The audience for online content delivery is fickle. If they are disappointed or lied to or misled customers will not come back. And this is the fundamental reason traditional newspapers are failing. They have misled the American people and the American people have found new sources. A recent PWC study http://www.pwc.com/extweb/pwcpublications.nsf/docid/80B8E15DAE7DEEFD8525759F0020C4EB “Moving into multiple business models: Outlook for newspaper publishing in the digital age” states that the Netherlands has the highest rate of highspeed internet penetration and Online as a first choice for news is less than 25%. Perhaps their papers did less damage to their own reputations than the Americans.

Marissa Mayer’s comment that “publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users,” is valid, but it should also be placed in the context of her also saying that as journalism goes digital the story itself becomes the centerpiece and not the package it’s wrapped in. My take on what she means is that stories need to provide the reader with related links which explain the story in more depth. And that means going beyond the norm of turning the ink of a current paper edition into pixels.

At the risk of a rhetorical question, consider this: Why is it easier to find out more about the background of California politics on Wikipedia than it is from the LA Times? In this instance, more story depth via linkage could also help with attribution. Michael Finegan’s analysis, in my opinion, seems weak in the area of the historical record.

All of which brings us back to your bearded lady, or in this case a runway model with nice knees. There’s nothing wrong with clever semi-related links to other parts of a website. They’re the equivalent of house ads. But they’re not the real deal and don’t mean much without the dancing elephants and flying acrobats under the Big Top.

That said, it’s nice to see that people such as previous commenter Meredith Artley are starting to understand this stuff. It says good things about the LA Times and where it’s going. It also seems to me that as newspapers go digital a common failure in site construction is one of not getting useful answers because of a lack of relevant design and coding questions.

Just my two cents…

I agree it’s not enough to have good SEO — once you get ‘em you need to keep ‘em. Carnival barking as you say. We have so much great stuff on the site — how can we make sure people find it? That’s a challenge not just for latimes.com — it places a premium on good editing, packaging and design that must be conceived of as part of the story from the get-go. It’s also about UNrelated material as you point out with the fashion photo example. That serendipitous experience — when you find something fascinating that you weren’t looking for — can be hard to achieve in a search-centric Web. We’re making sure some of our most unique material is displayed in popular articles and other well-trafficked areas of the site. We’re working on a redesign to make this practice even more effective.

Re the links in the California election analysis, I wonder if you saw the article shortly after it was published, before we added both related and unrelated links? We often publish articles in an evolutionary fashion — adding details, links, discussion, etc as the story evolves. If you click on that same link now, you’ll see links to an interactive county by county election map (results were live that day), explainers on the individual propositions, and also some unrelated material further down the page for a bit of serendipity.