“While it’s true the media landscape is challenging, The New York Post has been finding success through its unique voice, editorial lens and quality coverage. That same formula is tailor-made for California,” said the New York Post Media Group. It includes the Post and some other media properties.
California, with a population of nearly 40 million, still has hundreds 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, according to Danny Bakewell, president of the Los Angeles Press Club.
“It’s really an untested market here,” said Bakewell, who is editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly focused on the city’s Black population. “L.A. is always ready for good-quality news reporting, and particularly in this moment when so many other papers are shrinking and disappearing, it could be a really unique opportunity.”
There is no U.S. newspaper quite like the 224-year-old New York Post. It was founded by no less a luminary than Alexander Hamilton, the country’s first treasury secretary, an author of the Federalist Papers, the victim of a duel at the hands of the vice president and the inspiration for the Broadway smash “Hamilton.” Murdoch, News Corp.’s founder and now its chairman emeritus, bought the Post in 1976, sold it a dozen years later, then repurchased it in 1993.
The Post is known for its relentless and skewering approach to reporting, its facility with sensational or racy subject matter, its Page Six gossip column, and the paper’s huge and often memorable front-page headlines — see, for example, 1983’s “Headless Body in Topless Bar.”
In recent years, the Post’s website and such related sites as PageSix.com have built a large and far-flung digital audience, 90% of it outside the New York media market, according to the company.
With the Los Angeles readership second only to New York’s, The California Post “is the next manifestation of our national brand,” Editor-in-Chief Keith Poole said in a statement. He’ll also be involved in overseeing the California paper with its editor-in-chief, Nick Papps, who has worked with News Corp.’s Australian outlets for decades, including a stint as an L.A.-based correspondent.
The company didn’t specify how many journalists The California Post will have.
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Associated Press writer Jake Offenhartz contributed from Los Angeles.
