The bankrupt and shuttered Santa Barbara News-Press is poised to relaunch as a nonprofit newsroom managed by an Arizona State University group.
Ben Romo and Jason Yardi, who purchased the former newspaper’s website, trademark, copyrights and digital archives last year, announced Wednesday that they donated the assets to NEWSWELL out of ASU.
NEWSWELL, which officially launched Wednesday, took over the Times of San Diego and Stocktonia, and apparently plans to create a news organization almost from scratch for the News-Press.
News-Press owner Wendy McCaw stopped publication and declared bankruptcy in July 2023.
Romo said he and Yardi got into the bankruptcy sale to preserve the newspaper’s archives and head off the digital assets bid by a company from Malta. They won the bid, and then the Santa Barbara Historical Museum purchased the newspaper’s physical archives.
It seemed like “mission accomplished,” Romo said, so they started wondering what to do with the business assets. They didn’t want to sell them, he added, so they researched philanthropic media options and landed at NEWSWELL.
“It seemed like a perfect fit,” Romo said. “The NEWSWELL model is really interesting, and what form it might take in the future is an open question. We sealed our deal with them at the end of last year.”
Romo said they had talked to local residents who “bemoaned the loss of the News-Press” and said the paper “really helped shape our history as a community and define who we are in a lot of ways.”
He said he hopes NEWSWELL “will be very additive to the local media environment.”
“First off, more news is good news. More professional local news coverage is good for the community, and that is what has driven our focus this whole time,” Romo said.
NEWSWELL Plan for the News-Press
The former newspaper website is active again, with a note about a relaunch coming. The social media pages are also live with new posts for the first time in 238 weeks in the case of Instagram.
“The News-Press is now a part of NEWSWELL, a growing network of nonprofit newsrooms. We’re made up of local journalists, guided by community advisory boards and dedicated to one goal: transforming local news to help communities and democracy thrive. We’re ready to craft the next chapter of the News-Press, and we want your help,” the message states.
NEWSWELL will provide finance, technology, human resources and legal services, as well as advertising and audience expertise, while local teams do the journalism work, according to Executive Director Nicole Carroll.
Carroll said the goal is not just to sustain local news, but to transform it and make it financially self-sustaining. For now, donations and a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation are supporting NEWSWELL’s plans.
“For the first three months, we’ll be in the community to listen and find out what is needed here,” Carroll said. “We want more news and more readers able to access that news.”
NEWSWELL chose California news outlets because ASU has a large number of students from California, and they were “looking for places that were really struggling in the local news space,” said Mi-Ai Parrish, managing director of ASU Media Enterprise and board director for NEWSWELL.
The three newsrooms were donated to the program.
“In Santa Barbara, the idea of having a legacy title, one of the oldest mastheads in the state as almost a clean slate — I don’t know that it’s ever happened before,” Parrish said. “People care about the News-Press and want it to be successful, which is what we are looking for.
“We can honor the past, but we don’t have to be stuck with things that don’t make sense anymore, platforms that don’t make sense anymore, business models that don’t make sense anymore.”
It will be a “next-generation news organization,” she said, adding that “we don’t know what that is yet.”
They were in town for a few days this week and plan to come back and hold community meetings.
Carroll said they want to fill gaps and collaborate with the news system that’s already here, including sharing their work.
NEWSWELL and Romo did not reach out to Santa Barbara-area news organizations before this week, when the relaunch was announced.
“We didn’t, and part of it was those media organizations are news organizations, and we wanted to announce this now and in a controlled way,” Romo told Noozhawk.
He said he connected owners and NEWSWELL, sometimes via email, after he sent out a statement and NEWSWELL posted a press release about the relaunch.
“Like most locals, we only learned about this development today,” Noozhawk founder and publisher Bill Macfadyen said. “It’s not clear what Arizona State is hoping to accomplish in Santa Barbara, given that there already are multiple independent local news companies covering our community.
“But it is disappointing that a national journalism organization would not see fit to confer with local news media ahead of time. I really have nothing more to say until more details are disclosed.”
Former News-Press editor and longtime local journalist Jerry Roberts met with Carroll and other NEWSWELL leaders on Tuesday, at their invitation.
As they said in their announcement, they’re doing a listening tour rather than having a specific editorial strategy in mind already, Roberts said. He agreed to join their advisory board.
“They did say they want to be ‘additive,’ they didn’t want to compete or cut into either Noozhawk or the Independent; they’re looking for a way to provide content that’s maybe not present now because there are such small numbers of us,” Roberts said. “I think the more the merrier.”
Roberts added that he had supported Noozhawk’s plan to take over management of the Knight Foundation-funded Mission & State back in 2014 because he thought more long-form journalism would be good for the community.
“We need more enterprise and we need more investigation, so if they could help address those two categories, then more power to them,” he said.
The Santa Barbara South Coast region’s media organizations include Noozhawk, the Santa Barbara Independent, Coastal View News, the Pacific Coast Business Times, the Montecito Journal, KEYT, KSBY, Edhat, radio stations and magazines.
Digital Archives Donated to ASU; Physical Archives in Historical Museum’s Hands
The deal for the digital archives says ASU computer science students will help reconstruct them — from servers, computer hard drives and other physical equipment — and make a copy available to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.
There’s also a clause saying past editions will be available to the Santa Barbara Public Library, Romo said.
The News-Press digital assets sale included a deal to pay former employees for their passwords to access the newspaper’s archives and social media accounts.
The bankruptcy trustee helped facilitate that, Romo said, confirming that they did get “access to everything.”
Carroll said there are three rooms of computers, servers, tapes, floppy discs and other materials with archives on them. They’ll create an ASU team to create an archive and make it accessible to the public, and it will be on the News-Press website.
“We’re super geeks about history and journalism and very, very grateful that Ben and others stepped in to save it and are trusting us to bring it back to life,” Parrish said.
After winning its bid for the physical archive materials last year, the Santa Barbara Historical Museum packed up and removed about 1,000 boxes of materials from the 715 Anacapa St. historic newsroom building.
That included photograph archives, microfiche collection, clippings and bound copies.
Museum director Dacia Harwood said they have already incorporated the “photo morgue” into the Gledhill Library. The research library already hosts decades worth of bound copies of the newspaper.
“It’s an extraordinary amount; in essence, we’ve ingested 500 banker boxes of just photos into the museum’s library,” she said.
The photos are available to researchers, and the museum has been sharing images and insights from the archives on its social media pages.