This week, Los Angeles residents browsing newsstands might have noticed a new paper tucked in among the usual copies of the Los Angeles Times and national dailies.
The California Post — the New York Post’s new West Coast venture — launched Monday, becoming the fifth local news initiative to pop up in Los Angeles in as many months. Since September, the city has seen the start of two outlets hosted on Substack, a newsletter, a digital startup and a tabloid. One more, a digital outlet, is expected to launch in the coming months.
“In the last year, we’ve seen this really delightful explosion of new startups and new models,” said Scott Woolley, the cofounder and editor-in-chief of one of the Substacks, L.A. Reported.
If areas lacking local news sources are known as “news deserts,” Los Angeles is currently experiencing a “superbloom,” Woolley said. The new ventures range from regional expansions of legacy brands to hyperlocal nonprofit startups. Their founders are eager to capitalize on the millions of potential readers who live in a region that has international influence.
At a time when many cities are seeing their main outlets turn into “ghost papers” or shutter completely, Los Angeles is doing comparatively well. The metropolitan area includes digital sites like the Los Angeles Public Press and L.A. Taco, public radio stations like LAist and KCRW, and a number of daily and weekly newspapers, including several published in foreign languages. The city’s paper of record, the Los Angeles Times, still boasts a staff of more than 300 journalists, according to its newsroom directory.
But the Los Angeles media ecosystem was once even more robust, and the recent, accelerated decline of the Times — which had more than 500 journalists listed in its newsroom directory just two years ago — has widened gaps in coverage that newcomers are eager to fill.
Several of the new outlets involve former Times staff who left the paper amid turmoil caused by owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong pushing the paper in a more conservative direction. Karin Klein, the inaugural editor of L.A. Reported, is one of them. Klein had previously been on the Times’ editorial board but quit after Soon-Shiong stopped the board from endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris ahead of the 2024 election. That experience helped convince her that the industry needed more nonprofit journalism, so when L.A. Reported gave her the opportunity to join as its inaugural editor, she agreed.
“Jeff Bezos (the owner of The Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong have not been the model of billionaire ownership that I think is going to lead to great, sustainable, really ethical journalism in the future,” Klein said.
She added that nonprofits aren’t susceptible to the same pressures as for-profits owned by billionaires who might have financial incentives to curry favor from politicians. “I felt, here is a model that I think really can work because they’re not funded by the government,” Klein said. “So it’s not like a new president can threaten to take away their funding.”
L.A. Reported launched Jan. 18, just over a year after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades and other parts of the city. Its initial package included three stories about the fires, including a deeply reported analysis of ongoing debates over fire safety legislation. Future stories — which will be published once a week for now — will feature that same level of deep reporting, Woolley said. To accomplish that, the outlet will pay freelancers at rates that average out between $2 and $5 a word.
“Our working theory is that if we can (spend) more money per story — and so that means more reporting time, more time spent on editing, more time and money spent on art and fact checking — that’s going to build a brand where people are going to say, ‘Wow, when I get these emails in my inbox, I click on them because I almost always get something that I didn’t know before, that I can trust and is interesting and fun and doesn’t make me feel like I read some sort of gross clickbait.’”
Woolley said the outlet is funded for roughly three years and aims to scale to multiple stories a week as it builds a paying subscriber base.
L.A. Reported’s stories will remain free to all, Woolley said, with paying subscribers getting certain perks like early access. The outlet’s business model assumes paying subscribers would largely be motivated by a desire to support high-quality journalism.
“The real dream is to create a new model that could work not just here in LA, but around the country,” Woolley said.
The Golden State Report, which started publishing in September, is another nonprofit, Substack-based outlet run by Times alumni. Its cofounder and executive editor, Mariel Garza, ran the Times’ editorial board but, like Klein, quit after Soon-Shiong killed the Harris endorsement. Her cofounder, Paul Thornton, was also part of the Times’ opinion section before taking a buyout last March. Their outlet — a news analysis and commentary site — fills an important void now that the Times no longer has an editorial board, Klein said about her former colleagues. The Report’s website highlights its independence: “No billionaires control us.”
Other coverage gaps exist at the neighborhood level, said Michele Siqueiros, CEO of The LA Local. That’s where her outlet — a well-funded, nonprofit initiative of the American Journalism Project — comes in. AJP first started researching the Los Angeles media scene in 2022, surveying and interviewing roughly 900 residents across the city.
Two years later, the initiative acquired the Boyle Heights Beat, a hyperlocal newsroom with roots going back to 2010. In October, it publicly adopted the name The LA Local, and a month later, it expanded its coverage areas to include Koreatown, Pico Union, Westlake, Inglewood and South LA. The LA Local website launched Jan. 12. (Previously, it distributed its reporting via social media and newsletters.)
“We did a lot of analysis of areas of the city that had populations that typically didn’t have access to local news and information — which, obviously, in this day and age could be a lot of communities — but also where there were major decisions being made in their communities and not a lot of oversight,” Siqueiros said.
The LA Local has already raised $19 million, giving it a three-year runway, and the bulk of its revenue is dependent on institutional gifts.
As a nonprofit, The LA Local will make its content free to access and republish. It already has partnerships with 24 local media outlets and universities, and it runs youth and community journalism initiatives, including a local “Documenters” program that trains residents to attend public meetings and take notes.
Siqueiros theorized that Los Angeles’ “distinctly unique” influence on the culture, economy and future of the country is what is drawing news startups to the area: “We’re going to be the epicenter of major world events.”
National corporations also sense opportunity in the city. The New York Post, part of the Rupert Murdoch-founded conglomerate News Corp, launched The California Post, a seven-day-a-week tabloid that follows much of the styling and tone of the original. The paper, based in Los Angeles, already has a staff of between 80 to 100, according to The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, USA Today Co., formerly known as Gannett, is investing resources into a new daily newsletter focused on the Golden State (not just Los Angeles) called Today Californian. The company put together a team of six journalists to power the narrative newsletter, which officially launched Jan. 15, and is recruiting for a seventh.
USA Today Co. already has several local papers in smaller California cities like Palm Springs and Stockton, but it has lacked a presence in the larger metro areas, including Los Angeles. Creating Today Californian was an opportunity to expand into those larger metros and tell stories about a state that is diverse in aspects ranging from geographical to industrial, said Greg Burton, a senior regional editor overseeing the American West.
“Every important cultural and political narrative, both as a nation and internationally, that we’ve been dealing with as a society has a nexus in California: the climate conflict, the immigration conflicts, the wealth gap, the conversion of our economic model from industry-based to individually driven startups.”
USA Today previously ran a roundup newsletter covering the state called In California. But Burton sees Today Californian as an opportunity to start conversations with readers and provide them with local stories and broader statewide context that other outlets might not have.
“Our differentiating factor is we can tell stories on the ground — and we’ll have a team to do that — but we can also connect that to what’s happening in Kern County, for instance, or what’s happening in Shasta County or what’s happening in Riverside County,“ Burton said. “So we have a statewide lens that those other startups might not have.”
Roughly a week after launch, Today Californian had 15,000 subscribers. The company hopes that the newsletter, which is free, will funnel readers to the various USA Today Co. news sites. Californians already generate 800 million pageviews a year for USA Today Co., and the company aims to increase that to a billion in the newsletter’s first year, Burton said.
In the coming months, Los Angeles is set to gain yet another outlet. L.A. Material, a for-profit digital outlet that aims to provide “ambitious, independent, non-partisan local news,” is planning to launch this spring, cofounder Julia Wick told Poynter in an email. Wick and cofounder Julia Turner are both Times alumni. Their outlet will produce “rigorous, lively, magazine-style journalism,” Wick said.
“There’s so much opportunity here.”
