Latinas Lead Charge to Rebuild Local News in L.A.

Editor’s Note: We welcome Brenda Gonzalez to The Latino Newsletter’s growing list of contributors.

LOS ANGELES — Local news sources are shrinking in the country’s second-largest city, where Latinos make up nearly half the population, and Latinas are stepping up to change that.

Last fall, Monica Lozano, former CEO of La Opinión, and Emmy-winning journalist Giselle Fernandez joined a coalition of media leaders and philanthropists to form the Los Angeles Local News Initiative.

The nonprofit, launched with nearly $15 million in foundational funding, aims to expand independent, community-centered journalism across the region.

Lozano chairs the board, which includes Fernandez, former Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Kevin Merida, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation President Gerun Riley, and American Journalism Project Chief Investment Officer Michael Ouimette.

In February, the organization appointed longtime civic leader Michele Siqueiros as its founding CEO.

The initiative, structured as a nonprofit to prioritize communities over commercial interests, aims to rebuild trust in local news by providing coverage that genuinely and accurately reflects the diversity of Los Angeles.

The L.A. Local News Initiative emerged from a two-year research effort led by the American Journalism Project and a steering committee of local media, community, and business leaders. The study, which included surveys, interviews, and focus groups in six languages, gathered insights from nearly 900 Angelenos across 244 zip codes. The findings revealed deep frustration with the lack of unbiased, fact-based local news and a widespread sense that many communities were underrepresented in existing coverage.

“People don’t feel that their communities are well represented, that the issues that matter to them are not the ones being covered,” Lozano told The Latino Newsletter. “So you get negative stories as opposed to the full breadth, and as a result of that not being seen and not being heard, it was leading to people not knowing how to engage civically, not knowing how to hold their electeds accountable.”

For Fernandez, the decline of local news threatens civic engagement and democracy. There needs to be an answer to this.

“I am very alarmed by the assault on the free press we’ve seen in the last decade. As a Latina journalist and concerned citizen of the world, we have to be concerned about the loss of a free and unbiased press,” Fernandez said. “The very heartbeat of a civic society is a free press. We are losing a pillar of our society.”

The process from ideation to formalizing the new nonprofit was swift, propelled by the urgency of responding to an environment in which people are feeling disengaged.

A coalition of funders, ranging from traditional philanthropy to local journalism outlets, came together to support the effort. The initiative is designed as a public service, ensuring that its reporting will be free to access and available for republishing.

“There was a willingness of our funders to say we can’t stand back anymore, even if we’re not journalism funders,” Lozano explained. “This is really about shifting the way in which the ecosystem of news and information partners together to satisfy the needs of a diverse community like Los Angeles.”

Siqueiros, the initiative’s founding CEO, was raised by an immigrant mother and has lived in Los Angeles her entire life. She emphasized that local communities must be the focus of the newsroom’s reporting.

“It’s critical to ensure that we have strong local media and news and information that is not just about our communities, but from all communities, and that highlights the voices and the people that make Los Angeles so richly diverse and beautiful,” Siqueiros said. “I can’t imagine doing anything more important right now for this city.”

It was what the initiative’s founding board members noticed.

“We’re very much taken by Michele’s love of L.A., her knowledge of L.A., and her demonstrated capacity to actually build something, as what I call, as audacious, as the L.A. Local News Initiative,” Lozano said.

Siqueiros’ leadership builds on her experience as an education advocate, ensuring that all communities have access to information and are empowered to tell their own stories.

“The value proposition is two-way. One is understanding that, of course, there's importance in educating and informing, but also in listening and hearing voices that are often not at the table and not part of the more formal media enterprise,” Siqueiros said.

“I think there’s a lot of good reasons that people don’t trust media or are frustrated by the media,” she added. “And it isn’t just misinformation and disinformation. It’s also that a lot of traditional news reporting has stopped. The first level of cuts is usually to local news. We’re building community newsrooms from and by the community. That is how you ensure greater trust and ensure you’re actually providing information that people care about.”

The initiative has integrated Boyle Heights Beat, a nonprofit newsroom providing local reporting in English and Spanish in L.A.’s eastside, and plans to replicate similar models in select communities across L.A. County. The goal is to establish additional community newsrooms that train and empower residents to report on their neighborhoods.

Other members of the initiative include L.A. Taco, LAist and La Opinión.

“Independent community news is the future. You answer to public interest, not private interest,” Fernandez said.

Creating and staffing new newsrooms will require considerable resources, but the initiative believes in solutions. According to Lozano, delivering news across multiple platforms can be more cost-efficient than reshaping a legacy newsroom. The nonprofit model also offers additional advantages.

“The benefit of philanthropy is that they’re about social change. And about how do you create opportunities for everybody. And that’s what we care about. And they also have risk capital,” Lozano said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into supporting local news because foundations understand what happens if people are not informed and they are disinformed or misinformed. What’s at stake is the collapse of our democracy.”

“The downfall of a lot of traditional news media has been because the focus has been so heavily on profit, making money off of information. Nonprofit news is how news should be. It is providing information as a public service. It literally saves lives,” Siqueiros said.

About the Author

Brenda Gonzalez is a Los Angeles-based writer and the founder, producer, and co-host of Tamarindo Podcast. 

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