Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Director of Policy, Rebuild Local News · Former President, Media Guild of the West · Former Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, California, USA
Rebuild Local News (Director of Policy, 2025–present)
Media Guild of the West / NewsGuild-CWA (President and co-founder, 2020–2025)
Los Angeles Times Guild (co-founding officer, 2019)
Los Angeles Times (staff writer, 2012–2024)
University of Missouri (MA, Journalism)
Matt Pearce is a journalist, labor organizer, and local news policy advocate based in Los Angeles. He joined the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer in 2012 and spent more than a decade there covering politics, technology, media, national news, and social movements — including contributing to the paper's 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of racist comments by Los Angeles city officials. He holds a master's degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In 2019, when the Los Angeles Times formed its first union, Pearce was one of its co-founding officers. He went on to be elected president of Media Guild of the West in 2020 and led the union through one of the most active organizing periods in American journalism labor history, nearly doubling its membership from a single newsroom to nearly a dozen across Southern California, Arizona, and Texas. He took a buyout from the Los Angeles Times in 2024 and in early 2025 became Director of Policy for Rebuild Local News — bringing his labor organizing and journalism policy experience to bear on the legislative side of the local news sustainability challenge. He was awarded the Sí Se Puede Award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the President's Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2024 for press freedom advocacy.
Pearce joined the Los Angeles Times in 2012, drawn from a newspaper career rooted in his master's training at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. At the Times he covered a wide range of national and regional subjects — technology, social movements, politics, and media industry coverage — building the breadth of beat experience that characterizes the general-assignment national reporters at major metropolitan papers. His contribution to the paper's 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of racist comments by Los Angeles city council officials — a story that landed with particular force in a city shaped by deep racial and political tensions and that led to the resignations of three council members — placed him at the center of one of the more consequential acts of local accountability journalism in the paper's recent history.
Pearce has described his path into union organizing as unplanned — he was not from a union family and had only mild interest in the idea when a business reporter at the Times first approached him about the effort. He attended early organizing meetings, held secretly to avoid tipping off corporate management (the paper was then owned by Tronc, the hedge fund-adjacent holding company that preceded Patrick Soon-Shiong's 2018 acquisition). The organizing effort succeeded in 2019, when the Los Angeles Times Guild was officially recognized — the first union in the paper's 138-year history.
Pearce served as a co-founding officer of the Los Angeles Times Guild from 2019, and in 2020 was elected president of Media Guild of the West — the NewsGuild-CWA local that emerged as the organizing vehicle for journalism unions across Southern California, Arizona, and Texas. When he first took the presidency, the Guild represented journalists at a single newsroom: the Los Angeles Times. Over the five years of his tenure, Pearce and the Guild's staff and members organized and won union elections at nearly a dozen additional newsrooms, including the Dallas Morning News, the Texas Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Southern California News Group, the Austin American-Statesman, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the San Antonio Report, Phoenix New Times, and the Desert Sun.
This expansion — from one newsroom in one city to a regional union covering some of the most important journalism markets in the American Southwest — made the Media Guild of the West one of the fastest-growing journalism unions in the country during a period when overall union membership in US newspapers was under sustained pressure. Pearce has described the skills that union organizing built — coalition-building, working with statutory language, coordinating diverse stakeholders, being a "relentless, meddling pain in the ass" — as directly applicable to journalism policy work, which requires exactly the same combination of advocacy, negotiation, and political literacy. He also coordinated journalist and labor advocacy on journalism legislation in California during this period, developing relationships with state legislators, policy organizations, and journalism advocates that prepared him directly for his subsequent policy role.
He took a buyout from the Los Angeles Times in 2024 — remaining a rank-and-file member of his Guild — and announced the end of his term as president in early 2025 when he moved to Rebuild Local News.
Pearce joined Rebuild Local News as Director of Policy in early 2025, describing the organization as the group he had come to "lean on most as a trusted source of reliable ideas and as a convener of the journalism world's pluralistic stakeholders" during his years of Guild advocacy. His role is to devise public policies that will help local news survive and innovate — specifically through legislative advocacy for laws that support journalist employment, newsroom sustainability, and the public interest dimensions of local journalism. In February 2025, he testified before the Washington State Senate Ways and Means Committee in support of SB5400, which would create the Washington Local News Sustainability Program — journalist employment grants financed by taxes on search engine and social media companies. The bill reflects the model of platform-levy-to-newsroom-subsidy that has been implemented in Canada and Australia and is being actively pursued at state and federal levels in the United States. The intersection of his journalism experience, union organizing expertise, and platform policy knowledge makes his policy role at Rebuild unusually well-prepared.
On his Substack, Pearce continues to write about journalism, policy, and local news — including a piece reflecting on the debate about "who destroyed journalism" that he characterized as bordering on theology, and another noting the urgency of journalists contributing to journalism policy debates rather than leaving that work to others.
Pulitzer Prize (contributing)
Los Angeles Times · 2023 · Coverage of racist comments by Los Angeles city council officials
Sí Se Puede Award
National Association of Hispanic Journalists · 2024 · For press freedom advocacy
President's Award
Society of Professional Journalists · 2024 · For press freedom advocacy