Free Weekly for African-Americans to Launch in L.A.

By: Mark Fitzgerald A new weekly is jumping into the competition for African-American newspaper readers in Los Angeles.

Former Los Angeles Times advertising executive Natalie Cole announced Friday the Jan. 13 launch of Our Weekly, a tabloid with 50,000-copy free distribution that includes door-to-door delivery to affluent African American south L.A. neighborhoods including Ladera, Baldwin Hills, Windsor Hills, View Park, Leimert Park, LaFayette Park Square, North Inglewood, and Mid-City.

The first issue will have 60 pages, according to Director of Marketing Robert Phillips. A prototype on the paper's Web site, www.ourweekly.com, shows a full color, magazine-style cover.

Our Weekly is entering a market already served by the Wave Community Newspapers, the Los Angeles Sentinel, and, on its fringes, other black-oriented community papers.

"What will distinguish us from Wave and the L.A. Sentinel is that we'll be more broad-based in terms of information," Cole said in a telephone interview. "We will cover not only politics and crime in Los Angeles, but we want to take nationally headlining stories and kind of translate them, telling people how they will be affected on the local level. We also want to cover the impact of what is happening to African-Americans nationally ... and in a state-by-state perspective."

Cole said the editorial mix is based on the frustration she and other black professionals feel in getting news now. "We have to get it in a fragmented way, a little from the dailies, a little from the community papers. There's nothing that puts it all together for me, and people I know," she said.

While the delivery will target a higher-end demographic, the paper is intended for the entire local African American community, she said. The 1,000 distribution spots identified include beauty salons and churches in addition to traditional retail outlets.
She said the paper had the resources for its ambitious editorial aims, but declined to provide details.

Cole spent 23 years in advertising positions at the Los Angeles Times. When she left that paper, she was director of sales development and general merchandise and also director of inside sales for the Recycler, a shopper. In 2002 she became associate publisher of the alternative L.A. Weekly, a post she resigned a few months ago.