Outlet profile

City News Service

U.S. centrist wire service (straight news, no clear ideological slant)

Owned byPrivately owned and independent. Tom Quinn, whose family has controlled the company since the 1950s, is the primary owner. He is non-executive chairman and lives in Reno, Nevada.

FundingSubscription fees from clients. Its 150 or so subscribers include newspapers, TV and radio stations, websites, private businesses and government offices. It has no known political, state or billionaire backing.

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

City News Service was founded in 1928 by Marvin Willard and Welland Gordon to supply national wire services and local outlets with Los Angeles stories, including city government and Hollywood. In the early 1940s, gossip columnist Florabelle Muir bought it. In the early 1950s, former Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron and United Press bureau chief Joe Quinn bought it, and Quinn later became sole owner. After Joe Quinn died in 1979, his widow Grace Quinn took over, and their son Tom Quinn assumed control in 1980. Tom Quinn retired as chairman in 2013. After the executive he had put in charge retired in 2021, he became non-executive chairman while remaining the primary owner. The service now covers Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Diego counties around the clock, and its stories appear in local news sites and on broadcast stations under their own branding. Marty Sauerzopf was listed as editor in the sources I found, though that may be out of date. I found no well-documented editorial controversies. Its output is typically brief, attributed, wire-style reporting that leaves analysis and opinion to its client outlets. I could not do a detailed review of its recent coverage of the administration, so the stance rating rests on its straight-news format.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-10-31; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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