Six months after being sold, the LA Weekly is moving to Downtown LA.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Business Journal, Weekly publisher Brian Calle says the company did not renew the lease on its Culver City headquarters and will move to “an unspecified location Downtown” in July. The Weekly’s 10-year lease at its present location near Venice Boulevard and Sepulveda is set to expire around the same time.
“The lease was not a good decision,” Calle says. “The building was way too big for LA Weekly, and it has been for a very long time.” The staff has shrunk under new ownership; the number of editorial staffers alone was reduced from 13 to four.
But the Journal questioned whether the Weekly’s move from Culver City to Downtown was in some part an attempt to offset the financial blow of canceling two major food-focused events—December’s Sips and Sweets and, last month, the Essentials. Events in general have traditionally been big-time moneymakers for the Weekly.
Both events were canceled as the result of an ongoing boycott of the Weekly spearheaded by former staffers.
The boycott began shortly after the October sale of the Weekly to Semanal Media LLC, a largely mysterious group of investors that has stronger ties to Orange County than LA. (A handful of investors in the group were revealed publicly only after intense public pressure to do so.) Semanal demolished the masthead on the day the Weekly sale closed.
- LA Weekly Aims to Change on the Fly [Los Angeles Business Journal]
- OC hotelier, real estate developer named among L.A. Weekly’s mysterious investors [Curbed LA]
- LA Weekly Cancels Essentials Event One Day After Dropping 99 Best Restaurant List [Curbed LA]
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