By FishbowlLA Staff
A week that began as an ordinary run of merger filings and legislative deadlines ended with an LA newsroom burying two of its own. Everything else in the LA media business this week — a studio threatening to leave town, a bill that could keep newsrooms staffed — sits in that shadow. Here is the week of September 11 to 18, 2026.
NewsChopper4 goes down in Chatsworth
Just before 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 15, the helicopter that KNBC and Telemundo 52 share for aerial coverage crashed into the parking lot of an industrial complex in Chatsworth. Journalist Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw were killed, as was a pedestrian on the ground, identified by the county medical examiner as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia. The crew had been overhead for about an hour covering a collision between a Metro bus and an SUV that had already killed two people.
Anyone who has worked an LA assignment desk knows the particular horror of what happened next. The station knew a news helicopter was down. It did not yet know whose. “We knew we lost contact with our people out there,” anchor Colleen Williams told viewers about two hours later, “and we just received the confirmation that, in fact, NewsChopper4 went down.” Reporters who had spent the evening covering one fatal crash spent the rest of it covering their colleagues’.
NTSB investigators arrived Wednesday. Air safety investigator Fabian Salazar said the video the aircraft was transmitting back to the station is “probably the most-important evidence that we have discovered so far,” and that a pristine copy is headed to the agency’s recorder lab for sound spectrum analysis. A preliminary report is due within 30 days; a final one could take 18 months. Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom both issued statements Tuesday night.
The wider industry context is worth stating plainly, because it explains why this happened here and not in most American cities. Aerial newsgathering has been quietly retired across small and mid-sized markets, where a full-time pilot, photojournalist and mechanic can run past $100,000 a month. Los Angeles is one of the few places where the chopper never went away — it is woven into how this city has covered itself since the Sixties. Moreno and Marciniw were doing a job that, in 2026, barely exists anywhere else.
Paramount tells City Hall it is preparing to go
On Wednesday, September 16, Paramount notified the offices of Mayor Karen Bass and California Attorney General Rob Bonta that it is preparing to leave the state, according to TheWrap. The move is the sharpest escalation yet in the fight over the company’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which Bonta and a bloc of state attorneys general are suing to block.
The timing is not subtle. A $7 million-per-day ticking fee starts accruing October 1. A judge hears arguments September 24 on Paramount’s request that the states and the WGA post a $1.9 billion bond. Settlement talks are calendared for October 14 and 15, with a 12-day antitrust trial set for March. A relocation threat delivered to the AG’s office a week before the bond hearing is a negotiating position with a moving van attached.
Days earlier, an LA County Economic Development Corporation study dated September 10 leaked through Politico with the number City Hall did not want to see: a full relocation could cost California up to 57,980 full-time jobs and between $10.6 billion and $21.2 billion in annual economic output, plus $1.17 billion in state and local tax revenue. Bass’s office says she “will continue to fight to make sure LA is home to Hollywood.” Bonta’s office was drier: it is “no secret that Paramount has been making this threat, despite its alleged commitment to California and Hollywood.” Insiders have told TheWrap that Nashville and Atlanta are the likely landing spots.
A $40 million lifeline for newsrooms waits on one signature
AB 2222, the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act, cleared the Senate 30–10 on August 30 and the Assembly 59–15 on August 31. It has been sitting on Gov. Newsom’s desk since, and he has until September 30 to sign or veto. The bill, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward and co-authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, would hand newsrooms a refundable tax credit per journalist employed: $20,000 for each of the first five full-time editorial positions, $15,000 for each one after that, another $15,000 for each newly created reporting job, and $7,500 per part-timer.
This week the pressure campaign went public. A coalition of 134 news organizations and press associations — 94 California outlets, regional publishers and labor guilds, joined by 40 national associations — delivered a joint letter urging a signature. The credits would not take effect until tax year 2027 and sunset after 2031, and they are paid for by capping the corporate deduction for executive compensation above $1 million, which is precisely why business groups are pushing the other way.
For LA the arithmetic is straightforward. In a town whose newsrooms have spent three years shrinking, a per-journalist credit is one of the few policy instruments that rewards keeping a byline on the payroll rather than cutting it. Whether it survives the last two weeks of September is now a question of one desk in Sacramento.
That’s the week
Quiet elsewhere: no verifiable LA radio moves this week — no format flips, no air-staff changes, nothing out of the Audacy or iHeart clusters that we could pin to the window — and nothing new out of Spring Street or the LA Times Guild. The LA Press Club’s press-freedom docket also stayed where it was. We would rather tell you a beat was quiet than pad the column.
Tips, corrections and newsroom gossip are always welcome. If something moved in your shop this week and we missed it, tell us — that is how this column gets better.