Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – Man, this is all we need. A new right-wing sensational tabloid newspaper and news website (no paywall) owned by Rupert Murdoch in California.
The California Post just launched from Los Angeles, with bureaus in San Francisco and Sacremento too.
Look out Gavin Newsom.
Historically, it is reported, The Post operated at a loss, sometimes of more than $40 million a year. But in 2021, the News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson declared that it was finally profitable after deep cost-cutting. Sean Giancola, The Post’s chief executive officer and publisher, said it remained profitable and now makes the bulk of its revenue from digital advertising, a difficult financial model for most news sites.
California is the second-largest media market in the country and has an economy larger than that of most countries.
According to Giancola, print editions of The California Post will replace the physical New York Post in California. The Post already prints in the state, so it wasn’t a big lift to switch, he said, and “the physical front page matters,” a counterintuitive strategy in an age of sharply declining newspaper circulation.
Using California to Go National
Both the print and online versions of paper will feature locally reported news as well as content from New York, where The Post publishes some 300 stories a day.
New York’s Page Six editor, Ian Mohr, has moved across the country to start Page Six Hollywood, and the outlet has poached journalists from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, The San Francisco Standard and The Minnesota Star Tribune. Mohr said Page Six Hollywood would operate as a five-day-a-week newsletter that covered the entertainment business and media world, as well as “some of the sociology of the business and L.A.”
Joel Pollak, who spent nearly 15 years at Breitbart, the right-wing news site, is the opinion editor. Mr. Pollak, whose X bio labels him as a “conservative, pro-Israel writer,” said in an interview that his motivation for taking the role was “revenge.”
As the wildfires whipped through Los Angeles last year, Pollak watched the destruction of most of his neighbors’ houses in his Pacific Palisades neighborhood. (His home survived.) “I feel like there is a cascade of government failures in so many ways,” he said.
Ken Doctor, a media analyst and the chief executive of Lookout Local, which has news websites in Santa Cruz, Calif., and Eugene, Ore., said that most local newspapers in the state were shadows of their previous selves and that The Los Angeles Times had receded as a force.
“If you have the deep pockets of News Corp and you have the ego of News Corp, you say, ‘OK, we can have a presence there,’” Doctor said.
But, he cautioned, California, with a population of about 40 million people, has vastly different cultures in different regions, making statewide publications tricky.
Dog help us all.
Read the full story in the New American Journal.