Philanthropists invest $15 million in L.A. County local news

With local news struggling to survive, a collective of Los Angeles media executives and philanthropists launched an ambitious nonprofit group Tuesday to bolster L.A. County’s local news ecosystem, support small independent media and build public trust in media.

The new organization, Los Angeles Local News Initiative, has raised almost $15 million to provide underserved county residents with free access to neighborhood, regional and state news that will help them be more engaged in their communities and hold officials accountable.

Funded by organizations including the American Journalism Project, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Spiegel Family Fund, the initiative will support a network of community-first media outlets to report across digital, print and radio platforms for L.A. County’s 10 million residents. Those hyperlocal outlets will work in partnership with CalMatters, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on explaining California politics and policy, and LAist, part of the Southern California Public Radio group, to deliver enhanced regional accountability journalism that fills news gaps.

“L.A. County is far too complicated and diverse a place for any one outlet to serve all local news needs of all residents,” said Michael Ouimette, the chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project.

Los Angeles County, like many parts of the nation, has seen reductions local news organizations over the last two decades, including newspapers closing down. Some questionable local news sites have risen up in the void.

California has seen both successes and challenges in hyperlocal news start-ups. Look Out Santa Cruz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News reporting earlier this year. But the Long Beach Post, once hailed a model in the industry, went though an ugly round of layoffs and labor unrest as some of its funding dried up.

The new initiative is one of many investment efforts by nonprofits and foundations to stem the losses in journalism and counter a growing tide of online misinformation.

The idea for the nonprofit — which organizers say will create more than three dozen journalism jobs in the next three years — came from L.A. residents in historically underserved areas.

In 2022, the American Journalism Project partnered with local civic leaders to interview 845 L.A. County residents in difficult-to-reach communities spanning 244 ZIP Codes from Newbury Park to South Central L.A.

They found many county residents feel their needs aren’t met by local news. They want access to more freely available, high-quality, hyperlocal news that provides information to keep them safe and meet their basic needs, holds government accountable and tells the full stories of the region without sensationalism.

At a time when more than 200 counties in the U.S. have no news outlets, L.A. County has 104, more than any other county than Cook County in Illinois, where Chicago is located, according to a 2023 report by the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. But its population is higher than many states, and most news outlets here are too stretched to cover many city council and school board meetings.

“When people think about news deserts, they’re thinking about rural America, or communities that are off grid, but we have those same sorts of deserts in the region,” said Monica Lozano, board chair of the new L.A. Local News Initiative and the former editor, publisher and chief executive of La Opinión. “It was that dearth of trustworthy, verifiable, nonpartisan information that allows people to make informed decisions about their neighborhoods that served as the genesis for what has now become the L.A. Local News initiative.”

The group identified a model that is connecting with residents in a disadvantaged community and doing the service journalism they want to replicate across the region: Boyle Heights Beat.

A bilingual nonprofit newsroom that began training high school reporters in the historic Latino community of Boyle Heights in 2010 to report on the communities they live in, Boyle Heights Beat has expanded into a digital news outlet covering East L.A. with nine staff members, three of whom are full-time reporters, and a network of 30 youth reporters.

“Boyle Heights Beat has gained the trust, the respect, the credibility, the relationships necessary to report on a local community from people that live in that community and experience it every single day,” Lozano said.

The news outlet holds quarterly community meetings to touch base with residents and hear their concerns. It gets news tips from local students and their parents. Its reporters, editors and coordinators personally hand-deliver 30,000 quarterly print editions to local libraries, restaurants and community centers.

This summer, Boyle Heights Beat reported on a program that was giving out free air purifiers to residents, a story that was widely shared in a community at the crossroads of five freeways whose residents have high levels of cardiovascular issues.

“Community-centered journalism is in our DNA and we’re going to go to other communities and really explore what those communities need, using Boyle Heights Beats as a model,” said Kris Kelley, the Beat’s executive editor.

It remains unclear how far the Boyle Heights Beat model can spread. There are 88 independent municipalities in Los Angeles County, in addition to scores of neighborhoods within the city of Los Angeles and unincorporated county communities. Some have local news outlets, but many others don’t.

The L.A. Local News Initiative is just the latest in a national movement of philanthropic and local leaders working to support and revitalize local news in the digital age. As Big Tech companies run advertising alongside news content, eroding the financial basis of journalism, California local news is in steep decline. A report last year found that California has lost 68% of its reporters since 2005.

Press Forward, a national coalition of more than 20 major donors led by the MacArthur and Knight foundations, unveiled a plan last year to distribute half a billion dollars to news organizations across the country over five years. Neighborhood-focused concepts are taking places across the country, from Block Club Chicago to Canopy Atlanta.

The initiative has already forged partnerships with nearly 20 media outlets and universities across L.A. County. Next year, the group plans to launch new publications in additional communities, but few details were released.

“We believe this is an opportunity to make sure that historically underserved communities aren’t further disenfranchised because their residents lack access to trusted and factual and nonpartisan news,” said Gerun Riley, president of the Broad Foundation.