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.
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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.