With support from the California Arts Council, Southern California Public Radio will produce a radio and digital storytelling series featuring local artists and people working in creative industries in conversation with the teachers, mentors, and artists who supported and taught them, with a focus on anecdotes and personal stories. By reconnecting artists and individuals who helped them develop as professionals, SCPR will demonstrate the cultural and economic impact of the arts on our region.
SCPR is a multiplatform news service operating as LAist. Our broadcast network serves 500,000+ weekly listeners on flagship station LAist 89.3 (KPCC) in Los Angeles and Orange County and repeater stations in Bernardino/Riverside (KUOR), Coachella Valley/Palm Springs (KVLA), Ojai (KJAI), and Santa Barbara. We produce daily radio show “AirTalk” with Larry Mantle as well as local broadcast segments throughout the news day; we also air programming from NPR, the BBC, and American Public Media. LAist.com, our digital destination for news and culture, averages 4 million pageviews and 1 million users monthly. Our podcast division LAist Studios produces award-winning limited series and popular news podcasts “How to LA” and “The L.A. Report,” with 600,000+ monthly downloads. We have 1.3 million social media followers and distribute six regular newsletters, including “How to LA,” “The Top 5,” and “The Weekender.” Our events team produces live and virtual programming and events at our Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena and at venues across the region. Our newsroom features reporting beats dedicated to the following topics: civics and democracy, housing, unhoused communities, health, mental health, early childhood education and development, K-12 education, community colleges, higher education, science, climate emergency, immigrant communities, Asian American communities, Orange County, arts and entertainment, community engagement, and investigations. Our newsroom is a nationally recognized leader in the practice of engaged journalism, in which we identify and seek to meet community information needs and collaborate with audiences in our reporting process. We have one of the nation’s most diverse public radio audiences at 46% nonwhite (24% Hispanic, 13% Asian, 4% Black, 5% Multiracial/Other). SCPR prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in our organization and our work by maintaining a public-facing style guide that reflects wide-ranging audience experiences, tracking the diversity of our sources, and undertaking third-party content audits through a DEI lens.

