Founding publisher Ari L. Noonan pursued a long and productive career in Southern California journalism before landing on Culver City’s front steps in 2001. He launched our predecessor, The Front Page, in print in March 2004 as a Culver City weekly based in The Culver Hotel. His goal: To energize, electrify and transform the traditionally relaxed style of Culver City journalism.
Seizing a unique opportunity in December 2005, The Front Page transitioned from print to digital with the launch of thefrontpageonline.com, Culver City’s first daily online newspaper. As the fate of print newspapers grew more imperiled, hometown readers were afforded virtually instant coverage of events that only yesterday took a week to reach them, typically in much gentler form. It developed that City Council members, School Board members, Chamber of Commerce leaders, not to mention greatly aroused residents – positively, negatively and usually stimulatingly – held strong views about politics and schools that they happily shared with our journalists. This represented a major breakthrough in Westside journalism. Purveyors of news accustomed to a heavy diet of tightly wound press releases, were pleasantly surprised to hear opinion-makers and their audiences speak out in their own words, not only firmly but daily. Our bristling form of journalism soon appealed to a diverse, news-hungry, upscale, well-educated audience that quickly learned to appreciate a newspaper that prides itself on being distinct from the crowd.
Our reporting focuses on lives both inside and outside the borders of Culver City. We cover routinely ignored neighborhoods spanning the entirety of the Greater Los Angeles area, especially in the Crenshaw District and South Los Angeles.