Palisades suffers another blow: Losing its paper

In a year of incalculable loss wrought by fire, Pacific Palisades this week has yet another:

- BY HAILEY BRANSON-POTTS

Its local newspaper.The Palisadian-Post published its final edition Thursday. The newspaper was 97 years old.

"Our reporters have chased their last stories. Our presses have printed their last copies. Our corner newsstands have opened for the last time," owner Alan Smolinisky wrote in the newspaper Thursday. "After the unimaginable sorrow and destruction of the past year, losing this beloved institution feels like a final blow."

He added: "This time last year, we still had a future. But it burned up in the fire, like most of the town."

Smolinisky, who bought the struggling newspaper in 2012, wrote that shutting down the Pali Post, as it's known, was "the hardest decision I've ever made."

After the Jan. 7 fire, local businesses — either physically destroyed or suffering from a lack of customers — stopped purchasing advertisements in the Pali Post, the owner wrote.

And the fire displaced readers themselves.

"The Palisades became a ghost town in the wake of the fire," Smolinisky wrote. "Subscriptions basically fell to zero. It's completely understandable. But you can't print a newspaper nobody reads.

The fire destroyed more than 2,600 businesses in Pacific Palisades, according to researchers at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. It partially damaged more than 650 more.

Most, researchers said, were small businesses.

The newspaper started publishing in 1928, a few years after modern-day Pacific Palisades was founded by members of the Methodist Episcopal Church who built an enormous campground in Temescal Canyon for annual gatherings called Chautauquas.

The newspaper started as the Palisadian, an eight-page weekly tabloid that sold for 5 cents a copy.