Not everyone building a media brand in Downtown Los Angeles is working in the arts or food space. Sienna Sinclaire has carved out a niche as the publisher, host and chief evangelist of Naughty Los Angeles, a platform covering the city’s adult entertainment industry, nightlife and sexuality-positive culture. Her base of operations is DTLA, and she has become a fixture of the downtown independent media scene in a way that most publishers twice her size have not managed.
Sinclaire is, by her own account, an accidental entrepreneur. She began writing about Los Angeles nightlife and entertainment as a personal project and found an audience she had not anticipated. That audience has grown steadily into a readership that spans the curious mainstream as well as the communities she covers directly. Her Naughty Los Angeles events — mixers, screenings and industry panels — take place across Downtown and have developed a loyal following among industry professionals and civilians alike.
“Downtown is the right place for this,” she told Downtown Weekly LA. “It’s genuinely open. You can be weird here. You can do things that would be impossible in other parts of the city without anyone batting an eye. That freedom matters.”
The Naughty DTLA empire — such as it is — runs on the kind of hustle that characterises much of the independent media scene in the neighbourhood. Events are self-produced, distribution is largely digital, and the editorial voice is unambiguously Sinclaire’s own. In a media landscape dominated by consolidation, that independence is, in its own way, a Downtown value.