’Shea was fired by publisher David Hiller in early 2008 over budget disputes about how many newsroom cuts the paper should absorb. Sam Zell’s leveraged Tribune buyout closed in late 2007 and pushed the parent company into the bankruptcy filing of December 2008. The years after that involved successive layoff rounds, the closure of major sections, the foreign and national bureau drawdowns the memo had predicted, and the gradual disappearance of the kind of staffing the recommendations had said the website needed. Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased the paper from Tronc in 2018 for around $500 million, moved the operation to El Segundo, and committed to substantial reinvestment — much of which has subsequently been retrenched, including two major rounds of newsroom cuts in 2023 and 2024 that hit roughly a quarter of editorial staff.
The recommendation about hyper-local news pilots — recommendation #5 in the memo — was the one prediction the broader industry collectively confirmed: hyper-local did turn out to be valuable. Patch, Voice of San Diego, LAist (now a thriving KPCC sister property), Crosstown LA, The Eastsider, and a dozen smaller LA-region outlets have built audience around the model the memo identified. The LA Times itself ran multiple hyper-local experiments — most prominently Mapping LA and the data-driven local-news projects of the mid-2010s — but never sustained the staffing and engineering commitment the Spring Street recommendation called for.
Of the committee members, the trajectories diverge. Dean Baquet went to the New York Times in 2007 and became its executive editor from 2014 to 2022. James O’Shea wrote a book about his firing (The Deal from Hell, 2011) and later founded the nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative. Richard Rushfield is now editor of The Ankler newsletter, one of the more-read Hollywood-press operations of the current era — meaning one of the Spring Street Project committee members is now running an outlet that competes for the same Hollywood audience the LA Times has spent twenty years failing to serve digitally. Vernon Loeb has had several senior editorial roles, most recently as executive editor of the Houston Chronicle. T. Christian Miller went to ProPublica, where his investigative reporting won a Pulitzer. Henry Weinstein left journalism for academia. Several of the other committee members are no longer in newsrooms at all.
The single most painful read in 2026 is the memo’s central premise: that the LA Times, in 2006, was at a moment when “this is within our grasp — if we act.” It was. It wasn’t. The publishable archive document — a public-record artifact that an LA Times editor commissioned, sixteen senior staff produced, and Mayrav Saar published in full on FishbowlLA before Mediabistro buried it — is one of the most important pieces of LA-media history of the last two decades. We are republishing it again here because the lessons it laid out have only become more legible with time.
The full text of the December 2006 memo, exactly as transmitted to James O’Shea, follows below for the archive record.
[The Spring Street Project full memo text is preserved at the original Wayback Machine snapshot below. The republication on FishbowlLA reproduces the same document.]
Original archive on the Wayback Machine: June 2009 snapshot of the FishbowlLA page with full memo text