White Papers
Also available at https://scholarworks.uni.edu/facpub/6955/
“Measure ULA,” named after United to House LA, was approved by voters in Los Angeles in 2022 to create a dedicated, long-term funding source for solutions to homelessness in LA, including funding the construction of affordable homes and preventing homelessness by helping tenants stay in their homes. The funding would come from a new tax on the most expensive real estate transactions in L.A. (i.e., mansion tax), and would affect fewer than 4% of all property transactions.
At the end of three years of local news coverage about Measure ULA from the Los Angeles Times and LAist, the news audience was left in early 2026 with two dominant news frames – that ULA reduced housing development in Los Angeles and ULA needs to be reformed. These two dominant frames – based on flawed studies – survived in the Los Angeles news media reports despite subsequent studies that demonstrated that ULA had not reduced housing development in Los Angeles and did not need to be reformed. The national news media, local and state politicians, and a statewide ballot initiative repeated the same faulty news frames.
The study analyzed news stories from the first three years of Measure ULA, from April 2023 to March 2026, in the Los Angeles Times and LAist.com. Although the Los Angeles news media attended to the concerns of major developers, an entirely difference narrative was possible on the homelessness front. Homelessness in Los Angeles dropped significantly from 2023 to 2025, yet none of the ULA-related stories in the study sample noted this.
Martin, Christopher R. (2020), What Makes Iowa Newspapers Resilient?
This study investigates why some dailies, weeklies, and news organizations in Iowa are more resilient than others, particularly in a time of financial distress brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The findings are based on interviews with editors, publishers, and general managers of eight newspapers and digital publications in Iowa. The report also relies on data from the Iowa Newspaper Association. The study finds that 10 dimensions contribute most to resiliency: local ownership, centrality of journalism to the business, nonprofit status, nonprofit funding support, diversified business, commitment to community, the health of the local economy, little/no reduction of newsroom staff, historic reputation and civic institution status, and the lack of competing local media. The study considers additional factors that may help struggling newspapers, including employee stock ownership plan structures to maintain local ownership, and postal subsidies to reduce expenses for small newspapers that use the postal service almost exclusively for distribution.
This paper is made possible by a generous grant from the Knight Foundation; the Center for Journalism & Liberty, a project of the Open Markets Institute, has been a part of the Knight Research Network since August 2019. This paper was edited by Michael Bluhm, Open Markets’ managing editor.