By John Hankins
I have no enjoyment in hearing that the Santa Barbara News-Press has died via mismanagement and finally bankruptcy on July 21; I had only hoped that owner Wendy McCaw would sell it to professionals to carry on its amazing legacy of providing local coverage since 1868 (as the weekly SB Post).
BW (Before Wendy) it had a solid reputation and, indeed, became an excellent source of environmental news, a new topic in the 1960’s.
The determined Dick Smith would disappear for days into the backcountry and suddenly appear with an in-depth feature about the forest that got little attention elsewhere. For his efforts, the Dick Smith Wilderness was named after him.
Then there was Robert Sollen, who was first to report on the 1969 oil spill from Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel, eventually writing the best book about it entitled, An Ocean of Oil: A Century of Political Struggle over Petroleum Off the California Coast. Sollen and his wife Tomika were proud Sierra Club members and for their efforts they were honored by us, the Environmental Defense Center, and Community Environmental Council.
When Sollen retired in 1985, he was invited to create an environmental journalism course in the UCSB Environmental Studies Program.
The News-Press called me up Before Wendy when I was let go from a Goleta daily taken over by the Ventura County Star which wanted its own reporters and editors, but it went defunct. The News-Press was a great place to work, and I focused on environmental issues and was still able to publish the Condor Call.
“Before she (Wendy McCaw) got there and began to destroy it, it was the best place I ever worked, and I’m forever grateful for what I learned and created there,” said Starshine Roshell who went on to write for the Independent. Her comment was perfect: “It’s simply the inevitable period at the end of an artless, run-on sentence.”
I left the News-Press BW to buy what I called the County News Service (and create a companion news clipping service), which covered a dozen newspapers across the Tri-Counties, and still put out the Condor Call!
Brandi Rivera, publisher of the Independent, wrote: “No matter your perspective, the death of the Santa Barbara News-Press is a tragedy — a tragedy for a community that once supported and relied on the printed daily paper as a source of information. It is also a tragedy for democracy, which depends on the free flow of ideas provided by honest news organizations.”
Taking up the slack now is Independent.com, an on-line and social media outlet that creates stories beyond the weekly printed edition. Others include SB Voice, Montecito Journal and two internet news outlets, Noozhawk and Edhat.
The daily Ventura County Star still exists in print and online. Recently, the Ojai Valley News began expanding its coverage to Ventura and Oxnard on its website, offering news beyond Ojai but not in its print edition.
When the “News-Press Mess” happened in 2006 after McCaw’s lapses of journalistic ethics, many employees quit in protest, fostering drawn-out legal problems and it’s likely the millions she owes them will never be seen.
This article is not about that, but about how reporting is essential to inform us all.
All that needs to be said is the Columbia School of Journalism now uses the News-Press Mess on what not to do in the profession.