By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2011
In early December 2011, Long Beach Post co-founder and publisher Shaun Lumachi died at 33 in a Florida car crash. He had been in St. Petersburg attending the National Workforce Association’s conference. The Long Beach Post he had co-founded was, in 2011, one of the more substantive standalone local-news operations in greater LA — and the publication has continued through the entire decade and a half since.
Then
Lumachi had built the Long Beach Post as one of the early-2010s independent local-news properties, with a structural focus on Long Beach as a distinct media market from greater LA. The site had been operating since the late 2000s and had developed a regular readership in a market the LA Times had been slowly retreating from.
The original FishbowlLA framing was the kind of sober obit the publication routinely produced for local-publisher deaths. Lumachi at 33 had been mid-build on a publication that was already showing signs of becoming a durable local-news operation; the car crash cut that short.
Now
The Long Beach Post continued after Lumachi’s death and is, in 2026, one of the longer-running independent local-news operations in the LA County region. The site has gone through multiple subsequent editorial transitions but has maintained its Long Beach-specific focus across the entire interval.
The broader category Lumachi was working in — independent local-news startups in LA-region cities that the major papers were thinning their coverage of — has expanded substantially since 2011. LAist, Crosstown LA, The Eastsider, the LA Public Press, and various other local-news operations have built audiences in specific LA-area neighborhoods and municipalities. The Long Beach Post was, in retrospect, one of the earlier models of the format.
National Workforce Association conferences have continued; the workforce-development advocacy work Lumachi had been part of remained one of his broader civic interests. The 2011 piece reads now as the kind of small documented LA-media obit that captured a working-publisher loss that the broader trade-press community noticed at the time and that produced ongoing institutional continuity at the property he co-founded.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.