About

Your Community Newspaper

Thank you for choosing the Acorn Newspapers, the leader in local news and feature story coverage for almost 50 years. In print, with five publications reaching 340,000 readers, online with new stories daily about key events in the community, and in social media with more than 100,000 followers on multiple platforms, the Acorn has you covered.

Our mission is to provide fair, in-depth reporting in the nine cities we cover from western Los Angeles to eastern Ventura County. In Acorn country, local voices matter. This is your community newspaper.

 

Meet the Publishers

Steve Strickbine, President and Founder

Steve Strickbine, founder and president of Times Media Group, is a publishing entrepreneur who started his first publication in 1997 in Scottsdale, Arizona. Steve continues to invest in, and believes deeply in the power of local media. “Real, useful and accurate information about the communities we serve will always be important. Providing it to our readers is our commitment and passion, whether it be in a newspaper on the driveway, on the Web, on a smartphone, in a short video or on a stone tablet, we’re committed to being the source readers trust.”

Nadine Johnson, Director of Operations

 

Meet our Editors

A photo of Acorn editor John Loesing

John Loesing

John Loesing is managing editor of the Acorn Newspapers and editor of The Acorn. In his more than 20 years with the company, he has helped oversee growth in coverage from one newspaper to five. Loesing is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a three-time winner in the California Newspapers Publishers Association Awards for feature and editorial writing. He has twice won a SCAN NATOA (States of California and Nevada chapter of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors) Government Broadcast Awards.

Sylvie Belmond

Sylvie Belmond is the editor of the Simi Valley Acorn. She studied business administration and languages in Switzerland and worked in the travel and administrative fields before transitioning to journalism in the late 1990s. Sylvie joined the Acorn Newspapers team in 2004 as a reporter and was promoted to editor in 2017.

 

Becca Whitnall

Becca Whitnall is a former T.O. Acorn reporter and current editor of the Thousand Oaks Acorn. A UC Berkeley alumna, Becca uses her English lit education to write pun-laden and alliterative headlines and her peace and conflict studies education to quell arguments in Facebook comments. With the Acorn, she’s won California Newspaper Publishers Association first-place awards for breaking news, coverage of local government, in-depth reporting and land use reporting.

Scott Steepleton

Scott Steepleton is editor of the Camarillo and Moorpark Acorn newspapers. A Ventura County resident most of his life and a graduate of Ventura College and Cal State Northridge, Scott has been in journalism more than 40 years, serving as reporter and editor along the way. He has received several awards from the California News Publishers Association for breaking news, lifestyle and enterprise reporting and was on the team of Los Angeles Times reporters named Pulitzer Prize finalists in Breaking News Reporting for the paper’s “compelling and resourceful coverage of every aspect of the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 off the California coast, which killed 88 passengers” in January 2000.