Politics Blog

Jill Stewart is the Deputy Editor of News at Los Angeles Weekly, the largest alternative weekly newspaper in the Western U.S. She directs a staff of metro reporters who specialize in Los Angeles and California news and politics. Her written commentary still appears on the op ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, and her work in recent years has been published by The New York Times and Wired.

She is a longtime print, radio, Internet, and television political commentator. From 1984 through 1991, she was a metro reporter with the Los Angeles Times. During 1991 and 1992, she lived in Prague and wrote occasionally about that nation’s difficult transition to democracy. From 1997 through 2003, she authored a weekly commentary column on Los Angeles, southern California, and Sacramento politics for the now-defunct alternative newspaper New Times LA. That “acerbic, iconoclastic” column propelled Stewart into the public conscious and made her a “must-read for many in town”, particularly the LA power elite. From 2003 to late 2006, she wrote a syndicated column on California politics that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Daily News, Orange County Register, Long Beach Press-Telegram and several other newspapers, reaching an audience of 1 million readers.

Stewart’s awards include one for Best Column In The Nation by the American Society of Newspaper Columnists, in 2001, and Top Columnist in Los Angeles, by the Los Angeles Press Club, in 2002.

Stewart has a long history in radio and TV broadcasting as a frequent past guest on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, particularly during the 2003 recall of California Gov. Gray Davis. She was a frequent commentator on the local radio show AirTalk, on Pasadena City College’s NPR radio station, KPCC, on PBS affiliate KCET’s Life & Times, KABC-AM’s Larry Elder Show, and Adelphia Cable’s Week in Review (formerly hosted by current City Councilman Bill Rosendahl). During the 2005 mayoral campaign in Los Angeles, Stewart was employed as a political analyst by KCAL 9.

She received her master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University.