Santa Barbara’s daily, one of California’s oldest, stops publishing after owner declares bankruptcy
SAN FRANCISCO — The Pulitzer Prize-winning Santa Barbara News-Press, one of California’s oldest newspapers, has ceased publishing after its owner declared the 150-year-old publication bankrupt.
The newspaper became an online-only publication in April. But its last digital edition was posted Friday when owner Wendy McCaw filed for bankruptcy.
Managing editor Dave Mason broke the news to staff in an email Friday, according to NoozHawk, a digital publication whose executive editor, Tom Bolton, used to lead the News-Press.
“They ran out of money to pay us. They will issue final paychecks when the bankruptcy is approved in court,” Mason wrote to staff.
On Monday, the News-Press’ website was still online, with the most recent stories published Friday. There was no mention that it would cease publishing or that it has declared bankruptcy.
A voicemail message left Monday by The Associated Press in the newsroom’s phone number was not immediately returned.
The Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing by Ampersand Publishing, the parent company of the Santa Barbara News-Press, said it has assets of less than $50,000 and debts and estimated liabilities of between $1 million and $10 million, according to federal court records. A meeting of creditors, which number between 200 and 999, is scheduled for Sept. 7.
Anthony Friedman, the lawyer listed for Ampersand Publishing in the bankruptcy filing, did not immediately return a phone call or email seeking comment. McCaw could not be reached.
At its height, the newspaper founded in 1855, had a daily circulation of 45,000 and was published seven days a week, serving Santa Barbara, an upscale city of 90,000 people. Editorial writer Thomas M. Storke won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for a series of editorials about the John Birch Society.
McCaw, then a billionaire local philanthropist active on environmental and animal rights issues, bought the daily from The New York Times Co. in October 2000 and a few months later appointed herself and her fiancé, Arthur von Weisenberger, as acting co-publishers.
Six years later, Santa Barbara News-Press Editor Jerry Roberts quit the newspaper along with four other top editors and a columnist to protest moves by McCaw that they said undermined the paper’s credibility. The editors who quit cited the publishers’ meddling in stories, which they said compromised the paper’s ethics. In one example, the editors alleged McCaw was against publishing a story about one editor’s drunken driving arrest and later intervened to stop a second story.
The editors who quit were also upset that McCaw had appointed the paper’s editorial page editor as the acting publisher.
The paper’s closure “is not a big surprise,” Roberts said Monday. “The paper’s been on a downhill slide for a while.”
“But the fact that the community has lost its only paper is unspeakably sad,” he added.
