Meet Victoria Schneps, President of Schneps Media

Sitting on her living room sofa, Victoria Schneps, with her compassionate friends who had healthy children, met and decided to create an organization to help children at Willowbrook State School.

That organization became the “Women’s Organization for Retarded Children,” and was born out of wish to help Victoria’s daughter Lara, who had been brain-damaged at birth, and was now residing at the Willowbrook State School’s Infant Rehabilitation Center. Fast forward 14 years, on that same sofa, with partner newsman John Toscano, the Queens Courier was born.

WORC, now Life’s WORC, has grown into an $80 million agency, and the Queens Courier has grown into one of the 100 media outlets now called Schneps Media. Her favorite expression is “Life is a great adventure,” and she surely is living it!

After Lara had spent only a year at Willowbrook, the state-run facility in Staten Island suffered budget cutbacks, eliminating many direct-care service workers, endangering the lives of many like Lara, who were totally dependent on staff to be fed, to be diapered, needing total care. Victoria Schneps and her members picketed and marched against the cutbacks affecting 5,400 individuals who lived there.

“We were picketing and marching against Gov. (Nelson) Rockefeller’s budget cuts,” Victoria Schneps remembers, “but we were knocking on air. No one was listening until Geraldo was snuck into the facility by a doctor, and his reporting instantly raised awareness and I saw the power of the press!”

Geraldo Rivera, a cub reporter with ABC’s Eyewitness News, was snuck into the back wards of Willowbrook. His coverage was both compassionate and compelling, and his expose of the abuses of people at Willowbrook put the spotlight on the problems there.

Victoria and her husband, Murray, with the parents’ association, filed a federal class-action lawsuit.

“We untimately won the case,” she says. “Willowbrook was closed, and a network of group homes were created for the residents. The site is now the College of Staten Island!”

“We have helped hundreds of thousands of people because of that lawsuit,” she says “Through Geraldo, I saw the power of the press to make a difference,” Victoria Schneps says, “And hoped one day to be in the news business myself.”

Today, Life’s WORC, with a Garden City headquarters recently named in her honor, provides services and support for people with autism and developmental disabilities, including providing nearly 50 group homes, day programs, family guidance and a soon-to-be-opened training center called WORC Force.

That step-by-step, determined attitude is how this teacher with no business or journalistic background was able to become a titan of community journalism.

“When we launched the Queens Courier in 1985, all the apartment buildings in New York City went co-op,” explains Victoria Schneps, a mother of four and grandmother of 16, of her target audience. “When you own your home or apartment, you care about what is going on in your neighborhood. As a community activist, I wanted to serve the community with news about them. John and I wrote every article and took every photo, and his son distributed the newspaper. We never took a salary for almost two years, and I ultimately bought him out and hired a newsman to be my editor.”

While she has a host of great stories from those early days, one stands out.

“I knew a Whitestone NYPD detective who called saying a bank had just been robbed and he had a picture of the suspect and would we want to publish it,” Victoria Schneps says.

“We did, and one of our readers recognized the suspect, allowing us to report the following week that one of our readers helped nab a bank robber,” she says.

She grew her newspapers one at a time, mainly with people coming to her, asking her to create a newspaper in their community. When she saw the census numbers 20 years ago that showed the growth of the Hispanic communities in New York City, she created a Spanish-language newspaper. And, when her investment-banking son, Josh Schneps, joined the company, they started to acquire newspapers across the city, the state, Philadelphia and Southern Florida. Today, their media company, with print, digital, events and broadcasting, including podcasts, webinars and streaming television shows, is flourishing.

She is very proud that Schneps Media was chosen the Number One media company in New York State by their peers at the New York State Press Association. With a smile on her face, she says, “Now we have to go for a Pulitzer!

“Community journalism makes the community stronger. Our motto is that our news is ‘All about you.’ That is true in every one of our media outlets. We give the news without political bias, and people find us a trusted source of news. We’ve never been accused of fake news,” Victoria Schneps says proudly.

When someone says that print is dead, she quotes Mark Twain, “The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.’ And we are publishing 600,000 newspapers a week.”

“Our multi-platform media company allow us to stay relevant and profitable,” Victoria Schneps explains. Schneps Media’s mission is simple: To serve its readers.

Hosting more than 50 events a year, the Events Division is overseen by her daughter, Elizabeth Aloni, who is senior vice president. This summer Aloni is running multiple Dan’s Taste events, with the Taste of the Two Forks on July 6 at the Southampton Arts Center. Go to DansTaste.com to see other events this summer.

Ever an innovator, Victoria Schneps launched the Power Women Awards, now in its 30th year, and added the Power List, Caribbean Impact Awards, Hispanic Impact Awards, Out East End Impact Awards, Health Heroes and Salute to Labor in every region where they have newspapers and digital products. They recently launched the Palm Beach Power List, where they publish Dan’s Papers Palm Beach weekly on-line and six months a year in print. Their most recent acquisitions are the Fire Island and Great South Bay News Media and the Anton Media Group that covers the Gold Coast of Long Island.

“My son and I are like-minded in our passion to serve the communities with our media,” she says of Josh, who is the CEO. “I have great people around me in every division and I believe we’re successful because each media outlet has its own staff devoted to covering each community.

“I don’t just do the work, I have a passion for it,” Victoria Schneps says of getting up every day and thinking of new ways to serve her readers. “Our reputation speaks for itself. People know they can trust us.”

Todd Shapiro is an award-winning publicist and associate publisher of Dan’s Papers.