A newspaper without a town, the Paradise Post keeps printing, then goes looking for its displaced readers

Screenshot from report distributed to TEGNA stations

The town of Paradise, Calif., was destroyed by a huge wildfire this month, but it still has a twice-weekly newspaper: the Paradise Post. "Since the fire, they have been hand-delivering the newspaper to Paradise locals at evacuee shelters, hotels, trailers and wherever their readers may be residing," Andie Judson and Spencer Bruttig report for TEGNA television stations (formerly part of Gannett Co.).

The paper, owned by Digital First Media, has 7,000 subscribers in a town that had about 11,000 households. It gets help from the local DFM daily, the Chico Enterprise-Record. The Post has two staff members, including Editor Rick Silva, a native of surrounding Butte County.

“I know there’s the slogan, a newspaper without a town. Well we have a town! It’s just spread out everywhere,” Silva told Judson and Bruttig. “We just have to find out where they are, right? We still have a town. We still have the residents of Paradise. … They’re just not at their residences right now. So, we find them. . . . They’re not just our customers, they’re our neighbors and they’re our friends. … This has been their newspaper. Our voice is their voice.”

A print edition "is especially relevant now, as internet has been non-existent following the fire and many lost their phones while escaping the flames," Judson and Bruttig report. "The healing has just begun for the people of Paradise. And as the community rises from the ashes, Rick and the Paradise Post will continue to bring them the news."

And more. In a Nov. 13 editorial, titled "There are no words," Silva said "words like devastation, annihilation — even Armageddon as one co-worker described it as, don’t seem to be enough." After giving some examples of the destruction, he wrote, "How do you explain that in a way that both captures what happened accurately and gives people comfort? What are those words? I need to write those words. Does anyone know the dictionary, in which they exist so that I use them?"