Los Angeles Downtown News
Weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, California

The Los Angeles Downtown News is a free weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, California, serving the Downtown Los Angeles area.
The newspaper focuses on general news with an emphasis on real estate and business along with coverage of the arts scene. It also has occasional historical features by Jay Berman and features in its news coverage photos by Gary Leonard (plus the weekly feature "Take My Picture Gary Leonard" that highlights notable events and local figures cultural and political).
Coverage area is roughly bounded by the Los Angeles River to the north and east (excluding Echo Park), the University of Southern California and Exposition Park to the south and City West to the west.
The paper's masthead in 2001 briefly included entertainment blogger and former Associated Press correspondent Nikki Finke, who was hired as executive editor.
Coverage area and history
From a 2001 Los Angeles Times story about the paper:
"(Founder and editor Sue) Laris was a public school teacher and her then-husband Jim Laris worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1972 when they decided to start their own community newspaper. They targeted downtown because there weren't any other weeklies there at the time. When the couple divorced in 1979, Laris bought her husband's share of the business. Over the years, the newspaper's folksy approach and loyal advertisers sustained it while others succumbed to diminishing readership and the high cost of newsprint. Today, the Downtown News operates on a $1.7 million annual budget."
It publishes more than 40,000 copies every Monday, is audited by VAC. and distributed via newsracks in Downtown Los Angeles, Wilshire Center, Pasadena, Glendale, Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake and Larchmont Village.
The public source identifies “Los Angeles Downtown News” as weekly newspaper in Los Angeles, California. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Angeles, Downtown and News.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6682126. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1972 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Los Angeles Downtown News” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.