A group of Los Angeles organizations, in collaboration with the nonprofit American Journalism Project, announced on Tuesday that they have raised $15 million to invest in Los Angeles’s local news through the LA Local News Initiative.
The initiative will debut a nonprofit that will use this funding to support local newsrooms in the city in an effort to increase coverage on community issues. “Local news in LA is in jeopardy,” said Giselle Fernandez, an anchor at Spectrum News and a member of the initiative’s board, in a statement. “We’ve lost our common story—we no longer have a shared set of facts.” The board includes Kevin Merida, the former executive editor of the Los Angeles Times; Monica Lozano, former editor, publisher, and chief executive of La Opinión; Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project; and Gerun Riley, president of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The board will be tasked with finding a chief executive officer and executive editor to lead this endeavor.
The initiative comes at a difficult time for local news throughout California. The Medill School of Journalism reported that California has lost a third of its newspapers and that the number of journalists in the state has dropped by 68 percent since 2005. In January, the Los Angeles Times laid off over a hundred employees, about 20 percent of its newsroom.
The LA Local News Initiative’s research on the state of the local information landscape included input from over nine hundred Angelenos who expressed the need for more localized news. The research, according to the statement, “showed the vastness, diversity, and complexity of LA would require the work of many players in an ecosystem, not one singular outlet.”
The initiative already has several local news partners including CalMatters, Latino Media Collaborative, Documenters Network—City Bureau, and USC Annenberg. It will help facilitate free content sharing, special projects, and resource sharing among existing outlets and organizations. It will also invest in a “region-wide accountability reporting team” at LAist and CalMatters, that will report on city and county government.
The initiative’s announcement follows other efforts to help revitalize local California journalism this year, including the California Journalism Preservation Act, a bill that would require platforms like Google to pay news outlets for linking to their work. In June, a separate bill passed in the state’s senate would tax Google, Meta, and Amazon on the consumer data they collect. Those funds would in turn be directed to local newsrooms.
Feven Merid is CJR’s staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow.