Reuters reporter Steve Gorman went to a luncheon featuring Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller on Thursday, and found out where Hiller will get at least some of the workforce to power the engine of the newspaper’s future - its latimes.com Web site. It’s called the newsroom.

The Times plans to add about 100 people to its digital operations, with “a good chunk” of them to come from the print side, Hiller said at the luncheon, held at the Regency Club in LA. In fact, there are some 50 people from the print side there already, he said. That comes after recent buyouts, he added, which shrank the news staff of more than 800 by about 40 people.

Hiller also described the ongoing changes buffeting the newspaper business, which is suffering a drop in paid circulation, advertising sales and just about everything you could count as healthy and good: “It’s very scary… If you don’t like whitewater canoeing, you may be in the wrong business.”

The publisher also addressed several other topics:

On Sam Zell , the Chicago real estate tycoon who is taking the Times’s parent company Tribune Co. private:

He is a blunt-talking, smart guy… a voracious reader of newspapers… [and] very positive about the future of our industry.

Will newspapers die?

I think there’s going to be a really excellent print newspaper for a long time to come, and we have to do more on the Internet.

One of those ways, he added, was to add more video to the site. To that end, the Times has ordered about 100 video cameras to help its reporters bring back more multimedia material for the Web site, he said.

On the need for more analysis to differentiate news outlets from their competitors:

In an era when the simple ‘what happened’ part of the news is everywhere, you have to do something special which people can’t get [in] other places.

(Photo: Reuters)