By FishbowlLA Staff
The Week in LA Media is catching up. Before the franchise settles into its Friday rhythm, here’s a look back at a stretch that was rough on the city’s television and public-radio newsrooms — and, improbably, kind to its independent press.
KTLA loses a generation of on-air talent
In late February, KTLA — about as close to an LA institution as a television station gets — pushed out a wave of familiar faces as corporate parent Nexstar Media Group cut costs ahead of its proposed merger with rival Tegna. Among those let go: Mark Kriski, the eight-time Emmy-winning weathercaster who had been on “KTLA Morning News” since the show launched in 1991; weathercaster Kacey Montoya; midday anchors Lu Parker and Glen Walker; and reporter Ellina Abovian.
SAG-AFTRA condemned the cuts. With Kriski gone, Eric Spillman is now the lone on-air member of the Morning News still standing from the 1991 debut. For a program that functions as a piece of LA civic furniture — the thing half the city wakes up to — it was a jolt, and a reminder that the station-level damage from national broadcast mergers lands on local screens.
The public-media funding cliff arrives in Southern California
The reckoning LA’s public broadcasters have been bracing for is here. After Congress clawed back roughly $1.1 billion in public-media funding, the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted on January 5 to dissolve the corporation entirely, and federal money for public broadcasting was zeroed out for the 2026-27 fiscal year.
The local tally is sobering. PBS SoCal says it stands to lose about $4.3 million. KCRW has put its exposure at roughly $1.3 million against a $24 million budget. LAist has spent the past year working against a projected multimillion-dollar shortfall. These are stations that built decades of local programming on a federal foundation; for 2026 the question is no longer whether to cut, but what.
As the legacy outlets shrink, LA’s local-news ‘superbloom’ keeps blooming
Counter-programming the gloom: new Los Angeles newsrooms keep opening. The California Post — a seven-day West Coast tabloid from News Corp, parent of the New York Post — has launched with a staff reported in the 80-to-100 range, one of several LA outlets to debut inside a few months. It joins L.A. Reported, a weekly Substack from veteran journalist Scott Woolley, and The LA Local, a community-focused nonprofit that took its current name last fall and brought its website online in January.
Poynter has taken to calling the phenomenon a news “superbloom.” Whether all of it survives contact with the same advertising economy that’s hollowing out the incumbents is the open question — but for now, the LA media map is gaining dots faster than it’s losing them.
That’s the roundup
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