At 6:45 a.m., Alan Smolinisky pads out to his driveway in a hillside cul-de-sac just west of the Getty Villa.
He wears black-and-white-checked flannel pajama bottoms and a pristinely white T-shirt that glows like a beacon in the muted light. In one arm, he carries 15-month-old Charlie, named for billionaire investor Charles Munger.
Bending carefully toward the concrete apron, Smolinisky lets Charlie scoop up three newspapers stuffed in plastic bags.
As Charlie sucks on a bottle in the kitchen, Smolinisky unwraps the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, separating sections into carefully considered piles — news, features, markets coverage. By day's end, he will have spent five hours reading them cover to cover.
Smolinisky, 33, is a newspaper junkie. He abides by Munger's philosophy that high achievers in the financial world tend to be voracious readers.
"I love knowing everything going on everywhere in the world," said Smolinisky, a real estate entrepreneur who keeps a peacock blue Bentley and a red Ferrari in his garage. Late last year, he satisfied a decade-long dream, paying seven figures for the Palisadian-Post. The weekly has chronicled life in Pacific Palisades since 1928 and has been losing money. Smolinisky aims to turn it around.
"Pacific Palisades is my favorite place on Earth, and the Palisadian-Post is my favorite newspaper," he said. "I have a moral obligation to make sure this newspaper arrives every Thursday for as long as I live."
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At a time when his peers have mostly traded paper for pixels, Smolinisky doesn't own an iPad or a Kindle. He's not much for social media and says he has never used Facebook or Twitter. So it seemed fitting that he chose to buy this decidedly low-tech, old-school paper.
The broadsheet has endeared itself to residents by recording quotidian happenings — births, marriages and deaths, with a panoply of soccer games, high school graduations and Fourth of July parades in between. The paper covers each year's first Palisadian baby, the Mr. and Miss Palisades contest, young residents' accomplishments and 50th wedding anniversaries.
Bill Bruns, managing editor since 1993, likes to joke that, if a resident of Brentwood won a Nobel Prize, the paper would not cover the story. But if the person lived in the Palisades the news would land on the front page.
When Smolinisky and his friends were tykes, the Pali-Post ran photos of their T-ball and soccer games. When he was a teen, it carried stories about A&A Productions, a company he co-founded that put on dances in the Palisades.
"All the other papers are so serious and scary," he said. "The Palisadian-Post was never like that. It always had this hyper-local, fun attitude of 'we are the luckiest people on Earth to live in such an amazing, crime-free community.' "
What other publication, he mused, would write about where the Department of Water and Power would put its new electrical substation? Or about the colorful gingerbread-themed house on Sunset Boulevard? Or the house across the street from the gingerbread-themed house, the one where the Iranian immigrant erected dozens of Iranian and U.S. flags and a banner reading "Long Live Iran and United States Peace."
Page 2 each week features "Your Two Cents Worth," a column of brief, unsigned questions and opinions from readers. After hearing from readers and editors how popular the sound-off column was, Smolinisky allotted more space.
Donna Vaccarino, an architect, heard Smolinisky speak at a community meeting and was impressed by his pride in owning the paper. "We all want to help him make it a success," she said.
Smolinisky bought the publication and its office building on Via de la Paz. The deal included the Post's money-losing commercial printing business, which he shuttered. He has told the staff he wants to make the paper profitable so that he can restore full-time status to 16 employees, including seven in the newsroom, who have endured years of shortened hours and pay. (An eighth newsroom employee, the copy editor, volunteers her time.)
Smolinisky has learned some quick lessons in newspaper economics. An equipment broker inspected the 37-foot-long Goss printing press in the concrete-lined back shop. It was valued 30 years ago at nearly $400,000. The broker named a price: $15,000.
The fledgling newspaper man was elated at first, having feared that the bulky machine had no value. Then the realization dawned. That was the price he'd have to pay somebody to haul the press away. For now, it remains in place.
Smolinisky finds he doesn't get much done when he's in the newsroom. "I sort of worship the writers and just like to watch them and listen to what they are up to," he said.
