Tribune may be taking its time figuring out where it plans to be a year from now, but Editor James O’Shea at its largest paper, the Los Angeles Times, is taking its future into his own hands.

The Web will now be the LAT’s primary vehicle for news, reflecting a need to boost sales at what many people see as the future of news delivery and to try to fight what Editor Publisher called “an increasingly difficult economic climate for newspaper publishers.” 

Here’s the LAT in its own words: “O’Shea employed dire statistics on declining print advertising revenue to urge The Times’ 940 journalists to throw off a ‘bunker mentality’ and view latimes.com as the paper’s primary vehicle for delivering news.”

How? Again, to the LAT: “O’Shea named Business Editor Russ Stanton to the innovation post and said the ‘Internet 101′ course would teach reporters, editors and photographers to become ’savvy multimedia journalists,’ able to enhance their writing with audio and video reports. He emphasized the need for speed in reforming an operation that he called ‘woefully behind’ the competition.”

The Times’ project to figure out how it would save itself produced a report noting that “As a news organization, we are not Web-savvy… If anything, we are Web-stupid.”

- Other notes from the report, reproduced in the Times article:

  Lack of assertive leadership on the subject within The Times and at the paper’s parent, Tribune Co.

  Understaffing. The Web operation has 18 employees, a small fraction of the 200 employees at the Washington Post’s website and the 50 at the New York Times’ site.

  “Creaky” technology that has made it impossible for latimes.com to host live “chats” between readers and journalists or to let readers customize stock tables or weather reports.

(Photo: latimes.com)