By: Seth Porges Several weekly newspapers in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties have been forced to evacuate their offices due to the wildfires that have ravaged much of Southern California this week. Despite the evacuations, the papers have still managed to publish on-schedule.
"The Lake Arrowhead
Mountain News and
Big Bear Grizzly [of Big Bear Lake] papers are both under mandatory evacuation," said Doug Fetzer, publisher for Hi-Desert Publishing, a division of the papers' parent company Brehm Communications in Yucca Valley, Calif. "They brought some computers with them and we hooked up and brought them on the server."
Much of the evacuated newspaper staff were placed in motels or trailers and are connecting the server via the Internet, according to Fetzer.
Although production is on-schedule, road closures have caused circulation problems, Fetzer said. "Everything's on schedule. We've printed the papers. Now when it comes to distributing them, we've taken the outgoing mail to the post office. We're holding off on the local delivery till we can get into town. They plan on taking the papers to all the evacuation shelters and distributing them there."
Fetzer said the evacuated employees are aggressively covering the deadly wildfires, even though none have received special training on covering fires -- to Fetzer's knowledge.
The
Idyllwild Town Crier, which was not forced to evacuate, experienced a fire-related power outage that delayed production of the current issue by 24 hours, Fetzer added.
He wasn't aware of any other papers in the region that had to evacuate, and is not sure when the staffs will be able to return to their headquarters.
"Within San Bernardino and Riverside County those are the only ones [forced to evacuate] that I know of," Fetzer said. "We're still waiting to get news [about when they can return]. The last I heard, the flames kinda went around Lake Arrowhead. They're not sure yet about Big Bear."
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