By FishbowlLA Staff
A quiet week on the assignment desks heading into Labor Day weekend — no anchor exits, no station shake-ups, no layoff memos landing in anyone’s inbox. What we got instead were three stories about the machinery underneath: a heritage LA call sign filing the number off its own logo, Sacramento voting to pay newsrooms to keep reporters employed, and ProPublica finally planting a flag on this side of the Rockies.
KNX takes the number off the door
Audacy’s all-news KNX rolled out a new logo in the last week of August, and the notable thing about it is what’s missing: the frequency. The lowercase “knx” wordmark drops the dial position entirely, which RadioInsight’s Lance Venta flagged Tuesday as part of a broader pattern — the broadcast sports stations that launched on SiriusXM’s platform on September 1 did the same thing, with “96.5 The Fan” in Kansas City becoming simply “The Fan Kansas City” and so on down the line.
The logic is hard to argue with once you look at where KNX actually lives now. Venta lists the station’s distribution as 1070 AM, 97.1 HD2, the Audacy and iHeart apps, and soon the SiriusXM app — four of those five are places where a frequency number means nothing at all. His broader argument is that brands need to travel identically across platforms, and he points out you can search “Z100” in the iHeartRadio app and end up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Point taken. Still, there’s something bracing about watching a station that built its identity around a number decide the number is now the part holding it back.
Sacramento passes a bill that pays newsrooms to keep reporters
The California legislature sent Assembly Bill 2222 — the Community Newsroom Employment and Workforce Sustainability Act — to Gov. Gavin Newsom on August 31, after it cleared the State Senate Sunday night and then the Assembly with a supermajority of at least 54 votes. The bill creates refundable tax credits for news outlets based on how many journalists they employ, and Nieman Lab reports it could generate as much as $40 million a year for California newsrooms. It’s funded by capping California’s corporate tax deduction for executive compensation above $1 million and redirecting part of the revenue to local journalism.
The mechanics matter more than the headline number. Per sponsor Rebuild Local News, the retention credit is worth $20,000 per journalist for up to five positions and $15,000 for every additional one, part-time positions draw $7,500, and a $15,000 new-hire credit stacks on top. “If you hire more people, you get more money,” Rebuild’s policy director Matt Pearce said. “If you lay people off, you get less money. If you don’t employ anyone, you don’t get anything.”
Which is to say: this is a subsidy pointed squarely at headcount, in the state and the city that have shed the most of it. Los Angeles has both California’s deepest concentration of newsrooms and its most conspicuous retrenchment, and for the small nonprofit shops that have sprung up in the gaps, a five-figure credit per reporter is not a rounding error — it’s a hire.
ProPublica comes west, and a former LA Times reporter explains why
ProPublica has named Bernice Yeung to lead the California investigative hub it announced back in May — its sixth regional newsroom, and the one that finally closes what Charles Ornstein, who oversees the organization’s local initiatives, called “a huge hole that was sort of screaming out to us to be filled.” Speaking to Nieman Lab in a piece published September 1, Ornstein laid out the case: a new governor this fall, a sitting one who may run for president, artificial intelligence policy emanating from the state, and water, climate and agriculture questions that all center here.
He also named the thing everyone in this town already knows. Among the changes to the California news ecosystem, Ornstein cited “the retrenchment that’s happened at the L.A. Times, which is very personal to me, having worked there” — he was a Times reporter from 2001 to 2008 — plus “some cutbacks in public radio as well.” On the other side of the ledger he pointed to CalMatters, a revitalized San Francisco Chronicle, and newer outfits including L.A. Material and LA Local, arguing the premium has shifted toward covering California “in a more micro way, in a more community way or neighborhood way.”
With California added, ProPublica will have 33 staff reporters covering local issues across 20 states. Worth watching who Yeung hires, and from where — a well-funded national shop staffing up in a market this thick with recently displaced talent tends to be a redistribution event as much as an expansion.
That’s the week
Local TV was genuinely dry — nothing verifiable out of Channel 5, 7, 4 or 9, and no newspaper personnel news worth the ink. Three stories it is. Hear something we should be chasing — a memo, a hire, an exit, a format flip? Tips are always welcome, and always handled discreetly.