On Monday, News Corp announced that it would start printing a West Coast edition of The New York Post in 2026 called The California Post.
The announcement was met by journalists from The Hollywood Reporter to The Guardian repurposing the News Corp press release and sharing mock-ups of the frontpages we might expect from the soon-to-launch tabloid: “TAKE BACK OUR STREETS!” declares a made up “business owner” in Los Angeles: another features a picture of Sydney Sweeney with the drooling headline “WE DREAM OF JEAN-Y,” probably written by someone who watches a lot of late-night reruns on TV Land.
Like The Post itself, the statements quoted from editor-in-chief Keith Poole were barely disguised dogwhistles designed to radicalize your grandparents: “California is the most populous state in the country, and is the epicenter of entertainment, the AI revolution and advanced manufacturing — not to mention a sports powerhouse. Yet many stories are not being told, and many viewpoints are not being represented. With The California Post, we will bring a common-sense, issue-based approach to metropolitan journalism.”
Yes! Finally, some common sense about how hot Sydney Sweeney is!
The California paper doesn’t launch until next year, so we’ll wait and see if it lives up to the standards of its New York edition. Will The California Post falsely report that Kamala Harris’ kids book was left on beds for young detainees at a migrant camp on the southern border, a story its bylined author claims she was forced to write and resigned over? Perhaps The California Post will accuse the wrong people of deadly acts of terrorism as The New York Post did with Richard Jewell at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and Salaheddin Barhoum and Yassine Zaimi, two innocent bystanders at the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 whom the paper splashed on the cover with the headline BAG MEN? (Both stories resulted in settlements for undisclosed amounts.)
Maybe we can look forward to The California Post loudly trumpeting an EXCLUSIVE of a presidential nominee’s running mate on its frontpage as The Post did (100% incorrectly) with John Kerry and Dick Gephardt in 2004? Will The California Post have editorial cartoons like The New York Post, which once ran a cartoon by Sean Delonas that equated the first Black president of the United States with a chimpanzee that has been shot by police prompting this pitch-perfect headline from Vanity Fair: Sean Delonas: Stupid, Racist, or Both? (The same cartoonist also depicted Arab-Americans being surveilled after 9/11 as terrorists.) Perhaps the California Post will report the details of a prominent Black writer’s home purchase (including the price and address) forcing him to sell before moving in to protect his kid’s safety?
Of course, people don’t read The Post for news. They read it for sports and gossip. Hopefully The California Post will be anchored by a West Coast version of Page Six, the gossip franchise whose former editor accepted a “Christmas present” of $1,000 in cash from a restaurateur covered regularly in its pages. In 2006, another Page Six employee tried to shakedown a wealthy subject for $100,000 leading to a federal investigation. Page Six also reported a sighting of Jam Master Jay in a club in 2004, a huge scoop given that the RUN-DMC DJ had died two years earlier. (“It was loud and dark and our intrepid reporter has trouble distinguishing among Grandmaster Flash, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Fab Five Freddy and Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” went the sort of apology.) And let’s not forget the time an unbylined item crudely insulted the looks of a New York magazine writer and threatened to sexually assault her because she referred to Page Six as “emasculated.”
If these examples all seem old, that’s for a reason: I stopped reading The New York Post over a decade ago. (I also worked in the digital division of News Corp on its entertainment side more than a decade before that.) At some point it became clear to me that the paper was less a distraction to occupy my mind on the F train for 5 minutes than an outrage machine designed to push (often fallacious, frequently false) narratives into the right wing infosphere. If the Post says it on Monday, Fox News (also owned by News Corp) says it on Tuesday. The president is sure to post about it Wednesday and your annoying uncle is sure to share it on Facebook for the rest of the week.
Take the example of Barack Obama asking for a hamburger with Dijon mustard, which the Post reported blandly following Obama’s inauguration in 2009. President Obama’s supposedly rarified tastes became a right-wing talking point —what we’d call a meme today — popping up on Fox News for months. The Daily Show eventually did a segment about the coverage calling it, with tongue firmly in cheek, “The Worst Scandal in Presidential History.”
Now that’s what I call serving raw meat to the base, but it’s not what I’d call journalism. One of the great pleasures I experienced upon leaving New York for San Francisco was not seeing The Post on newsstands or subway floors. Even without reading it, New Yorkers are ambiently aware of it all the time. In 2026, Californians will be too.
That the paper is coming here at all is something of a surprise given that The New York Post is nothing but hostile to California. Despite the New York lodged in its logotype, the paper bangs on about the Golden State constantly. Frankly, it’s kind of obsessed with us. The paper and its columnists attack our governor, crime, “riots,” the homelessness crisis, so-called wokeness, and the exodus of businesses like In-N-Out and Blaze Pizza.
In the eyes of the Post, California is a hellscape, but then so is New York. Tabloids thrive on conflict and The New York Post does everything it can to capitalize on controversies, even creating them from whole cloth as when Page Six accused then-First Lady Michelle Obama of ordering room service of lobster and caviar at the Waldorf-Astoria. In fact, the First Lady didn’t even stay at that hotel, much less order those expensive dishes. And she definitely didn’t get a side of Dijon mustard.
Does California even need a reactionary, anti-woke news org screaming at us about how we’re going to hell in a handbasket? Last I checked, Bari Weiss’ Free Press is still based in Los Angeles.
We’ll see how The California Post turns out. As a journalist, I do believe that a robust media ecosystem is good for our industry. (Less so for readers if the news they take in is bunk.)
Hopefully this West Coast version of The New York Post fairs better than the Los Angeles edition the paper launched in 2003 before News Corp quietly pulped it. At the time, one New York transplant in LA told The Los Angeles Times, “I can get the Post on the Internet for free. Why should I buy it?”
The answer is, you should not.
