NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Post is launching a California tabloid newspaper and news site next year, the company announced Monday, bringing an assertive, irreverent and conservative-friendly fixture of the Big Apple media landscape to the Golden State. In the process, it is creating a 21st-century rarity: a new American newspaper with a robust print edition.
Adding another title to Rupert Murdoch ‘s media empire, The California Post is setting out to cover politics, local news, business, entertainment and sports in the nation’s most populous state, while drawing and building on the venerable New York paper’s national coverage. Plans for the Los Angeles-based paper call for a print edition seven days a week plus a website, social media accounts and video and audio pieces.
“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. In typically brash and punchy Post fashion, he portrayed California as plagued by ”jaundiced, jaded journalism.”
It enters at a bumpy moment for its industry
However bold its intentions, the venture is being launched into a turbulent atmosphere for the news business, particularly for print papers. More than 3,200 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.
“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.”
The Post is a unique beast
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.”
At the same time, the Post is a player in both local and national politics. It routinely pushes, from the right, on “wokeness” and other 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 as recently as last month.
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.
