DTLA Business Guide is an independent publication. Businesses are listed because they are real and useful to know about, never because they paid. Anything paid for is labelled as paid, every time it appears.
Who publishes this
DTLA Business Guide is owned and published by Joshua Michael Shelton, a photographer and business owner based in Downtown Los Angeles. There is no parent company, no investor and no business improvement district behind it. That independence is the point: coverage is decided by what is useful, not by who pays an assessment or an ad rate.
How a business gets listed
We add businesses ourselves, based on what exists in Downtown Los Angeles and what readers would want to find. Owners can also submit a listing, and anyone can tell us about a business we have missed. A free listing is a free listing: it is not a trial, it does not expire, and it is not downgraded if the owner never buys anything.
How we check facts
Addresses, phone numbers, hours and websites come from the business itself: its own site, its own official social profiles, an owner submission, or a phone call. Every listing shows the date we last checked it, and where the information came from.
The rules we hold ourselves to
- If we cannot confirm it, we leave it out. A missing phone number is better than a wrong one. We do not fill gaps with plausible guesses.
- City registration is a lead, not a fact. Los Angeles publishes a list of registered businesses. A registration means someone filed paperwork, not that a business is open, or open to the public, or at that address. We treat it as a starting point for research and nothing more.
- Accessibility information is published only when verified. An unverified accessibility claim can send someone to a business they cannot get into. If we have not confirmed it, we say so rather than leaving a blank that reads as “fine”.
- Listings go stale, and we say so. After six months a listing is flagged for rechecking. After a year it loses its verified mark until someone checks it again. A badge nobody maintains is a lie by neglect.
- We do not copy other people’s work. No scraped reviews, no copied descriptions, no photographs lifted from Google, Yelp or TripAdvisor.
Reviews and ratings
We do not publish star ratings, and we do not republish anyone else’s. There are no reviews on this site at launch, so there is no rating data in our pages and none in our structured data either. If we add first-party reviews later, we will explain how they are moderated before we turn them on.
Photography
Photographs of a business are real photographs of that business, either taken by us or supplied by the owner. We do not use AI-generated images to stand in for a real place. Where we use generated or stock imagery for atmosphere, it is never presented as a picture of a specific business.
Corrections
Every listing has a “report incorrect information” link, and we would rather hear about a mistake than not. See our corrections policy for how we handle them and how quickly.
Conflicts of interest
Common ownership · Joshua Michael Shelton also owns Headshots LA, a portrait photography business in Downtown Los Angeles. Headshots LA is listed in this directory under exactly the same rules as every other business, it receives no editorial preference, and it is excluded from any “best of” list in its own category. Wherever it is mentioned, this relationship is disclosed on the same page.
We also sell photography services to businesses, some of which are listed here. Buying photography does not buy editorial coverage, a better position, or a “best of” mention. If that ever changes, this page changes first.
What we will never claim
We do not sell search rankings, backlink value, domain authority, or citations in AI assistants, and we will not tell a business that buying a listing delivers any of them. Nobody can deliver those, and saying otherwise would be a lie told to a small business owner.
Related: how we decide what is “best” · advertising policy · corrections