ScheerPost is an independent daily news website based in Los Angeles, California, publishing investigative reporting, news, and progressive commentary. It was founded in 2020 by veteran journalist Robert Scheer together with his wife, journalist Narda Zacchino, emerging from the breakup of Truthdig — the pioneering progressive news site Scheer had co-founded fifteen years earlier. Describing itself as a home for independent journalism, ScheerPost carries on the tradition of its predecessor: long-form investigations, sharp opinion writing, and interviews with dissenting voices in American politics, produced outside the commercial and institutional pressures of mainstream media. Its official website is scheerpost.com.
Robert Scheer: The Journalist Behind the Site
To understand ScheerPost, one must understand Robert Scheer, one of the most durable figures in American progressive journalism. After several years freelancing for magazines including New Times and Playboy, Scheer joined the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a reporter. He spent 17 years at the paper as a national correspondent, writing articles and series on subjects ranging from the Soviet Union during glasnost to the Jews of Los Angeles, arms control, urban crises, national politics, and the military, and covering several presidential elections. The Times entered his work for the Pulitzer Prize 11 times, and he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series on the television industry. After leaving the paper in 1993, he was granted a weekly op-ed column that ran every Tuesday for the next 12 years until it was canceled in 2005. He is a contributing editor for The Nation magazine, was heard weekly on the nationally syndicated KCRW political analysis program Left, Right & Center, and hosts Scheer Intelligence, a half-hour KCRW podcast of conversations with politically engaged figures. He is now a clinical professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, teaching courses on media and society — a role he has held alongside teaching stints at Antioch College, the City College of New York, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Berkeley.
Truthdig: The Predecessor
In 2005, Scheer co-founded Truthdig with Zuade Kaufman, a former Los Angeles Times colleague, creating Truthdig LLC with each owning half of the company — Kaufman as publisher and CEO, Scheer as editor-in-chief. Built on their shared progressive values, Truthdig became over the next 15 years a reputable and award-winning news organization, a platform for expert reporting and commentary that won numerous journalism accolades. But the economics never worked: although both founders worked without compensation as managers, the site could not become financially self-sustaining, and Kaufman repeatedly loaned the company money to keep it alive — debt that reached $4.8 million plus interest by the end of 2017. In March 2020, the partnership ruptured publicly when Kaufman filed a Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit against Scheer seeking to dissolve the company behind the website, amid disputes over finances and control. The lawsuit exposed the fault lines — including the fact that Scheer, unlike Kaufman, had been paid for most of the columns he wrote, making him the only managing member drawing income from the company.
The 2020 Split and the Birth of ScheerPost
Out of the Truthdig wreckage, Scheer launched ScheerPost in 2020 with Narda Zacchino — herself a veteran Los Angeles Times journalist, whom Scheer had met and married in the paper's newsroom decades earlier. The new site was, in effect, a continuation of the editorial project by other means: the same editor, the same progressive sensibility, many of the same contributors and concerns, but under a new masthead and a new corporate structure, free of the partnership dispute that had consumed Truthdig. The timing was pointed — the launch came in a presidential election year, amid a pandemic and a national reckoning over racial justice — and the site positioned itself immediately as a daily destination for readers who had followed Scheer's work across the Times, Truthdig, The Nation, and KCRW.
What ScheerPost Publishes
ScheerPost publishes daily: original reporting, investigations, opinion columns, and interviews, with a focus on American politics, foreign policy, war and militarism, civil liberties, economic inequality, and media criticism. The site's columnists and contributors have included some of the most prominent dissenting voices in American journalism — notably Chris Hedges, the former New York Times war correspondent turned Pulitzer-winning columnist, whose unsparing columns on American empire, Gaza, and the media are a signature feature. Scheer's own writing anchors the site: reported columns and interviews that draw on his half-century of contacts and his long-standing preoccupations — the national security state, the failures of the Iraq War era, the hollowing of American democracy. The tone is avowedly left and avowedly independent: skeptical of both parties' establishments, hostile to concentrated power whether corporate or governmental, and insistent that journalism's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Scheer Intelligence and the KCRW Connection
A distinctive feature of the ScheerPost operation is its relationship with public radio. Scheer's Scheer Intelligence — a half-hour interview program produced with KCRW in Santa Monica — features long, thoughtful conversations with what the show calls "American Originals": people whose lifetime engagement with political issues offers unique and often surprising perspectives on the day's most important questions. The podcast extends the site's editorial reach into audio and connects it to KCRW's audience, one of the most influential public-radio audiences in the country. Scheer's decades on KCRW's Left, Right & Center gave him a broadcast presence that the website leverages: ScheerPost is as much a personality-driven journalistic enterprise as an institutional one, built around its founder's voice, reputation, and Rolodex.
Editorial Stance and Independence
ScheerPost's identity rests on a particular definition of independence. It is independent of corporate media ownership, of party apparatus, and — crucially, given the Truthdig history — of the donor dynamics that can compromise nonprofit journalism. The site's progressivism is of the old-school, anti-war, civil-libertarian variety associated with Scheer's generation of the New Left: deeply critical of American foreign intervention, of the surveillance state, of corporate power, and of what it sees as the failures of mainstream liberalism. That stance has put it at odds at various times with both the Democratic establishment and with left-liberal outlets — a position the site wears as a badge of honor. Its motto, "your home for independent journalism," is both a branding line and a polemic: an argument that truly independent journalism is homeless everywhere else.
The Business of Independent Digital News
The economics of ScheerPost are the economics of the entire independent digital news sector — precarious by nature. Truthdig's history is the cautionary tale built into the new venture's DNA: even an award-winning site with a loyal audience could not cover its costs through the 2010s, surviving only on its publisher's loans. ScheerPost operates in a media environment that has only gotten harder for small publishers, with platform algorithms throttling referral traffic and subscription dollars consolidating around a handful of national brands. The site's survival strategy is the classic independent playbook: a loyal core readership, reader donations, and the founder's personal brand as the primary asset. Whether that model can sustain a daily news operation over the long term remains the open question hanging over not just ScheerPost but the entire ecosystem of independent progressive media.
Place in Progressive Media
ScheerPost occupies a specific niche in the progressive media landscape: the veteran-led, writer-driven opinion-and-investigation site, in the lineage of the great alternative weeklies and of Scheer's own earlier ventures. It is smaller and more personal than institutional progressive outlets, more polemical than nonprofit newsrooms, and more rooted in print-journalism traditions than in the influencer-driven media of the social platforms. Its contributors' Rolodexes — built over decades at the Times, The Nation, and Truthdig — give it access to sources and voices that younger outlets cannot easily replicate. In a fragmented media environment, ScheerPost functions as a clubhouse for a particular tradition of American left journalism: the investigative, anti-establishment, literary-political tradition that runs from Ramparts — where Scheer himself once wrote — through the alternative press to the present.
Why It Matters
ScheerPost matters as a case study in journalistic persistence. Robert Scheer has now founded two significant independent news sites in two decades, survived the collapse of the first, and rebuilt the second around the same editorial convictions at an age when most journalists have retired. The site's existence is an argument — that there remains an audience for long-form, ideologically committed, institutionally skeptical journalism, and that such journalism can be produced outside the corporate and nonprofit structures that dominate the industry. Whether one agrees with its politics or not, ScheerPost represents something increasingly rare in American media: a news organization that is transparent about its point of view, accountable to a named editor with a public record, and unwilling to subordinate its editorial judgment to commercial or partisan pressure. In that sense, the site's name is its mission statement — journalism with Scheer's name on it, for better and worse, standing behind every word.
