The Los Angeles Times Profiles the Great Los Angeles Walk!

Thanks to the Los Angeles Times and writer Deborah Vankin for this wonderful profile of me and the Great Los Angeles Walk, which ran on Friday as part of the newspaper's week-long series of articles about walking in L.A.

I spent time with Deborah a few weeks ago to talk about the Walk, why I started it and continue to do it -- for love of community, of course. And this year in particular, after the terrible week many of us just experienced, I think it will be more important than ever (and perhaps healing and therapeutic) for us to all get together on November 23.

I loved Deborah's flourishes in the story, and my family and friends are also getting a kick over some of the descriptions. But she accurately captured my passions about, yes, walking in L.A., but also the city itself, my love of course of TV and other things.

In ’99, he landed a job as a reporter at Variety and met his wife, Maria. He wasn’t much of an exerciser, but she liked to walk. Their early dates were spent exploring the city on foot, including taking Los Angeles Conservancy walking tours downtown and hiking in Griffith Park. Schneider fell in love with L.A. history and found that walking its concrete stretches helped him feel more rooted in the city.

“When I first came to L.A., I was like: Where is the core?” he says. “I didn’t understand why people didn’t know where to congregate. Now I get it. It’s all these different cores.”

Schneider also has collected handfuls of odd, serendipitous moments from the Great Walk. The event has passed weddings in progress, film crews shooting, even buildings on fire. Once, in 2009, the group streamed past the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Washington Boulevard and Magic Johnson appeared in the window to cheer them on. Two years earlier, on Pico Boulevard, a crane holding a billboard toppled over and chaos ensued.

“Traffic stopped, police were everywhere, no one could get through,” Schneider recalls. “But here we were, just walking on by.”

Schneider doesn’t make any money off of the Great Walk; it’s free to participants and he doesn’t pay to advertise the event. In recent years, there have been sponsors, including The Times, who might give him free ads, say, or pass out water in exchange for a mention on the blog.

“But there’s no business model,” Schneider says. “We’re not an official organization. This is just a grassroots group of people getting together to walk.”

Nineteen years of crisscrossing L.A. on foot has given Schneider a rare, bird’s-eye-view of the city, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective.

Thanks to the Los Angeles Times, we'll be passing out copies of their "Walk On, LA!" special section at the start of this year's event!

Read more here.