Post to Coast: New York Post plans a California newspaper
[August 05, 2025]
By JENNIFER PELTZ
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Post is launching a California tabloid
newspaper and news site next year, the company announced Monday,
bringing an assertive, irreverent and conservative-friendly fixture of
the Big Apple media landscape to the Golden State. In the process, it is
creating a 21st-century rarity: a new American newspaper with a robust
print edition.
Adding another title to Rupert Murdoch 's media empire, The California
Post is setting out to cover politics, local news, business,
entertainment and sports in the nation's most populous state, while
drawing and building on the venerable New York paper's national
coverage. Plans for the Los Angeles-based paper call for a print edition
seven days a week plus a website, social media accounts and video and
audio pieces.
“There is no doubt that the Post will play a crucial role in engaging
and enlightening readers, who are starved of serious reporting and
puckish wit,” Robert Thomson, chief executive of Post corporate parent
News Corp., said in a statement. In typically brash and punchy Post
fashion, he portrayed California as plagued by ”jaundiced, jaded
journalism."
It enters at a bumpy moment for its industry
However bold its intentions, the venture is being launched into a
turbulent atmosphere for the news business, particularly for print
papers. More than 3,200 of them have closed nationwide since 2005,
according to figures kept by Northwestern University's Medill School of
Journalism. The online world spawned new information sources and
influencers, changed news consumers' tastes and habits and upended the
advertising market on which newspapers relied.
“While it’s true the media landscape is challenging, The New York Post
has been finding success through its unique voice, editorial lens and
quality coverage. That same formula is tailor-made for California,” said
the New York Post Media Group. It includes the Post and some other media
properties.
California, with a population of nearly 40 million, still has hundreds
of newspapers, including dailies in and around Los Angeles and other
major cities. But the nation’s second-most-populous city hasn’t had a
dedicated tabloid focused on regional issues in recent memory, according
to Danny Bakewell, president of the Los Angeles Press Club.
“It’s really an untested market here,” said Bakewell, who is
editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly focused on the
city’s Black population. “L.A. is always ready for good-quality news
reporting, and particularly in this moment when so many other papers are
shrinking and disappearing, it could be a really unique opportunity.”
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The New York Post is seen at a newsstand in Manhattan, Monday, Aug.
4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jennifer Peltz)
 The Post is a unique beast
There is no U.S. newspaper quite like the 224-year-old New York
Post. It was founded by no less a luminary than Alexander Hamilton,
the country’s first treasury secretary, an author of the Federalist
Papers, the victim of a duel at the hands of the vice president and
the inspiration for the Broadway smash “Hamilton.” Murdoch, News
Corp.’s founder and now its chairman emeritus, bought the Post in
1976, sold it a dozen years later, then repurchased it in 1993.
The Post is known for its relentless and skewering approach to
reporting, its facility with sensational or racy subject matter, its
Page Six gossip column, and the paper's huge and often memorable
front-page headlines — see, for example, 1983’s “Headless Body in
Topless Bar.”
At the same time, the Post is a player in both local and national
politics. It routinely pushes, from the right, on “wokeness” and
other culture-war pressure points, and it has broken such political
stories as the Hunter Biden laptop saga. The Post has an avid reader
in President Donald Trump, who gave its “Pod Force One” podcast an
interview as recently as last month.
In recent years, the Post's website and such related sites as
PageSix.com have built a large and far-flung digital audience, 90%
of it outside the New York media market, according to the company.
With the Los Angeles readership second only to New York's, The
California Post "is the next manifestation of our national brand,”
Editor-in-Chief Keith Poole said in a statement. He'll also be
involved in overseeing the California paper with its
editor-in-chief, Nick Papps, who has worked with News Corp.'s
Australian outlets for decades, including a stint as an L.A.-based
correspondent.
The company didn't specify how many journalists The California Post
will have.
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Associated Press writer Jake Offenhartz contributed from Los
Angeles.
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