didnt have an ask tony on friday for religious reasons. and also b/c there was only one really good question which i will answer here
Dear Tony, my youtube videos freeze in Firefox. My other videos freeze too (FunnyOrDie.com, Break.com). Sometimes I hear sound, sometimes it stops playing after 3 seconds. Help!! -AB
What youve got is some bad java. you will be fine in three easy steps
1. Download this here Flash uninstaller
2. Download this here Flash installer
3. Close Firefox
4. Run the uninstaller
5. Run the installer
6. Restart
and today the joshes asked me if i had seen this in jeff jarvis’s buzzmachine:
LA Times followup
Russ Stanton, editor of the LA Times, sent email following up on questions I had confirming the much-discussed report below that its web revenue is now sufficient to meet its entire editorial payroll. “Given where we were five years ago,” he email, “I don’t think anyone thought that would ever happen. But that day is here.”
Can I hear an amen?
Stanton does some bragging about the Times’ web life and given this milestone, let’s grant him the moment as Neilsen Net Ratings says it passed USA Today and the Washington Post in uniques with, according to internal numbers, 138 million page views in November, up more than 70% in a year, and 24 million uniques, up 125%.
Secret sauce?
There are two primary reasons for these sharp increases: We have added some outstanding web talent over the past two years, including latimes.com editor Meredith Artley, blogging guru Tony Pierce and database specialist Ben Welsh, who is part of a new 10-person team of interactive and data experts supplementing our print report with terrific online material (more on that in a minute). And our printside reporting and editing staffs have embraced the future like never before.
Nice to see a shoutout for longtime blogging comrade Pierce and for blogging itself:
One of the most visible measures of our success is our blog network. When I became innovation editor in January 2007, only four of our 49 blogs were produced by our staff, and those blogs accounted for only 2% of our site’s total monthly traffic. Today, we have more than 40 blogs, all but six of which are produced by our staff, led by Top of the Ticket, our presidential campaign/politics effort started by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. Technorati now ranks Ticket in the top 60 blogs on the internet. At last count, about half our newsgathering staff — more than 300 professionals — are contributing to our blogs. In several of our traditional print sections (California, Sports, Books, Health, Travel), the entire staff is participating in that section’s main blog. That, in turn, has been acknowledged and valued by our readers. Today, our blogs account for 16% of our total monthly page views.
i hadnt. i was on vacation. but now that ive read it, i now understand all the commotion at all the la-based blogs about us being second only to the new york times last month in unique readers, and now the revelation that advertising on our site can pay all the salaries of our editorial staff, both print and online.
the web is paying for the people.
but heres the interesting thing. all of those newsgatherers who are just learning to blog – they get really good at it, really fast. just wait for whats next.
it’s also nice to see the sales dept get really good at selling the web really fast. educating longtime advertisers about this new thing isn’t easy. especially since it is changing so quickly and because the definitions of things like “blog” are so varied and inconsistent. so kudos to sales for making it happen.
and of course it’s nice to be recognized with my boss meredith who provides a space to make it all happen. she hired as my fellow cubfan, ben and i on the same day. ben, who has teamed up with those newsgatherers and other cool kids, has launched an amazing array of useful and interesting projects like
Mexico Under Seige, California’s War Dead, California Schools Guide, Where the boys and girls are
and of course the LA Top Dog Database
all of the projects, most of which were done by the triple threat of Ben, Eric Ulken, and flash and graphics wiz Sean Connelley, can be seen here.
didnt have an ask tony on friday for religious reasons. and also b/c there was only one really good question which i will answer here