1 minute read
Q&A with Brian Allison
from SoMe trial
by Katerina
art director for Los Angeles Downtown News
Q: How does L.A. inspire what you do?
I mean, we are hyperlocal, and we live and die with the Downtown community. We’re the news source for what goes on in Downtown L.A. Smaller, local newspapers like us get along because they provide information to people in the neighborhood that want intense close coverage of the area where they live in.
There are so many blogs on the internet now, it’s hard for people to discern between professional journalism and regurgitated information. These blogs are re-reporting professional journalism, which is great for spreading the word, but it should always trickle back to a source and the source is what makes journalism and newspapers important professional sources.
We’re a free weekly newspaper with a few magazines per year, and, as a newspaper that’s been around 40+ years, Los Angeles Downtown is a professional news source with journalists providing something to the community that is important.
Q: How did you get started?
I’ve been in the printing and publishing business for over 30 years — since the late 80s — and joined this paper in 1996. Los Angeles Downtown News was created to provide information to the Downtown community that they weren’t getting before. I worked through the transition from print to desktop, and these transitions to the internet also had a massive impact on printing and publishing. issuu helps our paper cover our bases, so to this day we have print, our website and our stuff on issuu.
Q: Any advice for your readers?
Brian: If you’re going into journalism or starting a paper, you need some talented people to put together your copy, and a person, or persons, capable of composing that information on a page that is both easy and elegant to read and is enjoyable for the reader to absorb. You need to have the right tools to do that: Photoshop, InDesign, etc. Then it’s just creating those files and publishing in any form you see fit. It’s just a matter of having those two elements in place first.
Los Angeles Downtown News, Issue 007
