For some in Santa Barbara, the News-Press bankruptcy marks a sad but merciful death after the newspaper's slow-motion implosion under owner Wendy McCaw.
This city of red-tile roofs, temperate breezes and coastal charm has long glimmered as one of those exceptional California places.
The downward spiral reached rock bottom July 21, when Ampersand Publishing, the McCaw-led company that owns the News-Press,The finishing stroke came without fanfare or public notice. “All of our jobs are eliminated, and the News-Press has stopped publishing,” Managing Editor Dave Mason wrote in a brief email to the outlet’s staffers. “They ran out of money to pay us.”
Joining in the regrets about the newspaper’s fate was a nominal rival, Nick Welsh, the irascible dean of the Santa Barbara press corps who has written for the alternative weekly, the Independent, for four decades.
That’s not to say the closure shocked Santa Barbara. Locals had watched the paper go from a publication with a daily print circulation of more than 45,000 and a robust website to an online-only enterprise with paltry local coverage and national stories provided by a right-tilting news service. A news staff of close to 50 withered to fewer than 10 and became reliant on student interns to cover many public meetings.
The News-Press’ bid for journalistic excellence was reinforced in 2002, when Jerry Roberts, a former managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, took the post of executive editor. But the good times did not last. The meltdown drew national attention, most of it accusing McCaw of violating the journalistic credo that insists on a “wall” between media owners and news-gatherers.
The Byzantine legal fights dragged on. In one round, a federal appellate court ruled that the News-Press had engaged in “unusually aggravated conduct” against its employees. That conduct included bargaining in bad faith, discontinuing merit raises and unilaterally transferring work away from union employees to nonunion workers.
“She can have a conservative slant on the opinion page. That’s her right,” said Stephen Millard, a retired outdoor-festival impresario. “But she shouldn’t be controlling the stories in the news section of the newspaper. And previously the News-Press had supported the community and all sorts of events. That all seemed to slip away.”
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