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July 21, 2025
By Brian Hews
Southern California Gas is about to dig up two residential streets in Artesia—186th and 187th—starting the week of July 21. There will be trenching, lane closures, sidewalk disruptions, and repaving. If you live there, you might know about it—if you stumble across a flier or read a website buried three links deep.
What Metro won’t do is advertise in the local community newspaper—the one you’re holding right now, the one that actually goes to every single home in Artesia. Why? Because we’re a free paper. And in the minds of bureaucrats and clueless go-for-the-largest-commission advertising agencies, free means “throwaway.”
That’s the label they slap on us—throwaway—as if reporting on your neighborhood, your streets, your schools, your kids, your crime, your taxes isn’t worth a damn because you didn’t fork over $3.25 at a newsstand.
We home deliver (thrown from a truck on driveways) the print newspaper every single week—to thousands of households in cities like Artesia, Bellflower, Cerritos, Commerce, Hawaiian Gardens, La Mirada, Norwalk, and Lakewood, La Palma, Pico Rivera, and Santa Fe Springs. On top of that, we drop bundles of papers at over 300 local businesses, libraries, city halls, and community centers—every week.
In the cities we service, we have 80% more newspapers than all the daily newspapers (LA Times and Daily News/Press Telegram) combined, per the daily newspaper’s circulation reports.
We’re free, yes—and we rely solely on advertising revenue to survive and keep informing the public. No subscription model here, we don’t charge $100 a month to deliver the paper. When public agencies bypass advertising with community newspapers, they’re not just ignoring journalism—they’re ignoring the only industry that connects residents to what’s happening in their own backyards.
This is the same Metro that’s burning through billions of your tax dollars on construction, consultants, and endless press releases. But when it comes time to actually inform the public—the people who will be impacted by these projects—they’d rather drop tens of thousands into the daily newspapers or obscure digital ads no one will ever see.
Community newspapers? Forget it. We’re too local. We’re too effective.
Let’s get one thing straight: community newspapers are the last line of defense against news deserts. We’re the only media outlets still reporting on school board meetings, corrupt city councils, and projects like this one in Artesia that will screw up your commute or tear up your street for two months.
We still show up. We read City Council agendas. We still care. We are embedded. And we still deliver, for free, to your door.
But thanks to Metro’s twisted priorities, our readers—the residents who will actually be affected—are kept in the dark. It’s not just negligent. It’s insulting, like calling us a throwaway.
And it’s not just Metro. Politicians at the county and state level (not local they know LCCN is very well-read by their constituents) have ignored community newspapers for years, except whne it comes to press releases, then we somehow become a vital tool to get the message out.
They pass laws that divert public notices away from us. They award ad contracts to agencies who couldn’t locate Artesia on a map, let alone explain what’s happening at the intersection of 186th and Jersey.
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So here’s my message to Metro, SoCalGas, and every other agency pretending to care about “public outreach”: if you want to reach the public, advertise in the publications that serve the public. Start with the community newspapers you’ve been ignoring, dismissing, and defunding. There are a few left in Los Angeles County and they are all beloved by residents
Because while you’re busy calling us “throwaways,” we’re still the only ones telling the truth—and delivering it to every home and City Hall every week.
La Mirada resident reading the Lamplighter News, part of LCCN’s group of newspapers.
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