Bill Pearl, who covered and frequently antagonized the powers at City Hall and Sacramento through his website LBReport.com, died Tuesday afternoon at his home in Long Beach of cancer. He was 71.
Pearl started in media as a disc jockey working as a Boss Radio on-air personality for the music powerhouses of the 1960s, KHJ and KRLA before transitioning to talk radio for news stations, including KABC. He paid for his schooling in law that way and embarked on a successful law career before starting his LBReport.com in August 2000.
“Bill was a very talented individual and performed a great service to the community,” said Jay Beeler, publisher of the community newspaper the Beachcomber, which ran Pearl’s pieces on its cover during the past year, most of it material that was first written for LBReport.
Those of us at the Post would run into Pearl while covering city politics and while on his site, he was a dogged competitor, but always amiable in person. I didn’t always agree with his journalistic decisions, but you could not deny his drive and determination (if not the hectic design of his site, with headlines pretty much telling the entire story and peppered with abbreviated and apostrophied words that were, in older days, employed by newspapers to make headlines fit into tight spaces).
Pearl wrote and said things the way he wanted them written and said. His wife, Sharon Katchen, met Pearl at KFWB in 1986 when she moved from Denver to take the job covering politics for the station.
“I tried to help Pearl in his coverage of the city, since we both have journalism backgrounds,” she said. “I’d write something for him and he’d say, ‘This is great, but I’m going to rewrite it.’ He was very particular about how his stories read and looked.”
The couple would have been married for 32 years in March. They have triplets: Max, David and Chaya, all of whom came home to be with Pearl on Tuesday, the day after he came home from the hospital.
“When people say someone was having a long, hard battle with cancer, it’s true,” said Katchen. “He was diagnosed in July 2019 and started treatment in August. He had surgery, radiation and chemo, then more radiation and more chemo.”
Katchen said her husband started LBReport.com because he had grown weary of the city’s daily newspaper. “He didn’t feel like they were doing a good job of covering the news and that they told people there was nothing they could do about problems. He started LBReport.com with the idea to let people know earlier when they could do something about it.”
Pearl was infamous at City Hall for his frequent Public Records Act requests. “There was a lot that came to light from those,” said Katchen. “He always went where the truth was and if it was down a dark hole, Bill would go down that dark hole.”
Pearl stayed at it until early November when he went for more treatment at UCLA/Santa Monica, until there was nothing more to do for him.
“He really lit up when he saw his pets and his children,” said Katchen.
She said she intends to keep LBReport going. “It’ll be down for a while so I can learn how to use it easier and make it look nicer,” she said.
“But right now I have to have my time to grieve and deal with things.”
Katchen said Pearl’s service will be small and private for safety concerns, but added that there will likely be a more public memorial sometime in the spring or summer.
