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In the fall of 2021, Maer Roshan received an unusual message from his boss. Roshan, who had served as a deputy editor of New York and the editorial director for Tina Brown’s Talk, was fifty-four, the editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine, busy transforming it from a dull lifestyle publication—with articles on “the best” of the city—into a vibrant, timely outlet. Lately, Los Angeles had published a cover story about how COVID-19 could derail Los Angeles, seven days before the city shut down; an exclusive profile of Governor Gavin Newsom; a feature inside the “woke wars” at Brentwood School. The magazine had gotten out ahead of the Britney Spears conservatorship story, and was the first to interview Charlotte Kirk, a British actress who had been involved in Hollywood sex scandals. Its stories were picked up by the Los Angeles Times and CNN; Roshan was praised for his oversight. “He may hate the word buzz,” the Times declared, “but Los Angeles magazine editor Maer Roshan is creating it.”

Despite the magazine’s editorial successes, however, Roshan said he faced persistent demands from Hour Media, the magazine’s owner, to make budget cuts. In his two years thus far as editor, the team had dwindled from about twenty to eight people. The pandemic hit the business hard; the staff lost their office and ran their editorial operations on Zoom. Now John Balardo, the president of Hour Media, was looking to sell. He’d come to Roshan with a request: that he assist in searching for a buyer.

It was an unusual arrangement: publications are often owned by conglomerates that silo editorial operations from the business side. (Balardo declined to comment.) Roshan was intrigued by the opportunity. He drew up a list of likely prospects, including publishing companies and wealthy individuals, and, for more than a year, pitched everyone he thought would be a good fit. Finally, a friend passed on the name of Mark Geragos, a prominent criminal defense attorney. In a series of phone calls, Roshan spoke with Geragos about the magazine. “As a journalist, I’m naturally skeptical,” Roshan told me. “But he wore down that skepticism. His vision so nicely corresponded with what I was talking about. He was so complimentary of all the great stories we were doing and breaking.” They spoke of competing with the LA Times. Geragos quickly brought in Ben Meiselas, a colleague at his law firm and cofounder of MeidasTouch, a “pro-democracy news network” consistently aligned with the Democratic Party, to be his partner in the acquisition.

Geragos and Meiselas formed a company called Engine Vision Media, its name inspired by the old firehouse in downtown LA where they established its headquarters. In December 2022, through Engine Vision, they bought Los Angeles in a bundle with two other Southern California glossies, Pasadena and Orange County, for a reported six million dollars. “As someone who was born in downtown Los Angeles and raised in the Pasadena area,” Geragos said in a statement, “it’s a dream to help steward the legacy of these three incredible magazines.” 

Roshan was thrilled. He’d rescued Los Angeles from possible destruction by landing owners who seemed to appreciate its mission. “It’s like you just ran this marathon and got to the end, and you can’t breathe and you’re exhausted, you’re sweaty, but you made it,” he told me. “You got it over the finish line.”

At an introductory town hall meeting with staff and contributors, Geragos and Meiselas made speeches pledging to support ambitious investigative reporting. They gathered at Engine Co. No. 28, a restaurant owned by Geragos on the ground floor of their new office building. Over lunch, Geragos and Meiselas talked about taking Los Angeles to the next level—they wanted, as Geragos later put it to me, “to become more national, not just regional,” in the vein of Vanity Fair. The event’s mood was enlivened, guests said, by discussion of pay raises for everyone and of longtime freelancers being placed on staff. Roshan recalled Geragos saying that “he loved journalism, and what we were doing, and how he wanted us to do more of it,” that he would give the magazine the resources “to do it better and bigger.” The room was utterly charmed. “They said all the right things,” Jason McGahan, a former staff writer, told me. “I think there was some basis for optimism initially. And then, you know, things got weird really fast.”

Recently, I met with Geragos for coffee in New York, at a café in the Flatiron where he has a standing table for meetings during his frequent trips to the city. He is in his late sixties, charming, affable. He wore a crisp blue oxford, with dark-rimmed glasses perched on his forehead. When I arrived, he was waiting for me, reading a newspaper. “I was born in downtown LA, went to law school in downtown LA, and for forty years, practiced with an office there,” he said. Geragos is the grandson of survivors of the Armenian genocide; his father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. He grew up in a household, he said, where there were always some fifty or sixty magazines around. “Magazines were always something that I was fascinated with,” he told me. He loved print, and consuming stories of the wider world—science, technology, art, the law. Eventually, he and his father established a family firm, Geragos & Geragos, which he expanded with a New York office. “The time I spent in New York made me kind of jealous of what New York has versus what Los Angeles has,” he said. “You’ve got the Daily News, the New York Times, New York magazine, The New Yorker. Why is it that New York’s got that kind of range, and LA’s got the LA Times? It made no sense to me. And I always thought, ‘God, it would just be a crime if LA magazine went under.’” 

Los Angeles had a storied history: The idea came in the late fifties, when Geoff Miller, a gregarious, curly-haired twenty-three-year-old graduate student at UCLA, wrote a thesis about creating a city magazine devoted to a place, he liked to joke, that nobody actually considered a city. Los Angeles at the time was a “collection of villages,” Miller believed, “looking for an identity, if not a center.” It had “infinite possibilities,” but “nobody could figure out the terrain.” Los Angeles was to be a guide. While in school, Miller met David Brown, a thirtysomething ad executive who helped him develop the concept. The first issue appeared in the summer of 1960, on a shoestring budget of fifty thousand dollars, a scrapbook of hand-cut and -pasted freelance articles by pseudonymous writers who were under contract with the local Time-Life bureau. 

Los Angeles quickly gained recognition for its kitsch and clever prose, covering everything from the city’s “bachelor life” to a Malibu Rail Line that never materialized, along with book, theater, and art reviews. Eventually, Miller grew a stable of writers that included Ray Bradbury, Joseph Wambaugh, and Budd Schulberg; Joan Didion made an appearance. Los Angeles became a fixture on the coffee tables of the city’s major hotels and airport concession stands. Eventually, it reached a peak circulation of 172,000. Ad revenue was high enough to make Los Angeles the size of a phone book.

Geragos had read Los Angeles over the decades, as it went through a series of owners. “I watched it ebb and flow,” he said. He appreciated it: “I loved the range.” But he’d never made a serious move toward buying the magazine until the pitch came from Roshan—“as close a composite of Geoff as I could come up with,” Kathryn Leigh Scott, an actress and Miller’s widow, told me. “He had the same journalistic drive and sensibilities.” Acquiring Los Angeles would connect Geragos to a valuable piece of the city’s cultural legacy.

Geragos had already built a reputation in Los Angeles. He’d represented Michael Jackson; others on his client list have, at various points, included Chris Brown, Nicole Richie, Winona Ryder, Scott Peterson, Jussie Smollett, Sean Combs, and Hunter Biden; his firm has also represented the Republican National Committee and Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Donald Trump’s campaign. Recently, he’d seen his own name appear in a controversial story: In March of 2022, the LA Times reported that settlement funds meant for some American heirs of Armenian genocide victims—whom Geragos represented as part of a team in a case against insurance companies—were allegedly not distributed in full to the plaintiffs. The Times article, on “how corruption spoiled reparations,” observed, among other things, that about a million dollars of the payout ended up at Loyola Law School, Geragos’s alma mater, but did not suggest that he had been involved in any wrongdoing. Later, Geragos sued for libel. The court ruled in favor of an anti-SLAPP motion by the Times to strike the complaint: “Plaintiff proffers an inaccurate premise—that the Articles cause a negative public reaction, and that negative reaction was based on incorrect inferences drawn from the Articles, therefore the Articles must have made false statements or implications of fact and Defendants are liable for defamation,” the judgment went. “That logic is flawed.” The court found that the Times did not act with “malice or reckless disregard,” and that Geragos “has not demonstrated motive or the dubious practices he claims.” A state superior court judge ordered him to cover the newspaper’s legal fees, amounting to more than two hundred thousand dollars. (Geragos did not comment on the ruling ahead of publication. When reached for fact-checking, he asked for queries in writing, and more time to respond; both requests were granted, and then he said he needed another extension.)

Meiselas, his business partner, was in his late thirties, a lawyer at the firm and a lecturer at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. The son of Kenny Meiselas, a famous music-industry lawyer who has represented Combs, Lady Gaga, and The Weeknd, he’d gained attention for MeidasTouch, which began as the pet project of a trio of siblings during the pandemic and turned into a profitable venture, with videos that receive as many as five million views. “Ben and his brothers have created a force of nature with MeidasTouch,” Geragos told me. By the time Los Angeles came on the market, Geragos and Meiselas were working together on an expanding empire, Geragos Global, a development company that invests in real estate, business, and recreation. In 2021, they announced a fifteen-million-dollar investment in the hotel V Palm Springs, as part of a deal with Sonder, a short-term-rental startup; around that time, they also acquired a thousand-acre Catskills resort that was featured on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. With Engine Vision Media, Geragos told me, they had ambitions to broaden their reach.

In a press release announcing the purchase of Los Angeles, Geragos and Meiselas promised to “invest in more content, significantly enhance the magazines’ digital presence,” and “expand the slate of live events hosted by the magazines in their respective communities.” They brought in Chris Hannan, a former executive at Fox Sports, to advise Engine Vision Media during the transition. “It was an exciting thing, watching it grow and happen,” Roshan told me. 

But what Roshan perhaps underappreciated was that the new owners were, like many who acquire media outlets, businessmen at heart. When we met, Geragos was clear that his purchase of Los Angeles was “not a vanity project,” as he put it. “I love to try to make money. I think a business is designed to make money. My father used to have a joke about the law firm: We didn’t start as a not-for-profit. You can’t stick around as a not-for-profit.” 

Roshan first felt that something was off in January of 2023, when he received a call from Geragos informing him that he had hired a new legal writer. Roshan was confused, then angry. Los Angeles had a number of talented contractors, working tirelessly, who had been requesting to be put on staff. Why would the owner make an editorial decision without consulting him? On the phone, he spoke with Geragos about his frustrations: new hires should at least be vetted by the editor in chief, he argued. In Roshan’s view, Geragos seemed surprised he was upset. (When asked about it later, Geragos said, “This is part of the Maer narrative. I don’t really need to engage in a tit-for-tat with him.” Meiselas sent me a general note: “The state of journalism is already challenging as it is, and I don’t like contributing my time and energy to tearing each other down,” he wrote. “It’s bad energy.”)

Hannan, who consulted on Engine Vision Media’s high-level organizational priorities after the acquisition, had his own concerns. The first print magazine released under the new ownership included a detailed account of a socialite who had killed two children while, prosecutors alleged, she had been drag racing—a piece that received a tremendous response, much of it critical, and appeared at the front of the book in an issue on “What Your Car Says About You”; Hannan was taken aback. He asked Roshan and other members of the editorial team why they had presented the piece that way. To Roshan, the article was fair game: “There is no piece of journalism everybody can get behind—that’s not what we’re in the business of,” he said. “It was news.” To Hannan, “It comes across as offensive, quite frankly.” He recalled wondering, of Roshan, “How are you strategically looking at what you’re doing at the magazine?” 

The divergence between management and editorial widened when, according to Roshan, Geragos began suggesting that the magazine cover some of his legal cases. In particular, Roshan told me, Geragos proposed that Los Angeles do a piece about his libel lawsuit against the LA Times. At first, Roshan was hesitant: there was an obvious conflict of interest in covering legal action involving the magazine’s owner. “As editor, you have to proceed delicately,” he told me. He considered whether he would cover the story if Geragos were not his boss. In the end, he agreed to run a freelance piece, which quoted heavily from Geragos: “They had an agenda,” he told the reporter. At the end was an editor’s note: “Mark Geragos is a co-founder of Engine Vision Media, which owns Los Angeles as well as other properties. The company’s owners play no part in our journalism.” (Geragos denies that the magazine’s coverage has skewed toward his lawsuits. “I don’t have this as a vanity kind of vehicle,” he again told me. “I can get as much free media as I want just by virtue of the cases I handle. In fact, having LA magazine kind of pins me in a little bit.”)

By the spring, the relationship between Roshan and the new leadership had grown fraught. April’s cover story was about a ten-year-old boy who had been passed over by the county Department of Children and Family Services and was then murdered by his mother and her boyfriend. The reporter had spent months in Antelope Valley, ninety miles north of the city, speaking with family members, attending the trial, and digging through records to prove that the tragedy was not only a domestic failure, but a larger one encompassing the DCFS and Los Angeles County. The piece garnered wide attention: it was picked up by the LA Times and roiled activists. In response, according to Roshan, his bosses chided him, during what was supposed to have been an operations call, for running a story that was so upsetting. They wanted, he recalled them saying, to publish a “happy magazine.” (“I’ve never used that term,” Geragos told me. “I’ve never talked to Maer about that.”) Around the same time, the top brass debuted a podcast called The Bryan and Gina Show, with a pair of hosts Roshan had never met, discussing glamping, luxury pets, wedding venues, and celebrity encounters. 

Then, an hour before an editorial meeting, Roshan was called into what had been an empty office to meet a recent hire, Chris Gialanella, who was arriving as the magazine’s president and publisher. Gialanella’s résumé included more than twenty years at Modern Luxury, a media company focused on fashion and style. It quickly became clear to Roshan what was happening. In a meeting that lasted no more than five minutes, Roshan recalled Gialanella telling him that the magazine would be moving in a different direction. When Roshan asked what direction that would be, he remembered that Gialanella replied, “‘I’m not at liberty to say.’” (When asked about Roshan’s firing, Gialanella told me, “It’s a business, you know—people come and go, and decisions are made and, you know, things like that happen, and I think that’s kind of how to look at it.”) A security guard materialized. Roshan said he didn’t need an escort, and left.

By the time the rest of the staff showed up for their meeting, the news had spread that Roshan had been fired. “It was like somebody died,” Merle Ginsberg, the magazine’s former freelance style editor, told me. “It was the beginning of the end of Los Angeles being a seriously credible city magazine.” 

Meiselas viewed the situation differently. “I believe in these challenging times, community magazines should celebrate and respect the communities they represent and the people in it,” he told me. “Too much of news in general is focused on negativity and dividing people and fostering rage. I want our magazines to continue to be a bridge that brings people together instead of a chainsaw that cuts deep and divides. People are free to disagree with this approach.”

Geragos was, I found, amiable to a point. When I began asking about why Roshan was let go, he bristled like a lawyer displeased with the direction that a trial just took. “You sound like Lesley Stahl interviewing Donald Trump,” he told me. He wanted to keep the conversation positive. “I’m in talks on various fronts about expanding and retooling and doing the digital,” he said. “It’s vibrant, our sales are up, we’re national, we have great support, the team seems to be thriving, so that’s always a good sign.” He added, “I think 2024 will turn a profit.” According to Meiselas, “We have done what many thought was not possible by creating a profitable print magazine structure that celebrates the community and does exceptional journalism.” (Engine Vision Media declined to provide subscription, traffic, or revenue numbers.)

Many of those who remained at Los Angeles believed that, after Roshan’s ouster, the magazine became an expression of its owners’ interests. Gialanella, former contributors said, took a heavy hand in newsroom operations. “I felt it was important to take some things that I’ve learned from Modern Luxury and bring them to the LA brand,” he told me. “My vision was to kind of celebrate LA and do something fun—keeping what we’ve done in the past, but making it a little bit more celebratory.” Much of that work has involved “meeting businesses, seeing what their goals are, and really trying to figure out ways that we could grow their business,” he said. “Because if their business grows, our business grows.” His focus, all the while, has been profit. “My role is to find ways to keep everybody—my clients—happy, and keep the brand alive,” he told me. “We’re bringing the community together and finding ways to capitalize on that for revenue purposes, but also for the purpose of doing good things.” 

The magazine’s party coverage began highlighting events that Gialanella had attended, displaying photos of him posing among the stars. “It just seemed kind of pandering,” Ginsberg told me. (Gialanella did not respond to requests for comment from a fact-checker.) Los Angeles ran a piece on Scott Peterson, and another on Hunter Biden; both quoted Geragos, identifying him as a co-owner of the magazine’s parent company. Los Angeles featured a “wedding close-up” of Meiselas’s marriage in Simi Valley, written by a onetime MeidasTouch contributor. The same month, there was a promotion of MeidasTouch merchandise, including a link to the MeidasTouch storefront; at the end of the article appeared a disclosure, stating that Meiselas cofounded MeidasTouch and is a co-owner of the magazine.

There were also complaints that Engine Vision Media was allegedly not compensating freelancers for prolonged periods. “The issue was that when we inherited it, we had to fix errors and fix the lack of paperwork and lack of contracts and we had to ensure people were classified legally and correctly,” Meiselas told me. “There were a lot of handshake deals and favors and not uniform contracts, and that had to be fixed.” Some freelance writers were placed on staff; a few contract editors were let go; a copy editor’s hours were adjusted to part-time.

Then, in August of 2023, the Daily Beast published an article about how the “once revered” magazine was “starting to lose its luster” under Geragos and Meiselas. A number of employees, both former and current, the Daily Beast reported, alleged that “a host of troubling issues have befallen the new management.” Suddenly, former contributors told me, Gialanella began asking around about where their loyalties lay. Eric Mercado, the managing editor, sensed a high level of paranoia. “They went on this elaborate search to try to hunt out the mole,” he said, recalling that colleagues swapped stories about inquiries they’d received. “It did feel like we were all being monitored closely.” 

Eventually, Mercado, who had worked at Los Angeles since 1995, was fired without severance. (He said he was not told of any cause.) Many others had their contracts terminated. The editor who replaced Roshan remained in the job for a year. “It became clear to all of us who have been in publishing a very long time that these people obviously know a lot about what they’re doing in their own fields, but they didn’t know about general magazine publishing at all,” Ginsberg said. “And they didn’t want to listen.” According to Meiselas, “We invested a lot of money.” The size of the staff is similar now to what it used to be, he told me, and “infinitely more efficient.”

Roshan and a few former colleagues have since landed at the Hollywood Reporter. Los Angeles is still operating—though it now looks different from the magazine that it was before. Recent pieces feature a “broke writer” who “became a capitalist,” an argument that “new parents in LA can be treated like pariahs,” and “25 Grammy-Recognized Albums Made in or Inspired by Los Angeles.” Gialanella started something called the Best of Beauty Awards, “where we had beauty clients come on to create really cool new synergies that we haven’t done before,” he said. He has also written a number of pieces—including, recently, one on “an upscale escape in Dubai.” There have been events honoring food, leading men, and the “LA woman of the year”: Kris Jenner. Meiselas told me, “We have an incredible team, who dedicate their lives to fill the magazines”—Los Angeles as well as Orange County and Pasadena—“with love, joy, humor, a sense of community, while doing hard-hitting journalism and breaking stories that continue to be cited daily across national news.” To McGahan, the former staff writer, it was all “turning into Modern Luxury magazine, but trading on the reputation that LA magazine had built up.”

Is there any other way for a magazine to survive? What’s happened at Los Angeles seems increasingly common, as owners appear to believe they know something that those who have built careers in publishing do not. To be sure, robust journalism can be difficult to sustain financially. Yet the alternative—creating a digital-first “brand” that is essentially advertorial, and often self-serving—can undermine the value proposition of a magazine that attracts readers, and buyers, in the first place. Geragos, for one, remains undeterred. He sees the editorial changes that Los Angeles has undergone since his arrival not as a loss but as an opportunity to revive a near-extinct practice. As for the publications that haven’t caught on, he told me, “they have got kind of a dinosaur way of approaching journalism, and they don’t understand it’s changing, and they’re trying to exist in a nineties mentality—but they’re thirty years removed.”

Lately, though, Los Angeles, too, has lingered a few decades in the past. In addition to the steady stream of events and write-ups on luxury vacation spots, the magazine has devoted attention to the Menendez brothers, who murdered their parents thirty-five years ago—and who recently filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that new evidence supports abuse allegations against their father. Geragos is one of their attorneys. As the coverage accumulated, the former district attorney in Los Angeles County came out in support of resentencing the brothers, then lost his bid for reelection; his replacement has indicated that he will take a different approach to the case. In March, Los Angeles Magazine Studios, a new production arm of Engine Vision Media, debuted a docuseries about the Menendez brothers on Fox Nation, featuring interviews with Geragos. In October, Los Angeles published a piece on their “Long Fight for Release.” At the end, the reporter quotes Geragos: “Any reasonable person,” he said, thinks the brothers should walk free. 

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Maddy Crowell is a freelance journalist based in New York.