myBurbank
myBurbank is an online-only local news site covering Burbank, California, in the United States, publishing at myburbank.com. Launched in 2010, it provides free local news about city government, schools, public safety, business, community events and sports in a city known worldwide as a centre of film and television production. It is operated by myBurbank.com Inc., and its executive editor and president is Craig Sherwood, who has described the site as a labour of love run by local people, serving about 30,000 readers a month at the time of its tenth year.
Burbank is a city of roughly one hundred thousand residents in Los Angeles County, bordered by Los Angeles and Glendale, and home to major studios and media companies. Like many California cities, its legacy news source became part of a distant chain: the Burbank Leader was owned by the Los Angeles Times, operated as a paid site and, in Sherwood's description, had no office or reporters living in Burbank. myBurbank was built on the opposite proposition, that a free site staffed by people who live in and know the city could serve as its everyday newspaper, and that proposition has sustained it for more than fifteen years.
Origins and purpose
myBurbank launched in 2010 as a local, online-only alternative for Burbank news. Its corporate record shows myBurbank.com Inc. as a California corporation in the media business based in Burbank, with Craig L. Sherwood as chief executive and chief financial officer and Ross A. Benson as secretary, and Sherwood identified in his own profiles as the company's executive editor and president. From the beginning the site's offer to readers was simple: local news, written by local people, available free, in a market where the alternative was a paywalled product owned from outside the city.
Sherwood set out that founding logic plainly when the site appealed for help during the COVID-19 pandemic. myBurbank had been in business for ten years, he wrote, and had been at a break-even point for the previous few years, which was fine because the goal was to get local news to people who had no other free source. That statement of purpose, break-even local service rather than growth, explains much about how the site has operated: a small paid team of writers, editors and a photographer, supported principally by advertising from the local businesses whose customers read it.
The pandemic test
The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 exposed the fragility of that model and became a defining episode in the site's public history. Advertising by local businesses suffered immensely as Burbank's shops and restaurants closed or struggled, making it hard to pay expenses and to keep paying the site's writers, editors and photographer. Sherwood launched a GoFundMe appeal, Keep myBurbank News Site Alive, asking readers who supported local journalism and business to donate any amount, while the business applied for government help without knowing whether it would qualify or when anything would happen. At the same time, the site tried to help open businesses at no charge.
The appeal recorded the scale of the operation at ten years old: about 30,000 readers a month, a small staff, and an editor who presented the site as a labour of love run by local people who love what they do. Readers responded to a familiar presence rather than to a national brand. The site survived the pandemic period and continued publishing, and the episode remains the clearest published account of its economics: free to read, dependent on the prosperity of Burbank's own businesses, and sustained in a crisis by direct appeals to the community it serves.
Coverage of city government and public safety
City government is a core beat. myBurbank reports Burbank City Council meetings and decisions, city services, development and housing disputes, parking and traffic enforcement, and the work of the Burbank Police and Fire Departments. Its podcast discussions have worked through council meetings lasting ten hours, debates over no-fault evictions, parking control trials around schools intended to manage double parking, tow truck operators causing problems in the city, and cell tower placements. That agenda is unglamorous and essential: it is the level of government that decides whether a resident can park, build, rent or cross the street safely.
Public safety coverage is strengthened by the team's long involvement with Burbank's emergency services. Photographers and presenters associated with the site have documented fire and police events for years, including the annual Burbank Police and Fire Service Day, where the site has recorded special editions of its podcast on the apparatus floor with department leaders as guests. Sherwood's own background includes volunteer public safety photography work in the area, and co-host Ross Benson has photographed Burbank and Los Angeles County fire activity over a long career. The result is coverage in which firefighters, police officers and city crews appear as known individuals with careers the site has followed, rather than as anonymous uniforms in a press release.
Schools and sports
Schools and local sports are the second pillar of the site's identity, as the assignment description for the outlet itself notes. Burbank's public schools, principally Burbank High School and John Burroughs High School, generate news and sport that families follow closely and that metropolitan outlets cover only occasionally. myBurbank reports school news and photographs and reports local games, and its leadership is embedded in that world: Sherwood has served as an assistant varsity baseball coach at Burbank High School alongside his editorial role, a combination that would be unusual at a large newspaper and is characteristic of a community newsroom where the editor is also a neighbour and coach.
Sports coverage at this level performs a civic function beyond scores. High school athletics are one of the main ways a city sees itself represented, and a local site that attends games, publishes photographs and names players provides the record that families keep. Combined with school board and campus news, it gives parents a single place to follow the institutions their children attend, which is one of the strongest habits a hyperlocal publication can build with its readers.
Business, community and everyday Burbank
myBurbank covers Burbank business openings and closings, restaurants and cafes, entertainment industry news with a local address, community festivals, equestrian events, charity occasions and the nostalgic history of beloved local firms. Its podcast has ranged from gift card giveaways with a local cafe to celebrations of long-loved Burbank businesses, new local hotspots, classic car shows, art fairs and events in Johnny Carson Park. It also publishes opinion pieces and letters, including contributions from elected officials representing the area, and community features such as the myBurbank's Best reader voting, which invites residents to nominate favourites across categories of local life.
This mixture is deliberate. A city where Warner Bros., Disney and many other media employers are located could easily be covered only as an industry town, but myBurbank's Burbank is primarily a place where people live: where a tea cake shop, a school parking problem, a fire service open day and a council argument about evictions are the news. Covering the studios' city through its neighbourhoods rather than only through its soundstages is the site's editorial identity, and it is why its slogan-like self-description emphasises local people rather than media industry expertise.
myBurbank Talks and multimedia
The site has expanded beyond text and photography into audio and video with myBurbank Talks, a podcast presented by the staff of myBurbank and distributed through platforms including iHeart and podcast services. Episodes, under the title The Week That Was and That Will Be, are hosted by Craig Sherwood with Ross Benson and Craig Durling, and review the previous week's Burbank news while previewing what is coming, mixing reporting with contests, word-of-the-week winners and listener participation. Special editions have been recorded live at events such as Burbank Police and Fire Service Day, interviewing guests on site.
The podcast format suits the newsroom's strengths. Its hosts have covered the city together for years, know its officials, firefighters, business owners and coaches personally, and can explain a council decision or a parking scheme conversationally in a way that a formal article may not. Video versions and channel memberships extend the same material to YouTube audiences, and the programme has offered candidates on the Burbank ballot, for any office, the opportunity to record a candidate podcast by contacting the newsroom, an open invitation that treats access to local media as a civic service rather than a favour.
People
Craig Sherwood is the public face of myBurbank: executive editor, president of myBurbank.com Inc., host of its podcast, author of its appeals to readers, and a longtime Burbank baseball coach and public safety photographer. Ross Benson, the company's secretary, is its other most visible figure, a photographer and podcast co-host whose knowledge of Burbank's fire service and community events runs through the site's coverage. Craig Durling joins them as a podcast co-host, contributing photography and commentary, and writers and photographers including Ashley Erickson have produced the site's event and news coverage.
The smallness of the team is not incidental to the journalism. When the editor coaches at one of the high schools the site covers, the photographer has shot fire service events for decades, and the hosts can recall chili cook-offs and park events from years earlier while previewing this weekend's fair, the publication's authority comes from presence and memory. Readers are not asked to trust an institution; they are asked to trust named neighbours whose bylines, photographs and voices they encounter every week, and whose mistakes and corrections occur in public within a community that knows them.
Business model and independence
myBurbank's model is advertising-supported free news, run at close to break-even in normal years, with reader donations and memberships as a supplement that became vital during the pandemic. It sells its value to local advertisers as access to Burbank readers, and it sells its value to readers as independence from the chain ownership that took the city's legacy paper behind a paywall in another city. Its studio and podcast activities, including studio rental enquiries handled through the site, show a small media business diversifying modestly around its core newsroom rather than seeking scale.
Independence at this size has costs as well as benefits. There is no corporate parent to absorb a collapse in local advertising, no legal department or benefits structure of a large chain, and the line between the newsroom and the community it advertises is close. The site's answer, articulated in its own appeal, is transparency about those economics: readers were told how the money worked, why help was needed and who would be paid with it. That candour, and the survival that followed, form a small case study in how American hyperlocal sites endured the pandemic advertising shock.
Burbank as the subject
Burbank calls itself the media capital of the world, and its identity is genuinely dual. It is a working studio city in the San Fernando Valley, with major lots, animation and post-production companies, an airport, and a downtown and neighbourhoods that function like any other Los Angeles County suburb. Its news therefore includes entertainment labour and studio decisions, but also water and power, through its municipal utility Burbank Water and Power, schools, housing pressure from across the region, and the ordinary disputes of a council chamber. myBurbank's coverage follows the residential city through that industrial fame, reporting the council meeting and the school game with the same attention.
Longevity has given the site a place in that city's memory. Its photographers' archives of fire service days, graduations, games and festivals, its hosts' recollections of earlier Burbank events, and its continuous record since 2010 make it a reference point for residents who want to know what happened in their city and when. In a media market as large as Los Angeles, where Burbank stories compete with news from dozens of larger places, a publication that records only Burbank, every week, performs an archival function no regional outlet will perform for it.
Continuing publication
myBurbank continues to publish Burbank news, photographs, reader voting and the myBurbank Talks podcast from its base in the city, more than fifteen years after its 2010 launch. It remains free to read, locally owned through myBurbank.com Inc., and led by the editor who founded its public identity. Its history illustrates a durable answer to the question facing many American suburbs whose papers were absorbed by distant chains: a small team of residents, working at break-even in good years and asking for help in bad ones, can still give a city of one hundred thousand people a newspaper of its own, so long as the city decides that having one matters.
