Jim Rainey, Class of 1981
Jim Rainey, ’81, has covered multiple presidential elections, the war in Iraq, the foster care system, the environment and the state of California, in all its misery and splendor. He worked on Los Angeles Times teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of wildfires, the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1997 North Hollywood bank shootout. Jim wrote the twice-weekly column, “On the Media,” and in 2025 became the lead author of the Essential California newsletter, the Times’s single largest vehicle for reaching readers.
Over more than four decades in the media, he has ridden horseback into the Sierra Nevada’s with a wildlife biologist, swam a part of the Catalina Channel with a marathon swimmer and communed with nudists in a secretive oasis in the shadow of Death Valley. He investigated inhumane conditions in L.A. County foster care and in the state’s youth prison system, sparking reforms in both. Jim broke the news about the health dangers of swimming in Santa Monica Bay and wrote the first fulsome account of that somewhat ghastly Southern California phenomenon, the “mini-mall.”
At the Times and in previous stints at Variety and NBC News Jim strives to find lightness and hope, even when times look dark.