Capital & Main

Capital & Main is an investigative news organization. Founded in 2013 by Danny Feingold, Capital & Main reports on economic inequality, race, climate change, immigration, education and health. It won seven first-place honors at the 2023 Southern California Journalism Awards.

Capital & Main stories are published at capitalandmain.com and often co-published in major outlets The Atlantic, Time, Reuters, the Guardian, American Prospect, and The Daily Beast.

History and Founding

Capital & Main was founded in 2013 by Danny Feingold, a Los Angeles journalist and former communications director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a prominent labor-backed advocacy organization. Feingold had written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and Salon, and began his career as politics and managing editor at the LA-based weekly Village View. His time at LAANE — where he oversaw national media and publicity for campaigns including landmark living wage ordinances and community benefits agreements that were subsequently replicated across the country — shaped the publication's focus on economic inequality and the intersection of labor, politics, and public policy.

Operating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Capital & Main launched as an entirely digital outlet with a mission to investigate the power structures shaping California's economy and its most vulnerable communities. From the outset, the publication embraced a co-publication model — rather than building its own large subscriber base, it placed investigative and narrative stories with established news outlets that could amplify their reach. Within its first decade, Capital & Main stories had appeared in more than 150 media outlets, including The Guardian, USA Today, Fortune, Fast Company, Rolling Stone, Time, Reuters, The Atlantic, Grist, Slate, and the Daily Beast.

The publication has developed ongoing collaborative partnerships with major investigative organizations. Working alongside ProPublica, Capital & Main has produced investigations into Los Angeles' failure to enforce affordable housing laws, wage theft, and other accountability topics, with some of that work distributed through ProPublica's Local Reporting Network. ProPublica itself is listed among Capital & Main's financial supporters.

Coverage and Content

Capital & Main's tagline — "Investigating Power & Politics" — reflects its editorial orientation. The publication focuses on what it describes as the most pressing economic, environmental, and social issues of the time, with primary beats centered on economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism, and immigration. While its origins and core reporting are California-based, the publication has steadily expanded its geographic scope to cover national stories, particularly on inequality and the fossil fuel industry's influence on climate policy.

The publication is organized around both ongoing columns and special investigative series. Major recurring columns include "State of Inequality," which tracks economic disparities in California; "The Arc," written by Erin Aubry Kaplan — the first Black weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times — which examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and the receding Black presence in Los Angeles; and "California Uncovered," which explores the intersection of health, wealth, and race. Special investigative series have included "The Slick" (examining the oil industry's entanglement with California politics and climate policy), "Imperial Divide" (reporting on water scarcity and the Colorado River's decline), "Deadly Dust: The Silicosis Epidemic" (tracking the occupational health crisis among fabrication workers), and "Pain & Profit" (investigating the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries).

Notable investigations have included reporting on lead contamination mishandled by California public agencies, deputy gang culture within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (a series by reporter and video producer Cerise Castle that earned the 2022 International Women in Media Foundation's Courage Award and the American Mosaic Journalism Prize), and broad investigations into California's housing affordability crisis in collaboration with ProPublica.

The publication's editorial leadership includes Executive Editor Tony Barboza, a veteran of 18 years at the Los Angeles Times whose environmental and climate reporting has resulted in changes to state law and policy; and Senior Editor Steve Marble, who spent 24 years at the Los Angeles Times and was an editor on the paper's series on corruption in the city of Bell, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Managing Editor Pandora Young has been with Capital & Main since 2014.

Awards and Recognition

Capital & Main has won more than 60 awards in a single year (2024) from regional and national journalism competitions. In the Southern California Journalism Awards, administered by the Los Angeles Press Club and among the largest regional journalism contests in the United States, Capital & Main has accumulated multiple first-place prizes across successive years. The publication won 20 overall prizes at the 66th annual Southern California Journalism Awards (2024), including seven first-place prizes covering categories from Educational Reporting and Investigative Journalism to Technology Reporting and Environmental Reporting. In 2022 it won 16 prizes at the 64th annual competition, including the Online Journalist of the Year Award for Robin Urevich's investigation into California's affordable housing crisis. In 2020 it won 17 prizes and again took Online Journalist of the Year, as well as Best Website for a News Organization Exclusive to the Internet. The publication also received a Best in the West journalism award in 2017.

Access and Funding

Capital & Main publishes all of its content for free at capitalandmain.com. The site carries no paywall. It is supported by tax-deductible donations from foundations, labor unions, and individual donors. Per its publicly posted donor disclosure page, supporters of $5,000 or more in a recent twelve-month period included the California Endowment, the California Wellness Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Weingart Foundation, Heinz Philanthropies, the Glaser Progress Foundation, the Aileen Getty Foundation, the Kaphan Foundation, the Energy Foundation, and the Economic Security Project, as well as a broad range of California labor unions — including SEIU California, the California Teachers Association, the California Nurses Association, AFSCME, UNITE HERE, and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Individual donors of note include Abigail Disney and filmmaker George Zimmer.

Capital & Main publishes an editorial independence policy and a donor transparency policy, both publicly available on its website. Readers can subscribe to a free email newsletter and access video content and multimedia documentary work through the site.

Capital & Main
Los Angeles, California

Email: Contact page
Website: capitalandmain.com
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Donate: capitalandmain.com/support-real-journalism

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