By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, January 2013
In early January 2013, Erin Aubry Kaplan’s first KCET blog post of the new year — published in KCET’s SoCal Focus commentary section — drew an unusual reader response: a 74-year-old Leimert Park grandmother named Ann did not Google or tweet Kaplan, but rather looked up her number in the phone book and called her at home. What Ann told Kaplan was substantively connected to a larger ongoing community campaign around LA-region Black-press coverage. The original FishbowlLA framing captured the off-line-reader-engagement moment with warmth.
Then
Erin Aubry Kaplan had been one of LA’s most-cited Black writers and columnists across decades prior to the 2013 KCET piece. Her LA Times opinion-page work, her LA Weekly cultural reporting, and her various book projects had built up a substantial portfolio focused on Black-LA-region political-and-cultural reporting. The KCET SoCal Focus commentary slot was part of the broader post-PBS KCET rebuild (covered in this batch’s KCET set-visit piece) — an expansion of the station’s online-and-commentary infrastructure.
The unnamed 74-year-old Leimert Park grandmother reader was, in the original FishbowlLA framing, structurally characteristic of a specific kind of LA-region Black-press reader: the multi-decade-LA-resident, intergenerationally-engaged community member who would still pick up the phone and call a journalist whose work they were following. The phone-book-and-home-number contact method was itself an artifact of an earlier era of journalist-and-reader engagement.
The larger ongoing campaign Ann was part of involved LA-region community concerns about how the LA Times was covering Black-LA-region political-and-cultural issues. The 2010-2013 period had been one of substantial Black-LA-region critique of LA Times coverage, building on decades of community-press-and-mainstream-press dynamics that the broader paper’s editorial decisions had periodically generated.
Richard Horgan’s FishbowlLA framing was substantively warm. The piece treated the off-line-reader-engagement story as the kind of small documented moment of LA-press-community texture that FBLA periodically surfaced — and quietly noted the larger Black-LA-Times-coverage critique that Ann was part of without explicitly editorializing on the substantive merits.
Now
Erin Aubry Kaplan has continued as one of LA-region’s most-cited Black writers and commentators across the years since 2013. Her broader portfolio has expanded substantially: subsequent books, continued LA Times opinion-page work, podcast appearances, and recurring contributions to multiple national publications. Her 2020 LA Times piece on the broader paper’s racial-history reckoning was substantively connected to the kind of community critique the 2013 Ann phone call was reflecting.
The LA Times’s racial-equity reckoning across the post-2020 period — including the September 2020 institutional apology for the paper’s historical racism — was substantively the kind of institutional response that community campaigns like the one Ann was part of in 2013 had been building toward for decades. The cumulative pattern of Black-LA-community pressure on LA Times editorial coverage produced eventual structural acknowledgment of the historical pattern.
KCET SoCal Focus continued through the post-2013 reorganizations of KCET and the broader station’s 2018 merger with PBS SoCal. The commentary infrastructure has continued in modified form across multiple subsequent platform shifts.
Leimert Park has continued as one of LA’s anchor Black cultural and community neighborhoods. The post-2010 gentrification pressure on the area has been substantial; the broader question of how Leimert Park’s institutional Black-cultural character is preserved through subsequent demographic and economic shifts has been one of the recurring LA-region urban-and-cultural questions.
The 2013 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the kind of multi-decade LA-Black-press-community-and-mainstream-press dynamic that has continued to shape LA-region journalism. The 74-year-old reader’s phone call was substantively part of a larger campaign that has continued to be operative across the broader institutional changes at the LA Times and other LA-region publications since.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.