By FishbowlLA Staff
A catch-up edition covering the back half of March: press freedom on the streets of downtown, the book festival gearing up, and the LA Times inching a little closer to Wall Street.
A journalist gets kettled covering LA’s ‘No Kings’ protest
Press-freedom monitors flagged Los Angeles again. On March 28, independent journalist Dexter Thomas was caught in a police kettle and threatened with arrest while documenting a demonstration downtown, following a “No Kings” protest near the Metropolitan Detention Center and the Roybal Federal Building. By the trackers’ count it was at least the second time this year Thomas had been kettled while covering an LA protest.
The incident fits a national pattern that press-freedom groups have been documenting for months: the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has logged dozens of journalists detained over the past year, the large majority of them while covering immigration-enforcement protests. Los Angeles, with its frequent and large demonstrations, has been one of the recurring flashpoints — which makes how police treat working reporters here a local media story, not just a national one.
Read more at the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker →
The LA Times Festival of Books sets its 2026 lineup
A brighter item: the Los Angeles Times unveiled the program for the 31st Festival of Books, set for April 18-19 on the USC campus. The festival — one of the largest public literary gatherings in the country — is promising more than 550 writers and several hundred exhibitors, and is adding an Audiobook and Podcast Stage presented by Spotify, a nod to where a lot of “reading” now actually happens.
For a newspaper that has spent recent years mostly in cost-cutting headlines, the festival remains one of the LA Times’ most visible — and most genuinely affectionate — points of contact with its city.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times →
The LA Times’ slow march toward an IPO
Staying with the Times: owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s plan to take the 144-year-old paper public continues to grind forward. The blueprint, as reported, has the company listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “LAT,” preceded by a private placement seeking up to $500 million from investors, with the business reorganized into a set of “media suites” under what Soon-Shiong calls the LA Times Next Network.
The timing has slipped in the retelling — once floated for the fall of 2026, more recent reporting points toward 2027 — and skeptics keep asking the obvious question of who lines up to buy equity in a newspaper. The Times has also said it expects its core news business to break even in 2026 after losing roughly $5 million in 2025. That break-even number is the one that would have to be real for any of the rest of the plan to work.
Read more at The Hollywood Reporter →
That’s the roundup
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