By FishbowlLA Staff
Catching up on April: a fortnight that belonged to the next generation of LA journalists — with a couple of dial changes in Santa Monica and a very large book party in between.
A USC student’s newsletter quietly built an audience of 12,000
The most interesting LA media startup of the month did not arrive with a funding round. “Morning, Trojan,” a weekday newsletter written by 22-year-old USC journalism student Tomo Chien, has built a readership of roughly 12,000 with brisk summaries of USC, Los Angeles and California news. As Poynter noted in an April profile, it is also the rare USC student outlet that takes no financial support from the university.
It is a small but pointed data point in the local-news conversation: sometimes the new “outlet” is one person, an email list, and a reliable 7 a.m. send.
CCNMA names its 2026 honorees
In mid-April, CCNMA: Latino Journalists of California — the long-running organization that has spent decades pushing for newsroom diversity and training Latino journalists across the state — announced its 2026 honorees. The recognition lands at a pointed moment: the beats CCNMA’s members most often work, from immigration to housing to local government, are squarely in the news cycle, and the newsrooms that employ them are under as much financial strain as ever.
The Festival of Books packs USC
The 31st Los Angeles Times Festival of Books took over the USC campus on April 18-19, drawing the usual sprawling crowds for two days of author talks, panels and exhibitor booths. The new Spotify-backed Audiobook and Podcast Stage made its debut, and programming leaned harder into the romance and fantasy genres that have been driving book sales. For one weekend, at least, the LA media story was about abundance rather than attrition.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times →
KCRW reshuffles its music dial
Over in Santa Monica, KCRW made changes to its DJ roster in late April. The public station brought on two new music hosts — J.Rocc, the veteran hip-hop producer and founder of the LA crew the Beat Junkies, who takes a Sunday-evening slot, and Olive Kimoto, a host, DJ and musician, on Monday nights. The same announcement confirmed the exit of Dan Wilcox, who had held a weekend show on KCRW for 19 years.
DJ turnover is routine at a music station, but at KCRW — where the on-air personalities effectively are the brand — every change to the lineup gets noticed.
That’s the roundup
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