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Christopher Weber
Aiming to shake up the Golden State’s media landscape, the California Post launched with a new tabloid newspaper and news site that brings a brash, cheeky and conservative-friendly fixture of the Big Apple to the West Coast.
The Los Angeles outpost of the New York Post will be “digital first” — with social media accounts and video and audio pieces — but for $US3.75 ($5.40) readers can also purchase a daily print publication featuring the paper’s famously splashy front-page headlines. Perhaps most memorably: 1983’s “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”
“The most iconic thing about the New York Post, and now the California Post, is that front page,” said Nick Papps, editor-in-chief of the LA newsroom. “It has a unique wit, and is our calling card, if you like.”
Monday’s inaugural edition goes straight at Hollywood during awards season with the full-page headline: “Oscar Wild – Shocking truth behind director Safdie brothers’ mystery split.”
Page Six gets a Hollywood edition
Papps declined last week to reveal what stories his reporters were chasing and what bombs the political columnists will throw in its first editions. But he promised the growing staff of between 80 and 100 will focus on issues important to “everyday, hardworking” Californians, including homelessness, affordability, technology and “law and order.”
Of course, the Post’s infamous gossip column will get a Tinseltown version, Page Six Hollywood, that will keep a snarky eye on red carpets and celebrity culture. And sports fans can expect comprehensive coverage of the state’s major league teams, as well as the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Papps said.
“No matter what your politics are, sports is the great connector,” he said.
Adding another title to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the California Post will draw from and build on the venerable New York paper’s national coverage, which is known for its relentless and skewering approach to reporting and its facility with sensational or racy subject matter.
“There is no doubt that the Post will play a crucial role in engaging and enlightening readers, who are starved of serious reporting and puckish wit,” Robert Thomson, chief executive of Post corporate parent News Corp., said in a statement last year announcing the move. In typically punchy Post fashion, he portrayed California as plagued by “jaundiced, jaded journalism.”
Journalism or clickbait?
The California Post could make an impact with its combative style and conservative stance, said Gabriel Kahn, professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, who added “our statewide press is boring as bathwater,” especially when it comes to politics. He expects a major target to be Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who has possible presidential aspirations and has become a Republican boogeyman.
Readers shouldn’t anticipate that the new publication will become known for breaking big stories through old-fashioned journalism, Kahn said.
“There’s a crass cleverness in the way that tabloids present news that actually works well on social media,” he said. “It could be entertaining.”
Kahn doesn’t expect the California Post will turn a profit. He points out that the New York Post isn’t a big moneymaker for News Corp., but rather it serves another purpose, which is “to bludgeon its enemies” and curry favour with people in power on the right.
Nonetheless, the corporation’s New York Post Media Group, which includes several media properties, is a player in both local and national politics. It routinely pushes on culture-war pressure points, and it has broken such political stories as the Hunter Biden laptop saga. The Post has an avid reader in President Donald Trump, who gave its “Pod Force One” podcast an interview last summer.
It launches at a volatile moment for the industry.
However bold its intentions, the venture is being launched into a turbulent atmosphere for the news business, particularly print papers. More than 3200 of them have closed nationwide since 2005, according to figures kept by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The online world spawned new information sources and influencers, changed news consumers’ tastes and habits, and upended the advertising market on which newspapers relied.
California, with a population of nearly 40 million, still has dozens of newspapers, including dailies in and around Los Angeles and other major cities. But the nation’s second-most-populous city hasn’t had a dedicated tabloid focused on regional issues in recent memory. Meanwhile, venerable institutions like the Los Angeles Times have been hit with major layoffs.
The launch of a paper edition of the Post “defies logic” as news outlets in major metro areas are rapidly shrinking their print footprint, said Ted Johnson, a media and politics editor for Deadline in Washington, D.C., who reported in Los Angeles for 28 years.
“But Rupert Murdoch, his first love is print,” Johnson said.
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