In late January 2007 the Los Angeles Times announced that Joel Sappell was out as Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive and that Business Editor Russ Stanton was moving into a newly created post called Innovation Editor. The title sounded like a Silicon Valley parody. Within twelve months, Stanton was running the paper.
Then
Editor Jim O’Shea, who had taken over from Dean Baquet only weeks earlier, framed the move as a structural shift: “Break it on the web, expand on it in print.” Publisher David Hiller’s memo set the broader brief — Stanton’s mission, working with editors and reporters across news and features, was “nothing less than the transformation of our newsroom into a 24/7 operation that breaks news all the time online (and mobile, etc.) and publishes in print with the analysis, personality, and utility that only great writers and editors can provide.”
The same week saw the launch of MyLatimes.com, with promised follow-on products for Travel in February, Image/Fashion in March, and integrated CalendarLive/CalendarWeekend property in late spring. FishbowlLA noted dryly that it had never sensed Sappell had much affinity for the online side of the operation in the first place — a reading the Hiller memo did nothing to contradict.
Now
Russ Stanton’s tenure as Innovation Editor lasted less than a year. He was named the paper’s editor in February 2008, replacing O’Shea after the latter’s standoff with Hiller over newsroom cuts. Stanton himself ran the Times newsroom through the 2008 Sam Zell bankruptcy, the 2009 financial collapse of the parent company, and the painful staffing reductions that followed, until he was succeeded in late 2011.
The Innovation Editor title as a category did not stick — at the LA Times or elsewhere. The 24/7 digital-first newsroom that Hiller’s memo described in 2007 did eventually arrive, but it came through the Patrick Soon-Shiong ownership era starting in 2018 rather than through any 2007 reorg chart. The actual transformation the memo predicted required a sale of the paper, the relocation of the operation to El Segundo, and three additional rounds of layoffs across 2023 and 2024.
Joel Sappell continued in journalism after his Times exit, with subsequent roles at the LAObserved-adjacent corners of LA media and several documentary and book projects. David Hiller left the publisher’s post in 2008 amid the Zell-era turmoil. The Innovation Editor framing reads now as the kind of late-2000s newsroom optimism that newspapers were promising and the broader business model was not going to support.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: January 2007 snapshot