LA Times Audience Engagement Editor Adriana Lacy on using archival content to contextualise current events

This week, we hear from Adriana Lacy, Audience Engagement Editor at the LA Times. She launched a dedicated Instagram account for the LA Times’ archival photos late last year, so we talked about where those images are sourced from, what the response has been, and how they’ve used historical images of protests to add context to the events of the past few weeks.

She also discusses the LA Times’ wider social media and audience engagement strategy, as well as her own Journalism Internships project and the importance of mentoring.

See the full transcript here.

Adriana also runs her own newsletter The Intersection, exploring journalism, tech and innovation. It’s where we first read about the archival project last year!

In the news roundup, the team tries desperately to stay cheery around some good news for publishers. We don’t succeed.

Key stories: Green shoots of recovery for publishing

• WIRED UK are forecasting growth of 10% this year after seeing ‘huge appetite’ from readers and advertisers during the pandemic
• In the UK, The Telegraph has joined the Spectator to pay back the government’s furlough money after a better-than expected few months, where subscriptions hit 500,000
• A ‘Subscription Impact Report’ from Zuora found that businesses that rely on subscription revenues are showing resilience
• The Guardian gained 200,000 new supporters during the pandemic
• Substack’s success suggests that newsletters have been resilient too
• Bloomberg actually launched a new print magazine last week called ‘Bloomberg Green’, a new quarterly mag focused on climate change solutions
• ‘Still dreadful, but trending in the right direction’: Digital ad spend began recovering in May
• Publishers more likely to see Q3 thaw in ad spending
• News UK warns of job cuts due to coronavirus
• A quarter of Dennis Publishing UK staff facing redundancy

News in brief:

• JK Rowling: Sun newspaper criticised by abuse charities for article on ex-husband
• Black Lives Matter content is the latest to be hit by keyword blocking from cautious advertisers
• Twitter is testing a feature that calls you out for retweeting without reading the article. Our poll suggested that 77% of you would actually stop and read the article if you saw this prompt…
• George Osborne is ‘stepping down’ as Editor of the Evening Standard to become its Editor-in-Chief. Emily Sheffield is taking over the Editor role
• Dallas Morning News is trialling reporter-specific discount codes that give readers a free one month trial in the name of supporting local journalism
• The Ozone Project, the UK’s biggest ad alliance, has brought ESI Media’s flagship brands the Evening Standard and The Independent on board
• Facebook News has launched to all users in the US with the addition of local news and video
• After weeks of top editors resigning across the industry, Vogue editor Anna Wintour is the latest in the firing line, and has had to apologise in a company memo for ‘not giving space’ to black people at Vogue
• Microsoft’s decision to replace human journalists with robots has backfired, after the AI software illustrated a news story about racism with a photo of the wrong mixed-race member of Little Mix
• The European Journalism Centre has launched the Freelance Journalism Assembly to support the self-employed community with training, mentorship and events

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