In a year of incalculable loss wrought by fire, Pacific Palisades this week has yet another: 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 a poston the newspaper’s website 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 Jan. 7 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 per copy.
The lead story in the first edition, according to the newspaper’s website, was about $1 million being spent to pave a stretch of modern-day Chautauqua Boulevard and to plant trees near Santa Monica Canyon.
Over the years, the newspaper endeared itself to residents by recording the community’s marriages, deaths and births (noting the first baby born each year) — as well as Little League games, Fourth of July parades and the Mr. and Miss Palisades contest.
Smolinisky, a real estate entrepreneur who was born and raised in the Palisades, is a part owner of the L.A. Dodgers. He was 33 when he bought the newspaper and its office building on Via de la Paz.
In January 2013, The Times reported that the deal “included the Post’s money-losing commercial printing business, which he closed,” and that he told staffers he wanted to make the business profitable so he could restore full-time status to 16 employees, including seven in the newsroom, who had endured years of shortened hours and lesser pay.
In his note to readers on Tuesday, Smolinisky said his parents — immigrants from Argentina who moved to the U.S. in 1975 and eventually bought their first home on Seabreeze Drive — read the paper for five decades.
Smolinisky wrote that after he returned to the Palisades after college, “I subscribed immediately.” Later, he and his wife published their wedding announcement in the paper.
“I love the Pali Post because I love the Palisades,” he wrote. “This paper is our town in miniature—committed, conversational and a little bit quirky.”
The newspaper, he wrote, recently got up to 6,200 subscribers, which he considered a feat.
In 2023, the longtime weekly newspaper — whose staff continued to decline — announced that print publication would be reduced to twice a month.
Smolinisky on Tuesday wrote that his house did not burn and that he planned to stay in the Palisades, where “people are coming back, slowly but surely.”
“We’ll welcome a new generation of families to town,” he wrote. “And maybe, in time, we’ll restore this treasured institution. A town like ours needs a newspaper.”
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