Holy effing crap, my college contemporary and Daily Nexus colleague Tony Pierce has been hired by the LA Times to run their blogs.
This, to me, suggests the the LA Times is serious about doing amazing stuff with blogging. I’ve probably mentioned a few times that I’m feeling sort of meh about the NY Times’ blogs (treating blogs as first-class content on home page good; creating dozens of not-terribly-distinctive outlets to feature the voices of B-list staffers sans editorial and fact-checking bad). So I’ll be interesting to see where Tony takes the LA Times blogs — he’s passionate about blogging and passionate about the news, but he also won’t let up until you pay attention. I’m prepared to be revolutionized.
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Tony’s appointment to the times is outstanding news on so many levels. One of the things I really liked about his tenure at LAist was his strong emphasis on individual neighborhoods in LA, not just with the Neighborhood Project – which were long posts with excruciating amounts of info about your nabe.
While at first glance that kind of info is irrelevant to the vast majority of people – because hey, I really need to know everything there is to know about Reseda – if you actually live in Reseda (or, like in that Soul Coughing song “Screenwriters’ Blues,” you’re just going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio whose real name you don’t know), that kind of stuff is really useful.
Seeing Tony at the helm of LAist, I frequently found myself thinking, ‘damn, he really would be a great metro desk editor.’
I just hope this doesn’t mean the end of the Busblog. That’d be a damn shame if it did.
Smart move, indeed. Could mean the LAT is willing to get serious about this whole Internets thing, which may not be going away.