About Santa Monica Observer

The Santa Monica Observer is a free weekly print newspaper of general circulation and interest, founded in Santa Monica, California in 1998.

Print edition circulation is around 10,000. In the last five years, more than 10,000,000 people all over the world have viewed SMObserved.com.

The Newspaper and its content website, www.smobserved.com, do not shy from controversy. In general, we look at Santa Monica's neoliberal politics with skepticism. Our motto is "Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words." But we do not adhere to any party line.

Our previous writers include State Senator Ben Allen; Steven Miller, who now writes speeches for US President Donald J. Trump; Vlasic Hadjric, who writes for Bloomberg News; and numerous other successful journalists.

Our current writers include Samuel Alioto, Sarah Storkin, Stan Greene, and Liz Miller.

In the summer of 2016, Liz Miller noticed that a few of her friends from the University of Kansas who lived on North Dakota's Indian Reservations, were posting photos of protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline. She ended up breaking one of the big stories of 2016, after her story received over 2 million hits and was copied by the mainstream media.

In September 2018, the website for Santa Monica Observer (www.smobserved.com), broke the story of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer surgery. https://www.smobserved.com/story/2019/01/19/politics/sick-with-pneumonia-ruth-bader-ginsburg-fights-for-her-life-setting-up-scotus-battle/3780.html

Snopes posted an article labeling the story Fake News. As a result, news.google.com removed the Santa Monica Observer as a news source, and did not reverse the decision after Ginsburg’s staff confirmed that she in fact underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in January 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/washington/06ginsburg.html

The Santa Monica Observer has no friends at City Hall either. In 2009, the City of Santa Monica sued Observer Publisher David Ganezer, for violations of California's False Advertising laws (Cal Bus. Prof. Code Section 17500, et seq). The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed and Ganezer prevailed, but the City has never apologized, never paid costs of suit, and never taken the press release down from the City website.