Try Finding Out
The Purple Line extension is coming through Koreatown. A new park is being planned on Kingsley Drive. An after-school program opened at Pio Pico. A mortgage fraud scheme affected families in the neighborhood. A restaurant opened a new location on Vermont.
If you wanted to know all of that today, you’d need to check the LA Times, LAist, the Korea Daily, La Opinion, Patch, the city council agenda, and two or three Facebook groups. Some of it would be in English. Some in Korean. Some in Spanish. Some of it you’d never find because it was published in a source you don’t follow, in a language you don’t read.
That’s the information landscape for 120,000 people living in 2.7 square miles.
No One Is Watching
Koreatown has never had a dedicated news source. The LA Times covers the neighborhood occasionally, but Koreatown has never been a regular beat. After the paper cut 20 percent of its newsroom in early 2024, neighborhood-level coverage across Los Angeles got even thinner. The Korea Daily and Korea Times cover the Korean-American community well, but their focus leans toward homeland politics and diaspora-wide issues, not the zoning change on Wilshire or the bus route adjustment on Vermont.
For the majority-Latino population - roughly half the neighborhood - hyperlocal Spanish-language coverage is essentially nonexistent. La Opinion covers greater Los Angeles. Nobody covers Koreatown in Spanish.
Important things happen in this neighborhood every week. Most residents hear about them late, partially, or not at all.
What We Built
Ktown News watches dozens of sources - newspapers, city feeds, local blogs, community organizations - and surfaces what’s relevant to Koreatown. It updates daily. It’s bilingual in English and Spanish. Every story links to its original source.
It’s not a newspaper. We don’t have reporters. What we have is a system that does what no single person could: monitor every source that might mention Koreatown and put the relevant ones in one place, organized by topic, with context.
The homepage is built around what residents actually need. A daily briefing at the top. Sections organized by theme - development, transit, business, community, safety. Source attribution on everything. No paywalls, no accounts, no algorithms optimizing for engagement.
Why This Matters
Information access is the first step in every other kind of participation. You can’t weigh in on a development project you don’t know about. You can’t attend a community meeting nobody told you was happening. You can’t hold your representatives accountable for decisions you never heard they made.
The mission we’re working toward is to connect communities through technology and shared ownership. Ktown News is a piece of that - not the flashiest tool, but maybe the most fundamental. Before people can participate, they need to know what’s going on.
One neighborhood. One place to check. That’s the idea.