About Easy Reader

Easy Reader

Easy Reader is a weekly newspaper founded in 1970 in Hermosa Beach, California, and published on Thursdays for the Beach Cities of Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach in the South Bay of Los Angeles County. Its owner and publisher is Kevin Cody, and its claimed weekly circulation has been reported at between about 45,000 and 57,000. The paper is a legally adjudicated newspaper for Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, meaning it is authorized to publish legal notices for those cities. Its publisher, Easy Reader Inc., also publishes Peninsula People and Beach magazines, extending the weekly's local franchise into magazine form.

The paper is known for two chapters of its history in particular. Editorial cartoonist Bob Staake's first long-term job was six years at Easy Reader early in his career, and in the 1980s the paper became known for in-depth coverage of the McMartin preschool trial, the Manhattan Beach case that drew national attention. In 2014 a management and expansion agreement with Freedom Communications, the former owner of the Orange County Register and other Southern California papers, marked the weekly's attempt to grow within a consolidating regional industry while remaining a Beach Cities institution.

A Beach Cities Weekly Founded in 1970

Easy Reader was founded in 1970, at the beginning of a decade in which free and alternative weeklies proliferated across American cities and suburbs. Its territory was unusually well defined: three adjoining beach cities on the Santa Monica Bay, each with its own council, schools, police and civic character, but sharing beaches, surf culture, businesses and a coastal identity distinct from the rest of Los Angeles County. A weekly devoted exclusively to Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach could cover that territory completely, in a way the Los Angeles metropolitan press, which treated the South Bay as one district among many, never attempted.

Publishing on Thursdays placed the paper at the start of the beach weekend, a natural position for a publication mixing civic news with the surf, volleyball, dining and entertainment life of the coast. Over five decades that formula, hard local government and school reporting alongside beach culture, made Easy Reader the common printed forum of three small cities whose residents otherwise read different metropolitan papers and, increasingly, no metropolitan paper at all.

Adjudicated Status and the Legal Notice Function

Easy Reader's status as a legally adjudicated newspaper for Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach is a substantive civic fact, not a formality. An adjudicated paper of general circulation is one a court has recognized as qualified to publish legal notices, the official advertisements through which governments publish ordinances, hearings, bids and other required public information. For a free-distribution weekly, adjudication both certifies that the paper genuinely circulates and provides the legal advertising base that has historically sustained community papers. The Beach Cities' councils, agencies and courts have therefore been connected to Easy Reader not only as subjects of its reporting but as users of its columns for the formal business of local government.

That dual relationship is characteristic of strong community weeklies. The paper scrutinizes city hall while also serving as the medium in which city hall must legally speak to the public. Readers encounter both in the same issue: a council decision reported and criticized in the news columns, and the official notice of the next hearing printed as required by law. Across fifty years, that combination has made Easy Reader part of the governmental infrastructure of the Beach Cities as well as their press.

Kevin Cody and Easy Reader Inc.

Under owner and publisher Kevin Cody, Easy Reader has been an independently owned weekly in an era when most comparable papers passed into chains. Cody's company, Easy Reader Inc., built outward from the newspaper into magazines, publishing Peninsula People and Beach magazine alongside the weekly. That structure reflects a local publisher's strategy for the South Bay market: one newsroom and sales operation serving several print products aimed at overlapping coastal audiences, from the news-driven weekly to lifestyle magazines for the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the beach communities.

Independent ownership kept editorial control local. Decisions about coverage, endorsements and investment were made in Hermosa Beach by a publisher whose business depended entirely on the Beach Cities themselves. The circulation figures claimed for the paper, between about 45,000 and 57,000 weekly across its reporting, are large for three cities whose combined population is far smaller than metropolitan dailies require, and they indicate the saturation distribution, through racks, homes and businesses, by which free weeklies achieve their reach.

Bob Staake's First Long-Term Job

One of the paper's contributions to American cartooning came early in a famous career. Bob Staake, later a widely published illustrator and cartoonist whose work appeared in national magazines and children's books, spent six years at Easy Reader in his first long-term job. A weekly newspaper is an unforgiving school for a cartoonist: deadlines every week, local subjects that must be made visually intelligible, and the need to comment on councils, developments and beach controversies that readers know intimately. Staake's six years in that school preceded his national career, and the paper counts him among the talents formed in its small newsroom.

The detail matters beyond biography because it illustrates what community weeklies have historically provided to American journalism and art: entry-level positions where young talent did real published work immediately, under deadline, for a known audience. Easy Reader's role in Staake's formation is documented in accounts of his career, preserving the Beach Cities weekly in the record of a national illustrator's life as the place his professional work began in earnest.

Covering the McMartin Preschool Trial

The paper's most demanding reporting chapter came in the 1980s, when the McMartin preschool trial in Manhattan Beach became one of the most closely watched criminal cases in America. The prosecution of members of the McMartin family and their employees, on allegations that became a defining episode of the era's day-care abuse investigations, unfolded over years of preliminary proceedings and trial, in Easy Reader's home territory. National media descended episodically; the local weekly covered the case continuously, for readers who included the families, neighbours and officials living with its consequences in Manhattan Beach itself.

The paper became known for that in-depth coverage, which required a small staff to sustain legal reporting of unusual complexity and emotional intensity over an extended period. The case ended without the convictions its early coverage elsewhere had presumed, and it is now widely studied as a cautionary episode in American justice and media. For Easy Reader, the McMartin years demonstrated the distinctive value of the hometown weekly in a national story: it could not leave when the story slowed, and its readers could not either, so its coverage had to serve people for whom the case was not a sensation but a community trauma unfolding in their own streets.

The Freedom Communications Agreement of 2014

In 2014 Easy Reader entered a management and expansion agreement with Freedom Communications, the Irvine-based company then publishing the Orange County Register and pursuing an ambitious expansion across Southern California. The agreement followed Freedom's acquisition of other regional properties and reflected a period when larger companies sought partnerships with strong local weeklies to extend their reach. For Easy Reader, the arrangement promised management resources and expansion possibilities while the paper retained its Beach Cities identity and its publisher.

The episode belongs to the larger history of Southern California newspaper consolidation in the 2010s, when Freedom's expansion strategy itself soon collapsed into bankruptcy and sale. That Easy Reader continued as an independent Beach Cities weekly through and beyond that turbulence illustrates the resilience of its local model: adjudicated status, saturation circulation in three compact cities, magazine extensions and a publisher rooted in the market gave it a footing that survived the failure of its larger partner's ambitions. Editor and Publisher, the industry journal, documented the paper through these developments as part of its record of the American weekly press.

Surf, Sand and City Halls: The Weekly Mix

The Beach Cities possess one of the most distinctive local cultures in California, the birthplace of modern beach volleyball, a historic surf coast and a dense, affluent, highly engaged civic scene in which development, schools and coastal access are contested intensely. Easy Reader's weekly mix serves that whole world: council and planning commission battles over building height and density, school board affairs in three districts, police and public safety, and at the same time surf contests, volleyball tournaments, beach events and the restaurant and music life of the piers and avenues. The juxtaposition is not eclecticism; it is an accurate map of what Beach Cities residents argue about and celebrate.

High civic engagement makes the territory demanding for a weekly. Readers attend the meetings the paper covers, know the officials it quotes and write letters in volume. A paper in such a market survives on accuracy and familiarity earned over decades, which is why longevity itself, publication every Thursday since 1970, functions as the paper's credential. Each generation of Beach Cities residents inherits Easy Reader as the place where its predecessors' fights and festivals were recorded, and where its own will be.

Magazines and the Wider South Bay

Easy Reader Inc.'s magazines, Peninsula People and Beach, extend the company's coverage of coastal Los Angeles County beyond the weekly's three cities. Peninsula People serves the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the affluent hill communities adjoining the Beach Cities, while Beach magazine addresses the coastal lifestyle audience across the area. Together with the newspaper, they form a small, locally owned publishing group specialized entirely in the South Bay coast, a scale at which the publisher, advertisers and readers all know the product's territory street by street.

This local group model contrasts with the chain consolidation that absorbed most Southern California weeklies. Its viability rests on the same assets as the newspaper's: defined geography, high household incomes attractive to local advertisers, and content, from council news to beach culture, that national digital platforms do not produce. The magazines also give the newsroom's photography and feature writing a second life in formats suited to the coast's visual character.

Easy Reader Today

Today Easy Reader continues to publish on Thursdays from Hermosa Beach for Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach, in print and through its website, under publisher Kevin Cody. It retains its adjudicated status for legal notices, its claimed circulation in the tens of thousands weekly, and its position as the Beach Cities' own paper, a position it has held since 1970 through the McMartin years, the Staake cartooning era, the Freedom Communications episode and the digital transition.

Its history summarizes the best case for the American community weekly: a paper small enough to know its three cities completely and durable enough to record them for half a century. The Beach Cities have no daily of their own and are a small corner of a vast metropolitan media market. In Easy Reader they have had, since 1970, a publication whose entire purpose is their streets, their councils, their schools and their shoreline, appearing every Thursday as it has for more than fifty years.