California

What the death of local news actually means

Published

1 year ago

July 24, 2024

What the death of local news actually means

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, July 24. I’m Gustavo Arellano, a metro columnist, which means I’m allowed to have opinions like:

Newspapers are cool.

But before I begin my rant, here’s what you need to know to start your day.

Whither the news industry in California?

Since I was a teen, I’ve lapped up newspapers.

I used to steal the sports section from the rolled-up newspapers on the driveways of homes on the way to Sycamore Junior High in Anaheim. When I realized there was more to life than just the Angels and Dodgers, I’d jump a fence every Sunday morning to buy copies of the Orange County Register and L.A. Times from news boxes in my neighboring apartment complex. Once I got a job my senior year of high school, I subscribed to those two papers along with the New York Times.

I went into journalism straight out of college despite earning a film studies degree — I’ve never regretted it. But as the years went on, I ended my print subscriptions because I could read for free on the internet most of what I used to pay for.

An empty news rack that used to sell the Spanish-language newspaper Excélsior still remains along Bristol Street in a small shopping area in Santa Ana.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It’s people like me who launched the proverbial Little Boy that destroyed too many journalism outlets to count.

But the Fat Man remains companies like Craigslist, Google and Facebook, which eradicated the traditional business model of news organizations — advertising. This one-two punch has led to mass layoffs, shutdowns and a society where misinformation reigns.

Two bills currently in the California Legislature, Assembly Bill 886 and Senate Bill 1327, seek to confront this digital dystopia.

The former would require social media giants such as Facebook and search engines like Google to pay news outlets for using their content; the latter would use the revenue gathered from a proposed tax on user data gathered by Big Tech to gift news groups a tax credit for every full-time journalist they employ. The California News Publisher Assn., of which The Times is a member, supports AB 886, arguing it could give the state’s dying news industry — and local news — a lifeline.

(Tech companies vehemently oppose the bills, arguing it’s unfair to target them when the news industry hasn’t kept up with modernity and readers have more options to get their news than ever before.)

These bills aren’t merely a desperate money grab by the lamestream press, folks.

A limping media ecosystem affects society in many ways — few of them good.

Times reporters investigated the decline of local news and what it actually means. Here’s what we found:

More big businesses control the narrative. The largest news source in Richmond, Calif., is owned by the Bay Area town’s largest business: Chevron. That means in a city where pollution concerns are real from the company’s refinery, its digital rag doesn’t say a damn thing, Jessica Garrison reported.
News that serves disenfranchised communities is ignored. Santa Ana is one of the most-Latino big cities in the United States. Twenty years ago, dozens of local semanarios (weekly papers) and all sorts of sports, entertainment and lifestyle magazines covered the goings-on of the city. Today, just two publications focused on entertainment fluff remain. I looked at how important issues affecting residents now get ignored.
Tech companies are intent on winning. Australia and Canada passed bills similar to what California legislators have proposed. Some money went to publishers, but tech bros created chaos by blocking news from their platforms, national correspondent Jenny Jarvie reported.
AI is only making things worse. AI chatbots might openly lift local journalists’ work and either pass it off as their own or mischaracterize it. “The average consumer that just wants to go check [out a restaurant], they’re probably not going to read [our article] anymore,” L.A. Taco editor Javier Cabral told Wendy Lee on AI’s effects on his scrappy indie site.
Even news nonprofits — long seen as a foolproof solution — are having a rough time of it: The Long Beach Post had eclipsed the 127-year-old Press-Telegram in readership and gravitas but now finds itself in tatters after nearly three-quarters of its reporters resigned over editorial and business disputes with management. Those defectors now have their own publication, the Long Beach Watchdog, James Rainey reported.
There are fewer reporters to hold power accountable. The people paid to objectively find out what people in power are trying to hide from you … we’re losing jobs like the Halos are losing fans, Ashley Ahn showed.

I thank you, gentle reader, for reading this newsletter, offer you a virtual high-five if you subscribe to Essential California, and gift you a digital gold star if you are a Times subscriber. And if you read this without paying us? We pardon you — and ask you to subscribe. Hey, $1 for four months is a deal anyone can afford, amirite?

Today’s top stories

Kamala Harris hits the trail

Coronavirus in California

How clean is your weed?

Fentanyl

The family of 3-year-old twins who died of a suspected fentanyl overdose is in shock. Relatives said they had no idea the boys’ mother used the opioid.
Their mother has been charged with murder.
Just last week, another toddler died of a fentanyl overdose. DCFS had trusted his mom’s friend to keep him safe

More big stories

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Today’s great reads

A plate of tacos is displayed at the Industrial Downtown Night Market.

How L.A. reached peak taco. To understand how Los Angeles became the world’s most taco-diverse city, let’s start with the taco truck.

Other great reads

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com.

For your downtime

Going out

Staying in

And finally … from our archives

Front page of the July 25, 1974 L.A. Times

On this day in history, the Supreme Court voted 8 to 0 that President Nixon had to turn over transcripts of the Watergate tapes to Special Counsel Leon Jaworski.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team.

Ryan Fonseca, reporter
Defne Karabatur, fellow
Andrew Campa, Sunday reporter
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor and Saturday reporter
Christian Orozco, assistant editor
Stephanie Chavez, deputy metro editor
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.

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California

California loses $160M for delaying revocation of 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants

Published

2 hours ago

January 7, 2026

Press Room

California loses 0M for delaying revocation of 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants

California will lose $160 million for delaying the revocations of 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants, federal transportation officials announced Wednesday.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy already withheld $40 million in federal funding because he said California isn’t enforcing English proficiency requirements for truckers.

The state notified these drivers in the fall that they would lose their licenses after a federal audit found problems that included licenses for truckers and bus drivers that remained valid long after an immigrant’s visa expired. Some licenses were also given to citizens of Mexico and Canada who don’t qualify. More than one-quarter of the small sample of California licenses that investigators reviewed were unlawful.

But then last week California said it would delay those revocations until March after immigrant groups sued the state because of concerns that some groups were being unfairly targeted. Duffy said the state was supposed to revoke those licenses by Monday.

Duffy is pressuring California and other states to make sure immigrants who are in the country illegally aren’t granted the licenses.

“Our demands were simple: follow the rules, revoke the unlawfully-issued licenses to dangerous foreign drivers, and fix the system so this never happens again,” Duffy said in a written statement. “(Gov.) Gavin Newsom has failed to do so — putting the needs of illegal immigrants over the safety of the American people.”

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Newsom’s office did not immediately respond after the action was announced Wednesday afternoon.

After Duffy objected to the delay in revocations, Newsom posted on X that the state believed federal officials were open to a delay after a meeting on Dec. 18. But in the official letter the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration sent Wednesday, federal officials said they never agreed to the delay and still expected the 17,000 licenses to be revoked by this week.

Enforcement ramped up after fatal crashes

The federal government began cracking down during the summer. The issue became prominent after a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people in August.

Duffy previously threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding from California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, and Washington after audits found significant problems under the existing rules, including commercial licenses being valid long after an immigrant truck driver’s work permit expired. He had dropped the threat to withhold nearly $160 million from California after the state said it would revoke the licenses.

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Administrator Derek Barrs said California failed to live up to the promise it made in November to revoke all the flawed licenses by Jan. 5. The agency said the state also unilaterally decide to delay until March the cancellations of roughly 4,700 additional unlawful licenses that were discovered after the initial ones were found.

“We will not accept a corrective plan that knowingly leaves thousands of drivers holding noncompliant licenses behind the wheel of 80,000-pound trucks in open defiance of federal safety regulations,” Barrs said.

Industry praises the enforcement

Trucking trade groups have praised the effort to get unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English off the road. They also applauded the Transportation Department’s moves to go after questionable commercial driver’s license schools.

“For too long, loopholes in this program have allowed unqualified drivers onto our highways, putting professional truckers and the motoring public at risk,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association.

The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs. So the Sikh Coalition, a national group defending the civil rights of Sikhs, and the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the California drivers. They said immigrant truck drivers were being unfairly targeted.

Immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. The Transportation Department also proposed new restrictions that would severely limit which noncitizens could get a license, but a court put the new rules on hold.

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California

California officials facing backlash in aftermath of Palisades fire one year later | Fox News Video

Published

14 hours ago

January 7, 2026

Press Room

California officials facing backlash in aftermath of Palisades fire one year later | Fox News Video

Pacific Palisades resident Rachel Darvish joined ‘Fox & Friends First’ to discuss how the deadly fire has continued to impact the community one year later and why California officials are still facing backlash for their handling of the disaster.

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