LOS ANGELES — To an outsider, a food cart in Boyle Heights might look like just another place to buy a churro or some corn on the cob. But for Jonathan Thunderbird-Olivares, street vendors are the center of a conflict between a community and its poorest members, one that touches on issues of land use, immigration and economic policy. And the best place to read about that conflict is The Boyle Heights Beat.

The Beat (Pulso de Boyle Heights, in Spanish) is a bilingual newspaper written largely by teenagers from the Boyle Heights neighborhood on the east side of Los Angeles. In the coming years, the residents of Boyle Heights may be in greater need than ever of a publication that tells their stories.

The paper was founded in 2011 by Michelle Levander, the director of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, and Pedro Rojas, former executive editor of the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión, as a means of teaching young people about reporting. With financial support from the California Endowment and from private nonprofit sources, the website and the free quarterly print edition with a circulation of 33,000 is the only publication focused exclusively on Boyle Heights.