A Magazine Dedicated to L.A.’s Digital Coast Rises in the East

Less than six months have passed since Mayor Richard Riordan’s Los Angeles New Media Roundtable selected the name Digital Coast to represent the area’s multimedia firms, and there’s already a magazine devoted to chronicling the high-tech industry. But the monthly Digital Coast Reporter is produced in New York--one of Los Angeles’ biggest rivals.

Jason McCabe Calacanis, editor and founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, launched Digital Coast Reporter in April as an insert to his 18-month-old magazine. Come October, DCR will be offered as a stand-alone pullout available on newsstands in Barnes & Noble and Borders Books & Music.

“New York and Los Angeles are very similar, but Silicon Valley is very different,” said onetime Angeleno Calacanis, explaining his interest in the Digital Coast. “Silicon Valley is about the plumbing. New York and L.A. are about what goes through the pipes.”

(Besides, he said, “the people in New York and L.A. are better-looking, funnier and dress better than people in Silicon Valley, who are boring and don’t look good in photographs.”)

The magazine has won the support of Riordan--who is featured prominently with Calacanis in the summer issue--and Jim Jonassen, a new-media leader who has been essential in the Digital Coast campaign.

But when the digerati were selecting a nickname earlier this year, one of their chief concerns was choosing a moniker that no one else was using.

Indeed, one of the reasons they rejected the popular candidate Tech Coast was that an Orange County organizer had already reserved the name for a magazine of his own.

These days, though, Jonassen isn’t worried about others trying to profit by using the Digital Coast name. Nor is he worried about confusion that may arise when the Digital Coast team gets its own magazine going sometime in the future.

“We should be so lucky as to have two magazines,” Jonassen said. “We still don’t even have a Web site yet.”

Still, it would probably rankle him and other Digital Coast boosters to know that Calacanis insists that Silicon Alley is bigger than the Digital Coast. Riordan himself is fond of saying that Southern California employs more people in new media than Silicon Valley and New York combined.