At the end of this post, Jay Rosen has an interesting story about L.A. Times editors and their ignorance of the Web:

September, 2003: In publishing this op-ed piece with the Los Angeles Times, I had the strange experience of penetrating the newspaper’s online operation to fix something. Despite assurances, they had failed to include a “live” link to PressThink in the bio lines. But they did print the url itself with the http:// and everything; and so I called the city desk to try to speak with an editor. Found there were no editors available who understood what a link was, and why it mattered, or what the url meant. The “web guys” knew. Different silo.

By suggesting that my own call be transfered, I finally reached the kid on duty who was running the LATimes.com site live. He changed it for me in 30 seconds, though it took 30 minutes to get to him. He wasn’t a journalist, he was a geek, and all alone there. Or so it seemed to me. I felt like he inhabited a Los Angeles Times future that was a ghost town.

That’s an interesting attitude for a publication that scrapped its national edition because it’s counting on people to read it online. One hopes things have changed since September 2003.