SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Last year's wildfires in Los Angeles devastated the Pacific Palisades. Houses burnt. Beloved businesses shuttered, including the near-century-old local paper, the Palisadian-Post. But now the paper's coming back on its 98th anniversary. The Pali-Post, as it's nicknamed, will relaunch on Monday, May 4. And joining us are the paper's new owners, Tim and Laura Schneider. Thank you both so much for being with us.
LAURA SCHNEIDER: Thank you so much.
TIM SCHNEIDER: Thank you, Scott. It's an honor to be with you.
SIMON: A lot of people are trying to get out of the newspaper business. What led you back into it now?
T SCHNEIDER: Well, we're longtime residents of Pacific Palisades. And when news broke in December that our town paper would be shuttered, it was sort of the last blow that we could stand. So Laura and I reached out immediately to the previous owner. Both of us happened to have backgrounds in the publishing industry, and we had a love of the paper. In fact, Laura, wouldn't you say that the Palisadian-Post was really one of the reasons we moved to Pacific Palisades?
L SCHNEIDER: Oh, absolutely. There are a lot of reasons to love the Palisades. It's beautiful. Its community is close-knit. But one of the reasons that we fell in love with the Palisades was because it had this treasure of a small-town newspaper that focused on local people and local stories.
T SCHNEIDER: And certainly, after the fire, we felt like there was never a more urgent need to have an authoritative, fact-checked source of information for the community. So we really felt it was part of the civic infrastructure of Pacific Palisades that needed to be rebuilt.
SIMON: There must be a lot of important things going on now, with people trying to rebuild and moving back and sometimes moving out and all kinds of personal stories.
T SCHNEIDER: The reality is that a lot of people are still waiting on their final insurance settlements, and that means that they don't know yet whether they'll be able to rebuild. They don't know whether they'll be able to move back. The fire forced Palisadians into a lot of different places. According to our subscriber data, we have people from Pacific Palisades living in 33 states across the country, scattered along the California coast. And we see the Palisadian-Post as a way to reconnect Palisadians and let them know what's going on in their hometown.
SIMON: I understand your son was once profiled in the Palisadian-Post.
L SCHNEIDER: Yes. Indeed, he was. Palisadians mark the milestones of their lives, of their children's lives, in the pages of the Palisadian-Post. Our son had a lemonade stand on the Fourth of July, and he raised money to support the local library. And that was the kind of story that the Palisadian-Post covered, in addition to covering the important news that must be covered. The small stories matter, too, and they're going to be a big part of why I think people return home. They're the stories of our lives.
SIMON: How are you going to make money in the newspaper business these days?
T SCHNEIDER: We've decided to go with this digital-first approach. And instead of selling advertising, we are talking to the leadership of the local community about partnerships. Seeing as how we plan to reach more than 20,000 Palisadians, regardless of where they may be living temporarily, we see that as a great opportunity for local businesses and other institutions to reach those Palisadians in a way that they haven't been able to since the fire.
SIMON: What should we look forward to in the edition coming up?
T SCHNEIDER: The first thing we're going to do is catch the community up because we have been away for a while. As part of our acquisition of the Palisadian-Post, we've become the conservators of the town's archives. None of the archives of this newspaper were harmed in the fire. And so now a vital part of our mission is to make those archives available to Palisadians, and we're working on digitizing. One of the regular features will be photographs that we're finding in the archives that aren't necessarily marked, where we'll be asking our readers for help in identifying the people that we're showing on our new website.
L SCHNEIDER: And we have some really lovely local voices who will be writing for the Palisadian-Post, talking about what it's been like these past - what? - almost 18 months now. You know, the struggles and the challenges and, you know, the successes. I think that's going to be a real source of pleasure and joy for people, hearing those stories, because that's how we connect. That's part of being human. So I think that's something that I, in particular, am looking forward to.
SIMON: Tim and Laura Schneider. They put out the Palisadian-Post - back this week. Thank you so much for being with us. Good luck.
L SCHNEIDER: Our pleasure.
T SCHNEIDER: Thank you very much, Scott.
L SCHNEIDER: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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