“More of everything”: In Los Angeles, an “explosion” of new efforts aim to up the city’s local news game
From the outside, the state of local news in Los Angeles appears to reflect the city’s fractured, contradictory realities.
On the one hand, the country’s second-largest city doesn’t appear to be a news desert at first glance. Los Angeles County — population 10 million, comprising 88 independent cities — counts more than 100 local news outlets, per Medill’s latest State of Local News Report: 41 newspapers, 14 standalone digital sites, 15 network sites, 28 ethnic outlets, and three public broadcasters. Yet the county has the equivalent of just 3.6 local journalists per 100,000 people, making it “dramatically undercovered,” according to the Local Journalist Index released by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News this summer — and “by relative California standards, a news desert in terms of news personnel,” said Matt Pearce, director of policy for Rebuild Local News and former Los Angeles Times reporter.
The data, Pearce said, probably “catches the L.A. Times mid-collapse.” The Los Angeles Times has suffered a series of body blows — round after round of layoffs; public criticism of its billionaire owner’s decisions; a reported $50 million lost in 2024. Last month, its remaining journalists had voted to authorize a strike before reaching a tentative deal on a contract after three years of negotiations. (Patrick Soon-Shiong has said he plans to take the news org public within a year.)
For a long time, the Los Angeles Times “was the hegemon of L.A. local news,” Pearce said. “I think that’s no longer the case.”
Now, a rapidly multiplying number of new media upstarts are entering the fray — from driven local journalists to national commercial and philanthropic institutions that sense opportunity.
One wave of organizations launched a few years ago. The Latino Media Collaborative, headquartered in Los Angeles, launched CALÓ News in 2022 as “a site dedicated to the coverage of Latinos, written for English-speaking audiences in LA and California,” which has since expanded with an Arizona edition and has aspirations to cover “the Southwestern United States and beyond.” The small news nonprofit AfroLA launched this same year. So did Los Angeles Public Press.
New activity has accelerated in 2025 as national and local media players alike double down on a city at the center of so much national news. Politico, The New York Times, and The New York Post all announced Los Angeles expansions this year. Meanwhile, local veterans like L.A. Taco have stepped up their coverage of ICE raids in a city where almost one in five residents are undocumented or live with someone who is.
Among the local startups in various stages of launching, more than a few are backed by L.A. Times veterans. There’s Golden State Report, a newsletter established by former L.A. Times opinion staffers that its founders plan to build into a “larger news and commentary nonprofit.” There’s L.A. Reported, another planned nonprofit newsroom with an L.A. Times vet as its inaugural editor.
Others are veterans of different beleaguered news outlets: The Southlander is a worker-owned investigative news co-op and the result of a merger between a Long Beach media institution and former Knock L.A. journalists; another co-op, the Long Beach Watchdog, launched last year. There are single-reporter newsletters like Climate Colored Goggles, The LA Reporter, and Torched. And still more initiatives are in the works.
Given that dizzying level of activity, I wanted to hear from some of these newer entries about how they’re trying to add value in a local news landscape that’s somehow crowded yet stretched thin. I spoke with leaders at three young news organizations around the city about what they’re building. While they represent a tiny fraction of the overall activity in L.A. County, these three efforts — a big-philanthropy-backed coalition, an expanding, chain-owned for-profit, and a nonprofit newsroom making inroads with young audiences on social media — exemplify three different approaches to building local media across the country.
Amid this “explosion” of startups, new journalists and news orgs may compete, to an extent, for funder dollars, subscriber dollars, and attention. “Growth means growing pains, and I think perhaps you’re going to see some folks bump elbows with each other,” Pearce said.
But he sees that as a win for the public and for news consumers. In terms of reporting, as far he’s concerned, “we kind of need more of everything.”
The LA Local: The AJP-backed coalition doubling down on neighborhood-specific news
In 2022, the American Journalism Project and a steering committee of community leaders set out to conduct a survey of L.A.’s local news landscape. Two years later, the Los Angeles Local News Initiative launched after raising almost $15 million, a total that has since grown to exceed $18 million. This year, the initiative named Michele Siqueiros as its founding CEO and announced its name as The LA Local.
Its tagline, “My Neighborhood, Our City,” reflects ambitions to do two things at once: Cover Los Angeles’ many neighborhoods as distinct local communities in their own right — and, at the same time, bring the siloed city together with coverage of issues that cut across neighborhoods.
While The American Journalism Project’s earlier startup efforts (Signal Ohio, Mirror Indy, Houston Landing) focused on building something new, its more recent initiatives, like Tulsa and now Los Angeles, have embraced a multi-pronged approach — strengthening existing outlets and building something new.
As a core part of the fall 2024 launch, the L.A. Local News Initiative became the publisher of Boyle Heights Beat, the bilingual professional newsroom that has trained high school students to report on their community since 2010. The team is building out one Boyle Heights Beat-style newsroom for Koreatown, Pico Union, and Westlake, and another for Inglewood and South LA. “We expect to continue exploring additional neighborhood-specific launches” beyond those, Siqueiros told me. Like Boyle Heights Beat, these newsrooms will provide professional neighborhood-specific reporting and employ adult journalists while also training high school student journalists and working with Los Angeles Documenters. The initiative launched social media accounts and weekly local newsletters for those two communities last week.
Though L.A. has tons of different neighborhoods, “there’s not much attention or coverage that has been focused on the neighborhood level,” Siqueiros, a Los Angeles native who previously worked in higher education, said. The LA Local aims to “help inform and cover neighborhoods that have not been well covered — they’ve either been misrepresented or only covered when tragedy is there, not on a focused basis.”
“Going after a neighborhood-centric approach is really interesting,” said Pearce, who lives in Koreatown. He pointed to The Eastsider as a longtime example of a neighborhood approach to news. “That concept itself isn’t new,” he said, but The LA Local “is trying to scale it up.”
The hope is that service-oriented, neighborhood-specific news can empower people to get involved locally. “A lot of folks have told us they want information about what’s happening in their neighborhoods, and they also want to feel hope and inspiration, because a lot of the news is so heavy,” Siqueiros said, adding, “We’re a news organization, but we’re a community organization.”
Meanwhile, as a vessel for city-wide reporting, The LA Local launched a third “LA Local Central” newsletter last week. The first edition featured reporting from several Local News Initiative partners: LAist on the LAPD’s crime blackout, Boyle Heights Beat on the aftermath of an ICE raid, and L.A. Taco on a new “punk rock sushi spot.” The newsletter also mentioned an opportunity to join a pedestrian advisory committee while plugging its Documenters program, and a Community Resources section flagged food aid opportunities and an LA rent hike cheat sheet.
While uplifting and circulating partners’ citywide coverage, The LA Local is also hiring journalists of its own to report on the city. It has already hired an arts and culture reporter and is in the final stages of hiring an enterprise reporter with a focus on investigative accountability reporting. As another way of supporting regional reporting and adding journalists, the initiative has regranted some of its funding to California heavyweights CalMatters ($2 million) and LAist ($2.4 million over five years). The initiative has also invested in USC’s Crosstown to share block-by-block neighborhood-level data with its partner newsrooms.
Siqueiros told me the newsroom is finalizing hiring and onboarding, and that the website and more daily content will go “fully live” in early January. By the end of 2025, the newsroom will have 18 journalists on staff; its investments in LAist and CalMatters add another six journalists. The LA Local has hired 28 staff to date (Siqueiros expects an additional position, the enterprise reporter, to be filled by next week).
The LA Local describes its coalition as counting “nearly three dozen philanthropies and journalism organizations,” including the California Community Foundation, La Opinión, Witness LA, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Los Angeles Public Press (more on them later). Siqueiros said the network encourages content sharing and provides shared resources to partners.
Siqueiros was drawn to this role because it does not look to just support one media outlet. “It very much values strengthening an ecosystem, an environment of folks that are doing great things,” she said.
$18 million may be a staggering amount of money, but the local news industry has learned the hard way that generous seed funding is not a firewall against failure. In my conversation with Siqueiros, it was clear the Houston Landing had been on her mind as a study in missteps to avoid.
“Foundation and institutional support will be an important aspect of our on-going fundraising as we build a diversified revenue model,” Siqueiros told me. The goal is for The LA Local to rely on four revenue streams: foundation funding, major gifts, membership, and earned income, including sponsorships and events. (Its journalism will remain free to read.) Siqueiros sees actively cultivating all four streams as essential to sustainability.
“We have put together a three-year budget focused on strategically spending and raising revenue while maintaining a minimum 4.5 month operations reserve,” Siqueiros added. With the millions raised to date, “we are thoughtfully and carefully staffing up and spending in ways that ensure a sustainable spend year over year.”
The Southland: SFGate’s new newsletter aims to fill Los Angeles’ “missing middle” of news coverage
To the north, even in a city with a thriving local media scene, Hearst-owned SFGate is a standout. Over the past two years, it has built on its audience success as a paywall-free, advertising-driven digital heavyweight with expansions to cover the national parks, communities throughout the state, and Los Angeles, where its Southern California bureau is based.
That bureau is led by Eater alum and longtime Angeleno Farley Elliott. In September, the team launched a weekly newsletter called The Southland, rounding up SFGate’s lively, feature-y coverage of Los Angeles every Friday. (A few subject lines from newsletters: “The East Coast doesn’t have a diner like this”; “The Valley, once LA’s punching bag, fights back”; “LA’s billion-dollar bike path boondoggle.”)
The newsletter is for anyone who is “L.A.-curious,” Elliott told me. Still, a local audience is his priority: “I’ll take anybody, but the people in L.A. County are who I mostly want to be looking out for with the newsletter.”
Launching this newsletter, Elliott said, is a strategy to get the L.A.-specific reporting his team has been doing for two years in front of more people. “There are stories that we are writing every single week that I know local people here want to read; they simply aren’t finding it,” he said. “They’re not wrong. It is my job to put it at their feet and let them interact with it.”
To him, success “from a macro and brand perspective” would look like “probably north of 10,000 newsletter readers or subscribers every single week.” Elliott also wants to see more informal recognition of and enthusiasm for SFGate’s coverage of the city. “I want to get over that ‘the first two letters in the name are SF’ branding hurdle,” he said.
Elliott is a pragmatic audience thinker and lives by what he calls an “80-20 mindset.” That means “80% of the time, we’ve got to give our audience exactly what they’re looking for. And sometimes, to be a little blunt about it, we are shoveling coal into the content furnace to keep the whole engine going.”
On the other hand, recently, Elliott wrote about an Altadena taco truck called Tacos 210 that saved lives evacuating people during the wildfires, and continues serving the decimated community. That’s the kind of story, he said, that makes up the other 20% of the site’s coverage: “It’s great if that story reaches a wide audience. But ultimately, I’m doing it for the people that live there, the people that may have the opportunity to go experience that taco truck. And if it doesn’t land with 400,000 people, that’s okay.”
Like Siqueiros, Elliott emphasized that Los Angeles contains multitudes. At one end of the city, “Brad Pitt is probably at Bette Midler’s house having a singalong on a piano,”; meanwhile, the poorest residents suffer from the city’s housing and drug crises. SFGate’s coverage is geared toward what Elliott called the “missing middle” of the L.A. media landscape. Where many publications in Los Angeles have tailored their coverage to specific audiences, “I want to speak a little bit to a lot of different audiences and build that all together to make one ‘mecca audience'” that trusts and seeks out SFGate’s work, he said. He described himself as “blown away” by San Francisco’s thriving local media scene, and sees room for organizations old and new to create the same for Los Angeles.
“I’m really bullish on L.A. as a media market,” he said.
Los Angeles Public Press: A nonprofit accountability upstart reaching a young audience on social media
While Los Angeles Public Press launched three years ago, 2025 has been the news outlet’s breakout year, as it’s produced timely service journalism around wildfires and ICE raids. (Josh wrote about the org’s related traffic spike this summer.) Its audience is mostly under 45 and skews female. Nearly 90% of its traffic comes from mobile devices.
“When we launched, I did not think we’d be able to break through the noise in breaking news situations,” founder Matt Tinoco told me. “Candidly, I just assumed the TV stations and LAT would [obviously] be there first. Instead, 2025 has demonstrated that our ability to publish original work directly onto social media platforms [especially Instagram] has enormous utility for Angelenos during crisis situations.”
When I wrote about LA Public Press in its earlier days, Tinoco told me he didn’t see a path to sustainability for local media beyond “big checks” (barring a generational public policy overhaul). He still thinks that, he said, adding that he’s glad The LA Local is elevating local media among the county’s philanthropic community.
LA Public Press’ founding donor, Isaac Tucker, continues to commit $1 million per year of the publication’s $1.6 million budget, and chairs the publication’s board. Another $400,000 comes from institutional philanthropy and the rest comes from smaller donors. The news org’s impact report says that the publication believes “the pathway to sustainable local, independent, nonprofit journalism in Los Angeles is endowed giving.” Having grown its audience, Tinoco thinks LA Public Press can now start to “meaningfully develop” reader revenue, and sell mission-aligned sponsorships and advertising.
It’s easy to lose sight of the scale of local news contraction over three decades, Tinoco said. As he sees it, the city doesn’t have local news “gaps” so much as a “gaping maw.”
“Although there is a flurry of investment in some new digital outlets,” he said, “the bulk of the information ecosystem remains dependent on, mostly, contracting commercial and legacy operations.”