Fired from the community newspaper Paul and Sasha start a revenge podcast with all the town's dirty details not fit to print.

In real life we are Bari Alyse and Adam Brauer. Bari is a comedy writer and standup comic, and we are both former 1990s daytime talk show producers back when anything and everything was fair game in daytime talk. Our podcast is called Community News with Paul and Sasha. We play semi-fictional characters discussing real life issues and current events. Paul and Sasha were fired from the community newspaper for some salacious behavior. They started a community news podcast as revenge so they could talk about the town in a way that's not fit to print. Coincidently, our fictional firing had a recent real life parallel when an ESPN reporter was fired for saying the same thing. We talk about that on episode 270 - Hide The Kids.
 

Bari and I shared an office and a love for the most outrageous guests. We quickly became lifelong friends.  Twenty years later, we both became stay at home parents living in suburbia.  A random lunch found us riffing on the absurdities of our small town life. As we talked, people around us started laughing. Our real life stories were just as interesting and outrageous as the stories we used to produce on day time and late night talk shows. That's when our podcast was born.  We noticed that the stories we traded were universal and made the folks around us laugh. We didn't know the people seated by us so we were unfiltered and said what we really thought. To turn that unfiltered comedic energy into a podcast, we decided to create the fictional town of Townport (loosely based on affluent Westport, CT in tony Fairfield County, CT) and fill it with but a bunch of headliner comedian friends to play townsfolk and bring flavor and life to to our fictional town of Townport. Townport could be anywhere, any town in the USA. We realized that everyone has a crazy town government, or a teacher in trouble, or a restaurant closing, a restaurant opening, loud parents, overzealous sports and theater parents, a storefront that no one knows quite what they do, or even a hotel with questionable clientele.  We bring both the real and semi-real to the podcast. We give people a chance to laugh at the oddities of small town life and to really laugh with us - the 2 semi real, semi fictional, small town community news podcast hosts we play on the show. 

We have global listeners. Our top 5 countries are the US, Netherlands, Singapore, Germany, and Thailand.
 

We have over 277 episodes and release a new episode every Tuesday. When we started we were both stay at home parents and we worked around our family schedules.  Parenting gave us a lot of material to talk about. We had kids at all stages from elementary school to college and we had all the parenting chaos that stories to go with it.

The podcast is self produced and self funded. We love the creative outlet and no matter what other projects we take on, we are both committed to recording Community News with Paul and Sasha.
 

We gain a lot of badges! Most popular, global reach, over 250 episodes, etc. There’s no monetary gain yet but we're making a game plan to start generating revenue. We've recorded the show with a live audience and are working on taking Paul and Sasha on the road to comedy clubs and comedy festivals. We get countless emails at communitynewspodcast@gmail.com and visitors to our CNPODCAST.COM webpage from all over the world telling us how much they laughed and how something we spoke about just happened to them and how much they related to something we talked about. We have no idea how we gained listeners in Belgium and Japan and even Mozambique but somehow our topics and comedy is connecting with people and that makes us both really happy. We love our listeners and are so thankful they let us entertain them. We have charted as a top 100 podcast and top 100 comedy podcast in countries all over the world. We're really proud that we've created a way for Paul and Sasha to share their small town stories, no matter how outrageous or silly, that is universal and enjoyed worldwide.

Some of our reviews have suggested that it would make a great TV show or streaming series, and we would love that too and can see each episode as the basis of a new TV episode. 

Even though we've been doing the podcast for years we just recently decided to expand and take on new opportunities as Paul and Sasha. Hitting the top 1% of all comedy podcasts really opened our eyes to the benefits of podcasting and we can't wait to see what the future brings for Paul and Sasha.
 

We take our topics from current events but we are unscripted and rely on our improved skills, or as Paul and Saha say we deliver "yesterday's headlines today." At the beginning we were fortunate to know someone who had a world class recording studio in NYC where we recorded our show. Unfortunately that studio closed so we moved to a home studio. Since the pandemic and a couple of moves we now use Skype. It's amazing that with all the modern technology we don't need to be in the same room to record the show and our guests are often skyping in from NYC or L.A. or anywhere and it comes out just as cohesive as when we were recording from the same place. I use a garage band for editing which I learned while doing the show.
 

It all started by word of mouth. When we did stand up comedy or public appearances we would mention Community News with Paul and Shasha and we posted on Facebook. It's amazing how many listeners our personal Facebook pages brought in. We maxed out on our number of Facebook friends so we recently started a Facebook fan page facebook.com/communitynewspodcast. When we book comedian friends on the show they share Community News with Paul and Shasha on their own social media sites. We have a website cnpodcast.com with fun items for sale and we run occasional giveaways for free merchandise. We also have an episode archive at cnpodcast.com with a link to every episode.
 

Don’t give up. If you’re passionate about it, keep doing it. You never know what is going to really strike a cord with your listeners or when the right person is going to listen and help you get to the next level. We started this podcast for our own enjoyment and creative outlet not knowing if anyone would listen and ended up in the top 1% of all comedy podcasts.
 

Website: cnpodcast.com
Merchandise: CommunityNews.redbubble.com
Email: communitynewspodcast@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/communitynewspodcast
Paypal Donate: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/communitynews