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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.

According to reporting from The New York Times on Thursday, the California Post just launched from Los Angeles, with bureaus in San Francisco and Sacramento too.

MAGA Tab in LA-LA Land! The California Post Launches

The paper that is responsible for coining the phrase the “Donroe Doctrine” in a headline picked up by Trump after American commandos captured President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela this month, plans to setup shop in Hollywood, and shake the ground formerly held by The Los Angeles Times like an earthquake.

Trump seemed pleased that his foreign policy strategy could be distilled into a quippy two-word phrase riffing on the 19th century Western Hemisphere-focused Monroe Doctrine, according to reporting from New York and Los Angeles by Katie Robertson.

Fox News might be Murdoch’s biggest moneymaker, she reports, but The New York Post has long been understood as Murdoch’s id. The tabloid, started by Alexander Hamilton more than 220 years ago, obsessively covers issues like crime and immigration alongside celebrity gossip. More recently, it’s added cancel culture to the list.

“In other words, the paper’s preoccupations also look a whole lot like Trump’s, with a Republicanism that is suspicious of urban centers and sees ‘woke’ overreach on the political left … once strictly a regional paper, (it) has found an audience around the country. It has 100 million unique monthly visitors to its website and is the third-most-read newspaper in America by print circulation, having overtaken the embattled Washington Post in 2023, according to figures from the Alliance for Audited Media. Now, there’s a surprising new effort from the Murdochs to export the New York Post’s brand of screaming headlines to the West Coast, with a newspaper run by an Australian.”

In November, the biggest names from News Corp, the parent company of the Post, descended on the Fox studio lot in Los Angeles for a private coming-out party for The California Post, which started publishing on Monday.

News Corp’s chief executive, Robert Thomson, summoned key advertising clients, including Amazon and Disney, to mingle with Keith Poole, The Post’s editor in chief, and the new California Post editor, Nick Papps. The Fox Corp chief executive, Lachlan Murdoch; News UK chief, Rebekah Brooks; the Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker; and top tabloid editors from Australia joined the party. And there was 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch.

“The message was clear,” she writes. “This is not a toe-dip to test the frothy waters of Hollywood, but a well-funded push to cement The Post as a national brand. While its newspaper peers have been shrinking or closing, The Post’s obsession with local news has helped turn it into a wider phenomenon: No story is too small to turn into a national culture war. And on that front, California offers rich new material.”

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, though he declined to provide any financial figures.

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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.

Its first California cover, headlined “Oscar Wild,” dredged up drama between the brothers Josh Safdie, the director of the Oscar contender “Marty Supreme,” and Benny Safdie, who directed last year’s “The Smashing Machine.”

Using California to Go National

Both the print and online versions of the paper will feature locally reported news as well as content from New York, where The Post publishes some 300 stories a day.

Papps, a veteran News Corp editor, has relocated from Melbourne, Australia, to Los Angeles to run the operation, reporting to Mr. Poole in New York. The paper has already hired more than 80 newsroom staff members, according to a spokeswoman.

Papps said that the publication, though based in Los Angeles, would also have reporters in places like Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. He said he saw “an enormous opportunity to play a role in the big debates and to advocate for change where we see the need for change.”

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.”

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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.

Mariel Garza, a former Los Angeles Times editorials editor who recently co-founded the Golden State Report on Substack, said The California Post was entering at a key moment in state politics.

“If you wanted to be a relevant, powerful, influential conservative voice in California, this would be the time,” she said.

California is also at “the epicenter of a bunch of the story lines that matter both locally and nationally, including A.I. and politics, and arguably they haven’t been covered to the extent that they should be,” said Kevin Delaney, the editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard, a local news organization co-founded in 2021 by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

But Delaney said that what he thought was needed to combat a weakened media across California was “strong native West Coast news organizations that are independent and can speak as part of the national conversation about the issues.”

“The New York Post is an East Coast publication that aspires to have a West Coast presence,” he said.

Dog help us all.

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