Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Eddy Hartenstein on the LATimes.com Replate

From: Hartenstein, Eddy
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2014 9:22 AM
To: AllLosAngelesTimesEmployees
Subject: Announcing the New latimes.com

All –

Over the past year, a team of our colleagues from various departments has taken a critical look at how we’ve previously presented our journalism and advertising digitally. We completely rethought how design and technology affect the consumption of news, information and images throughout the day. We took into account the inner-workings of a 21st century newsroom, how stories break and build, and how to best engage contemporary audiences. We evaluated current marketing trends to enable advertisers to better reach our broad readership, as well as target niche areas of interest. And we thought a lot about sparking conversations.

The result is the new latimes.com, one of the largest fully responsive news sites ever built. It is a rich, dynamic showcase for our storytelling and an exceptional platform for our advertisers.

We’ll be meeting shortly for a sneak preview before tomorrow’s launch. These are some of the highlights you can expect from our new site:

• Conceived as mobile-first and built to adapt to future distribution models.
• Responsive design ensures a consistent, optimal reading experience across devices and desktops, be it mobile mornings, desktop days or lean-back evenings.
• Visually striking, bold design that highlights our marquee journalism, eliminates clutter and puts focus on our unique voices.
• Photo-centric browsing option that anchors latimes.com and is accessible on all section fronts.
• Recognizes how readers search for news by treating article pages as entry points as valuable as the homepage.
• In-line and in-context video, photo galleries, story collections and slide-out panels that enhance our storytelling abilities and reader experience.
• Endless scrolling and multi-directional navigation that eradicates print-centric and antiquated web concepts, such as “the fold,” “the jump,” “endless clicking” and “the dead end.”
• Seamless pathing from one piece of content to the next, with section fronts and article pages anchored by a row of thumbnails that automatically transport readers to related coverage or other sections.
• Multiple quick-review and micro-sharing options, including at-a-glance “sharelines,” pull quotes and photos.
• New local feature pulling in neighborhood-level geocoded news and dining information, as well as crime data…with more to come.
• Expanded sales opportunities driven by increases in traffic and engagement, greater video pre-roll inventory, and new, responsive ad units.
• Disruption of the traditional page grid, which helps advertisers break through by solving for “right-rail blindness.”
• A new fully responsive, large-format ad unit offering advertisers and marketers an execution as technologically advanced and visually arresting as the rest of the new site.
• Browsing features that incorporate native advertising and sponsored content.

This is a very exciting moment in our digital evolution and this new platform architecture paves the way for all Tribune Publishing news sites. My deepest thanks and congratulations to all who have contributed to this massive undertaking.

See you at 11,
eddy

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