Tribune going into Web consulting?

For a company that's not known for being at the forefront of most anything connected with the Internet, it's a pretty funny notion - and it provided a chance for the Informer's Dennis Romero to sound off on the LAT's often-stuttering Web site.

All you have to do is look at its site, where linking out to other sources is often taboo, and stories are almost always written as if they were discovered in a vacuum and delivered from Moses on the mountaintop. Competition be damned (which is way old-think). And forget about pointing out the obvious, having a personality, or even giving a little attitude (staples of contemporary bloggery). So we're sure all the social-media savvy boys and girls were spitting their lattes all over their iPhones when they heard this news.

Romero grouses about the Times forgetting to acknowledge "that any other website in the universe might possibly have gotten to a story before the 'paper.'" Of course, on this point the Web version of "the paper" is hardly different than the print version has been all these years. (Heck, they weren't even supposed to look at lil 'ol LA Observed. Don't know if there's still a prohibition.)

The Times fails to realize that the web is a stream, a conversation, a journey; it's not a one-way street in the way newspapers were. You strike a blow, and readers hit you back, changing your stance, updating your facts, opening your eyes to new angles. The megaphone model doesn't work, but it's where the Times is spinning its wheels.