By FishbowlLA Staff
Welcome to the first edition of The Week in LA Media — FishbowlLA’s Friday roundup of who’s hiring, who’s cutting, who’s launching and who’s signing off across Los Angeles newsrooms, radio dials and the trades. This was a brutal week for radio, an anxious one for public media, and — improbably — a hopeful one for the city’s independent press. Here’s what mattered.
CBS News Radio signs off after nearly 100 years
On Friday night, CBS News Radio went silent for the last time, ending nearly a century on the air. At its peak the network fed hourly news bulletins to roughly 700 affiliate stations across the country; its parent shut it down citing what executives called “challenging economic realities” and a broader shift in radio strategy. This is the network that carried Edward R. Murrow — CBS itself called it “an American institution” on the way out the door.
The void won’t stay empty for long. Two replacement bulletin services were timed to launch the very next morning, May 23: Radio Network News, from streaming provider Live Channel USA, and Worldwide News Network, from Red Apple Media, the company behind New York talker WABC. For most Angelenos the loss is abstract — until you realize how much of the news you half-hear in the car has, for decades, traced back to that one wire.
KNX 1070 quietly cuts its last cord to CBS
The clearest local marker of the CBS Radio era ending arrived a day earlier and much closer to home. On May 21, KNX — the all-news mainstay at 1070 AM, and one of the last stations still tied by name and history to CBS, its original parent company — switched its top-of-the-hour national updates to ABC News Radio. It was the quiet end of a relationship that ran back nearly a hundred years.
That capped a rough fortnight for the station. On May 18, Audacy ended KNX’s FM simulcast on 97.1, flipping that signal to a sports format as “97.1 The Fan” and pushing KNX’s FM listeners onto the 97.1 HD2 subchannel. The KNX brand survives on 1070 AM, but for the generations of LA drivers who reflexively reach for it to find out “what’s going on,” the dial just got a little harder to find.
Read more on what happens to KNX →
NPR sends buyout offers out the door — layoffs may follow
NPR offered voluntary buyouts to roughly 300 employees this week as part of a newsroom reorganization, with the cuts concentrated in the newsgathering desks. The network said it will accept up to 30; if too few staffers volunteer by the May 26 deadline, targeted layoffs are expected to follow.
The LA stakes here are easy to miss. LAist — 89.3 KPCC — is one of the largest NPR member stations in the country, and the national desks now on the chopping block supply much of the reporting that local public stations build their broadcast hours around. When NPR’s newsroom thins, the wire feeding Southern California public radio thins with it.
As the giants cut, LA’s independent newsrooms band together
Counter-programming all the gloom: six Los Angeles County newsrooms — LA Public Press, Capital B, CALÓ News, LA Taco, Capital & Main and Q Voice News — joined forces this week to jointly document how communities are responding on the ground to federal immigration enforcement.
It’s a snapshot of what a growing number of observers are calling an LA local-news boom. While the legacy outlets contract, a layer of small, mission-driven, often nonprofit newsrooms has been quietly filling the gaps — LA Taco in particular has drawn national attention for its coverage of ICE raids and protests. For a publication with FishbowlLA’s history, it’s the old story running in reverse: the energy has moved away from the big mastheads and toward the scrappy independents.
The trades spend a whole festival asking where Hollywood went
As the Cannes Film Festival wrapped its May 12–23 run, the Los Angeles trades had one shared obsession: for the first time since 2017, not a single major Hollywood studio premiered a film on the Croisette. Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline all spent the week dissecting the snub. The reporting landed on a consistent answer — studios increasingly see a seven-figure Palais premiere as a risk (savage reviews, social-media pile-ons) rather than a launchpad, with the full cost of travel, lodging and glam running past $1 million per title.
Festival director Thierry Frémaux, asked about the absence, kept it short: “I hope the studio films come back.” When the LA trade press spends an entire festival covering Hollywood’s no-show rather than its movies, that’s a media story every bit as much as an industry one.
That’s the week
The Week in LA Media runs Fridays. Spot a newsroom move, a new hire, a launch or a quiet exit we should know about? The tip line is always open.