Jim O'Shea Editor Los Angeles Times to Staff

To the staff:

Before the fires die down, I want to mark an extraordinary moment in the long, proud history of the Los Angeles Times: Its transformation from a great newspaper to a great interactive newspaper and website.

Readers expect outstanding newspaper journalism from us, and we delivered it this week. More than ever before, we simultaneously demonstrated the power and reach of our website, a reflection of outstanding work by many people over the past several months.

We are building the technical and journalistic capabilities to provide readers with exciting storytelling in print and online. Those efforts coalesced in our fire coverage and readers reaped the rewards. Millions of additional readers sought our journalism with record-shattering visits to latimes.com.

I hope everyone noticed the creative additions to the site: slide shows embedded in the home page, tools to connect displaced residents with family and friends, real-time interactive maps, live updates to mobile devices, cell phone photos from reporters on the ground, and user-generated video. We also sharpened our breaking news blog with more than 100 updates a day.

We gave readers the opportunity to share stories with us and with others. And, boy, did they respond. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were the three highest traffic days ever. On Tuesday, the site had 8 million page views, double the previous record and three times the daily average. The number of unique online visitors surpassed by 30 percent the number of people who bought our newspaper. Talk about a news organization with reach!

None of this would have happened a few short months ago. But this newsroom, starting with the Spring Street Report and continuing with the Reinvent project, responded to a challenge. We started the year with the Internet 101 training in the newsroom. Many editors and reporters have received additional training. Every daily section -- and many of the weekly sections -- now have web deputies to shape the online report. The website has beefed up its editorial and technical staff, giving us the flexibility to compete in this rapidly changing media landscape.

What draws people to our site are the same things that have drawn them to our newspaper for more than 125 years: Great storytelling, community and context. People want to understand the world around them. In times of crisis, they turn to us. The staff of The Times earned and held the trust of Southern California this week with crack coverage, sweeping stories of the struggle between nature and mankind, and vital lists of useful information on closures, evacuations and emergency procedures.

The web is vital to our future. Readers and advertisers are moving there and we have to move there, too. But the fire coverage showed that we don't have to leave great journalism behind. It also showed that we can move forward together and forge a prosperous future.

Over the next few weeks, we will accelerate our video training to give reporters another form of storytelling. We are also integrating the newsgathering process more tightly to eliminate the gaps and disconnects between what we do "for the web" and "for the paper." When we treat the paper and the web as one, we all benefit.

Thanks so much for all your hard work this week. I hope you are as proud of the results as I am.

Regards,
Jim