Charles Apple

The Los Angeles Times has sold its prime nightly press time to the Wall Street Journal, LA Observed reported Thursday night, a move that will force page one deadlines at the Times to advance to as early as 6 p.m.

We had a 6 p.m. deadline for our state edition when I was at the Des Moines Register. However, that was a copy deadline. Our punch-the-button-and-send-the-plate deadline was a bit later, as I recall.

LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick reports:

The paying customer — the WSJ — gets the preferential later press run under the plan approved by Publisher Eddy Hartenstein. Another way to put it is, for Wall Street Journal subscribers to get the benefit of later news deadlines, LAT subscribers have to accept a more inferior print product … Just last January, Editor Russ Stanton was glowing about getting later Calendar deadlines. Now they are moving the other way, and by a lot.

Roderick reports the Times will place late news in an inside AA section called LATExtra.

Stanton’s sales pitch today to skeptical editors and reporters was that the trade-off would have been more layoffs.

After midnight, Roderick reported further:

An email to LA Observed from a Los Angeles Times insider I trust says that, in recent weeks as the latest moves involving new deadlines to accommodate the Wall Street Journal were being discussed, “all top editors at the LAT were forced to sign secret non-disclosure agreements.”

The Times‘ own story Thursday makes no mention of earlier deadlines.

Find Roderick’s story here.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 11:24 am and is filed under Industry woes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.