A Maverick at the LA Times
Photo Credit: Dot Cannon
LA Times Blog Editor Tony Pierce talks about his blogging experiences.
Dot Cannon
August 13, 2010
Filed under Features, News
Tony Pierce discovered his passion for journalism in the middle of a party. Well, sort of.
Pierce, who is the LA Times’ blog editor, told the Newspapers2 class on Wednesday that he’d attended UC Santa Barbara, rather than UCLA, because he thought he would study more.
What he found instead, Pierce said, was nonstop socializing, along with a student-run newspaper with a large budget and no supervision. He and his fellow students would drink, smoke, carouse—and write stories. Then, they’d pass out, get up and do it all over again. Pierce and his classmates put out a newspaper every day.
But journalistic aspirations weren’t the reason he started blogging after college, Pierce said.
“I really liked a girl. I wanted to impress her. And I also hated my job! The only way (to) stop myself from jumping off…that building, was to create fantasy stories on my blog.”
The blog he created, called busblog, became popular, and it led Pierce to a job at LAist, a blog site that focuses on Los Angeles life. There, he took a journalist’s approach to assigning unconventional topics, like underground music and alternative lifestyles. He recruited friends and readers to write posts about their neighborhoods, and allowed topics like pot to be evaluated in the same way that more serious publications would analyze wine.
Blogging and editing from his bedroom in his pajamas, Pierce and LAist more than quadrupled the Los Angeles Times’ page views of the newspaper’s top blog.
His success at LAist was noticed by the Times, and Pierce was hired by the paper as its blog editor. Since 2007 when he started, Pierce has increased the total page views from 3.5 million to 25 million. When he started, the Times had twenty-seven blogs. Now it has has thirty-seven.
During his presentation, Pierce told the class that all student journalists should be blogging. “Write something—anything—for yourself,” he said, “(and) write every day.” The idea, Pierce said, was to do something that scares you, on a regular basis, and see where it could lead.
“In order to build a snowman, you got to start with a little snowball,” he said. “It starts with a sentence.”
