Talk about weird ass job titles. LA Time's new Editor James O'Shea is attempting to make the LA Times website relevant by creating a dumb position with a dumb title for Business Editor Russ Stanton who was dumb enough to swallow it. OK so you have to invest where the eyeballs are, but one of the first important things in grabbing those eyeballs is to have a clean cut strategy, a plan of attack, and someone who knows what those eyeballs want to see. We have nothing against old people but come on Jim O'Shea, you don't know shit about the web. You're probably being schooled on what to say by some young dude. OK we went off track there for a bit. We're just sick of reading about old men revealing so called web initiatives and appointing all these jug heads to look like they're really doing something. If you really want to be relevant on the web, leave it up to the young folks who actually know what a JPEG is.

The 63-year-old editor made the announcement before an audience of hundreds of the paper's journalists, who assembled in The Times' Harry Chandler auditorium. He said that some may have maintained a false sense of security about their industry because of the paper's continuing high profits, which were estimated for 2006 to be nearly $240 million, before taxes.

"At this rate, those double-digit profit margins everyone cites will be in single digits and then be gone," O'Shea said, adding later: "If we don't help reverse these revenue trends, we will not be able to cost-effectively provide the news -- the daily bread of democracy. The stakes are high."

Editor James O'Shea unveils Web initiative at Times [LA Times]