When the first edition of the Santa Monica Daily Press reached the streets Nov. 13, 2001, it was hand-delivered by one of the three founders during a 5 a.m. delivery run. The trio were running the upstart news organization from a shared apartment and 25 years later, while elements of the company are light-years ahead of their humble origins, the homegrown spirit remains at its core.
The free daily is still independently owned and still focused on Santa Monica. Some of the faces behind the scene have changed but the people running SMDP are still locals who live in the city and run the company out of a real-life, physical office open to the public Monday through Friday.
The physical paper continues much as it did all those years ago. Founding partners Carolyn Sackariason, Ross Furukawa and Dave Danforth came from the world of free “micro dailies” in Colorado and Silicon Valley. They were drawn to Santa Monica because it embodied many of the traits that made the model work in those communities and the closing of The Evening Outlook, which had left the city without a daily newspaper.
The Los Angeles Times called the newcomers carpetbaggers but the trio embedded themselves in the community.
Furukawa remains with the company to this day and said that despite the temperature difference, Aspen and Santa Monica are remarkably similar, sharing a tourism-based economy, labor struggles, housing crisis and distinct walkable neighborhoods.
“We had a simple idea: local news matters to local people,” he said. “And that remains as true today as it was 25 years ago. We’re the only news organization with actual employees inside the city day to day who are there to see and experience what it means to live in Santa Monica.”
Building a paper of record
Sackariason, the first editor in chief, also worked as reporter, researcher, scheduler, copy editor and delivery driver. She attended City Council, court, school board, Chamber of Commerce and neighborhood association meetings. Within a year, the Daily Press was established as the city’s paper of record.
The stories came quickly and were often hard. Weeks after launch, the paper covered the fatal stabbing of Santa Monica High School student Deanna Maran at a high school party, and her reporting was nationally featured on shows like Oprah and Inside Edition. In July 2003, Sackariason was the first reporter on scene after 86-year-old George Russell Weller drove through the downtown Farmers Market, killing 10 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 7-month-old boy. She went on to cover the lawsuits and trials that followed.
Michael Tittinger, editor-in-chief from 2006 to 2007, called himself something of a creative director. He turned the Saturday paper into a magazine-style edition built around one in-depth story. He also started a “quotes of the week” feature that predated the “overheard” accounts now common on social media.
Kevin Herrera joined as a young reporter and served as editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2014. He takes the most pride in the interns who went on to the Associated Press, Reuters and The Hollywood Reporter. He also oversaw the paper during Santa Monica’s economic heyday, documenting its evolution from a quaint beach town to a cultural and political force.
Steady hands through upheaval
Matt Hall became editor-in-chief in 2014 and sees his time as continuing the legacy of his predecessors while driving the paper into the future despite increasingly turbulent waters.
“Everything that came before me is still hugely important to the paper,” he said. “We were the ones on the ground when the city was looted. We were in the Palisades as it burned and throughout the recovery. If there’s a shooting, a plane crash, sinkhole or just a bad accident, we’re there cameras in hand covering the news. But the city is more than just a series of catastrophes. We’re also here covering the city’s culture of food, music, entertainment and fun. I’m incredibly proud to have worked with the people that have come through here and there’s a vibrant network of former SMDP reporters still producing important work throughout the industry.”
That said, he said the curse of interesting times has basically been the state of media for the past two decades and what matters most is that the company is still innovating its way around the dangerous currents and eddies that have sunk many other media companies.
“‘Evolve or die’ has never been more important and we’re still not dead yet,” he said.
Reinventing a free daily
Hall credits much of the company’s resilience to publishers Furukawa and Todd James.
Furukawa’s fundamentally entrepreneurial spirit has kept the paper moving to new revenue sources and new products that have repeatedly rebuilt the foundations of the company as the economic sands have shifted.
James, a longtime Santa Monica resident, became a partner in the paper in 2018. His push toward technological solutions and innovation greatly improved the company’s ability to publish efficiently and grow digital operations while streamlining operations behind the scenes. “In 2018, our entire operation literally existed inside on a creaky old Mac tower in a dusty closet” said James. “Today, our digital-first, cloud-based architecture allows us to build a paper from anywhere in the world…but we like it here.”
Why it matters
The Daily Press reached 25 as local news nationwide keeps shrinking. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism reported this fall that a record 238 U.S. counties now have no local news source. Medill found in 2023 that California had lost about one-third of its newspapers since 2005.
Researchers have measured what that loss costs communities. A 2020 study in the Journal of Financial Economics found that local governments’ borrowing costs rise after a newspaper closes, by about $650,000 per bond issue. Other studies link newspaper closures to more polarized voting, lower turnout and less competitive local elections.
Furukawa said reaching the ripe-old-age of 25 also allows the community to retain a sense of memory and context that can have a real impact on current decisions.
“For people who want to understand why Santa Monica is what it is today, we have those answers in our pages,” he said. “We can point to the story we wrote 20 years ago about mold at local schools while writing about the recent closure at SMASH or we can provide decades of examples for the debate over homeless services or a memory of what the Promenade has been like over its many reinventions. That is something no one else has done.”
James said the future of real journalism may be brighter than people think. “AI is making it easier than ever to manufacture reality. Fake Instagram accounts deliver fake news via fake personalities — all algorithmically tailored to tell you what you want to hear. What could possibly go wrong? Against that backdrop, a real newspaper with real reporters, covering a real community for 25 years suddenly looks like a pretty valuable thing.”
The Daily Press will be marking the anniversary with additional coverage in the coming year including in depth looks at the city’s history through its coverage, features connecting current news to past coverage and a celebration of the paper’s longevity.