By FishbowlLA Staff
A short, dense week in LA media. The story that animated Town in May – what happens to public radio after the federal money turns off – moved from theory to memo this week, with NPR taking a knife to its own newsroom. The Croisette wrapped with a familiar name on the Palme. And on a quieter corner of Sunset, a Hollywood landlord made a bet on what TV production actually looks like in 2026. Here’s the week.
NPR cuts staff. The bill arrives at LAist and KCRW.
NPR laid off 10 journalists this week and bought out at least 18 more, the network confirmed Tuesday. Veterans on the way out include National Political Correspondent Don Gonyea, Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James and Investigations Correspondent Joe Shapiro, who has been at the network since 2001. Eight additional positions will be left unfilled. Editor-in-Chief Thomas Evans called it a “heavy” day in a note to staff and said the cuts amount to about 4% of NPR’s content division.
The framing in Washington is reorganization and a sponsorship gap. The framing in Los Angeles is harder to spin. LAist and KCRW are NPR member stations, and they pay dues that get redistributed to the network. When NPR sheds investigations and political-desk muscle, the loss travels downstream to every member newsroom that depends on the wire – including ours. It also lands at a moment when KCRW has already gone through buyouts and LAist has thinned its own ranks. The math gets uglier from here.
Cannes wraps. Cristian Mungiu joins the two-Palme club.
The 79th Cannes Film Festival closed Saturday night with Romanian director Cristian Mungiu winning the Palme d’Or for “Fjord,” a Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve vehicle. It’s Mungiu’s second Palme – he won in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” – making him the tenth director ever to take the prize twice. Neon, which acquired the film for North America, extends a remarkable streak: seven consecutive Palme winners.
For the trades back home in LA – Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline – Cannes is half festival and half audition for the rest of the awards calendar. This year’s market read was cautious-but-not-dead. A24 paid a reported $17 million for Jordan Firstman’s “Club Kid” out of Un Certain Regard, the kind of bidding war that hasn’t shown up on the Croisette in a couple of years. The studios, meanwhile, mostly stayed home. The festival’s read of itself was that the indie ecosystem is reorganizing in real time while the majors retreat from prestige.
Sunset Studios builds for the vertical-video era.
Hudson Pacific’s Sunset Studios announced Tuesday that it is rolling out a collection of “standing sets” at its Sunset Las Palmas lot in Hollywood – pre-built, pre-lit environments (a courtroom, an apartment, a bar, a hospital, an office) that producers can book without striking and rebuilding for every job. The short-form studio Knockout Shorts is a partner on the initial designs, which the company says are explicitly aimed at both traditional film and TV and the fast-growing vertical-format market.
The interesting part for Hollywood-watchers isn’t the courtroom set. It’s the acknowledgement, by one of the largest soundstage landlords in town, that “content” now includes nine-minute vertical drama dropped on TikTok and Reels. Sunset Studios has stages sitting empty across LA right now as production stays soft. Building infrastructure for the people who are still shooting – including the short-form crowd – is a hedge worth watching.
That’s the week
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