By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, November 2011
In mid-November 2011, FishbowlLA covered KPCC’s hiring of former LA Times staff writer Tami Abdollah as the public-radio station’s education writer. The hire was made by Tony Pierce. The original FishbowlLA framing tracked the LA-Times-to-KPCC reporter migration.
Then
The November 2011 Abdollah hire was a representative data point in one of the defining LA-journalism patterns of the era: the migration of reporters from the contracting LA Times to the expanding KPCC public-radio newsroom.
Tami Abdollah had been an LA Times staff writer for three years before leaving the paper in late 2009. Her KPCC hire placed her on the education beat — covering LAUSD, the country’s second-largest school district.
Now
KPCC built out one of the LA region’s most substantial newsrooms across the 2010s, and the 2018-2020 KPCC-LAist integration further consolidated the public-radio operation’s position.
Tami Abdollah’s subsequent career continued — to the Associated Press covering cybersecurity, and to USA Today as a national reporter.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the LA-journalism institutional realignment — a single hire that captured the larger story of how the LA-region news ecosystem reorganized around public radio as the metro daily contracted.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.