William M. Macfadyen, founder, publisher and partner
Bill Macfadyen is the founder and publisher of Noozhawk, Santa Barbara’s freshest news and information source — and its only 24/7 professional news site. Commanding a staff of seven full-time professional journalists, four full-time sales representatives and an army of community contributors, he’s on a quest to figure out how to make online local news viable and sustainable.
He was the co-founder and editor and publisher of the South Coast Beacon, a weekly community newspaper that made its debut in 2002, won the California Newspaper Publishers Association General Excellence Award the following year and went bust in 2005. Not having the sense to get a real job, he turned his attention to the Internet, where the overhead is lower and the optimism knows no boundaries.
Bill moonlights as president of the Santa Barbara Club; a board member of the UCSB Economic Forecast Project, the Westmont College Foundation, the Montecito Association and Santa Barbara Partners in Education; and is a former board chairman of the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce and twice served as board chairman of the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce. He’s also a member of the Santa Barbara Council on Alcoholism & Drug Abuse’s Fighting Back Steering Committee.
He has served as senior warden at All Saints By-the-Sea Episcopal Church, where he completed two separate terms as a Vestry member, and is a past board member of All Saints Parish School. He’s also a past member of the statewide organizing committee of Common Sense California, which is now part of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement & Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.
In 2008, Bill was named Entrepreneur of the Year by both the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Santa Barbara Technology & Industry Association. In 2012, he received the national Journalism Education Association’s Friend of Scholastic Journalism Award in recognition of Noozhawk’s work with The Charger Account, the student news website at Dos Pueblos High School. He and Noozhawk are founding members of the Local Independent Online News Publishers Association (LION).
He was a California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow (Class of 2011) at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, and was the architect of Prescription for Abuse, a six-month Noozhawk team project exploring the misuse and abuse of prescription medications in Santa Barbara County.
Bill and his wife, Missy, live in Montecito with their latest Alaskan malamute, Sadie. They have three grown children, all of whom have worked for Noozhawk.
Reach Bill at wmacfadyen@noozhawk.com and follow him on Instagram: @bill.macfadyen
Tom Bolton, editor in chief and partner
Award-winning journalist Tom Bolton joined Noozhawk as executive editor in 2012 after more than 20 years of guiding newsroom operations for newspapers at each end of Santa Barbara County. He was named editor in chief in 2024.
From 2003 to early 2012, he served as vice president of news for Lee Central Coast Newspapers, leading the Santa Maria Times and supervising the Lompoc Record, the Santa Ynez Valley News and other local Lee publications.
He previously served as publisher and editor of the weekly South Coast Beacon, which he helped establish, and as executive editor and managing editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, where he spent much of his career prior to its sale by The New York Times. He also has worked for The Tribune in San Luis Obispo County and as a private consultant.
Tom has a reputation throughout the region as a tough but fair editor, whose staffs consistently generate top-notch news coverage — in print and online. He has guided scores of investigative and in-depth projects on topics as varied as homelessness, wildfires, affordable housing, youth violence, earthquake risks, and the future of agriculture. Many of these projects have won awards at the state and national level.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Santa Barbara, where he was editor in chief of The Daily Nexus student newspaper. He is a past board member of the California Society of Newspaper Editors, and also has been affiliated with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the California Chicano News Media Association and other national media organizations.
Tom and his wife, Joan, live in Goleta, and have two grown children.
Reach Tom at tbolton@noozhawk.com, follow him on Twitter: @tombol or call him at 805.456.7267
Kim Clark, vice president of business development and partner
Kim Clark is a proven sales and marketing leader with the ability to cultivate and build strong business relationships. She possesses more than 35 years of sales and marketing experience in the Santa Barbara community, and received her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from UC Santa Barbara.
Before joining Noozhawk in 2012, she was division director for Office Team, a subsidiary of Robert Half International, and led her staff to be the top-producing team in the region. She previously was sales and marketing director at the Santa Barbara Region Chamber of Commerce, and spent 14 years at the Santa Barbara News-Press, developing the company’s New Media Department in the 1990s and serving as online sales manager before leaving in the mid-2000s.
Kim previously served as Santa Barbara Chapter board president of the National Association of Women Business Owners, the Multimedia Arts & Design Academy at Santa Barbara High School, and is a past board member of Downtown Santa Barbara, and the Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers.
She and her husband, Woodie, a retired United States Navy captain and a pilot for FedEx, live in Santa Barbara. Their twin daughters, Brooke and Sierra, attend Jacksonville University NROTC in Florida.
Reach Kim at kim.clark@noozhawk.com or call her at 805.456.7198
Giana Magnoli, executive editor
Giana Magnoli has been covering Santa Barbara County news since 2009. She joined Noozhawk as a reporter and was promoted to news editor and then managing editor, a position she had held since 2015. She was promoted to executive editor in 2024.
She guides everyday newsroom coverage as well as investigations, special projects, and breaking news reporting. She also runs Noozhawk’s internship program and freelance reporting partnerships with student journalists at UC Santa Barbara.
Giana graduated from the Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo journalism program and now serves on the department’s advisory board. She worked as a reporter and editor in student media during her time at Cal Poly, including a year as managing editor of the Mustang Daily newspaper and website.
During her career at Noozhawk, she has been a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism fellow; member of the Solutions Journalism Network; and reporter and editor for Noozhawk health data reporting projects through the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
Reach Giana at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com.
Janene Scully, North County editor
Janene Scully joined the Noozhawk team in 2014 after working for the Santa Maria Times and its affiliated newspapers in northern Santa Barbara County for 23 years. Most recently she served as associate editor of the Times and managing editor of the Lompoc Record and Santa Ynez Valley News. An award-winning journalist, she grew up in San Luis Obispo County and earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Fresno State University.
Reach Janene at jscully@noozhawk.com and follow her on Twitter: @JaneneScully
Joshua Molina, South County editor
Joshua Molina is an award-winning journalist who joined Noozhawk as a reporter in 2014. In 2024, he was promoted to South County editor. He previously covered City Hall for the San Jose Mercury News. Since 2009, he has also taught journalism at Santa Barbara City College. Molina grew up in Goleta, where he lives with his wife, Dina Richardson. They have two children, Jacob and Megan.
Reach Joshua at jmolina@noozhawk.com and follow him on Twitter: @JECMolina
Diego Sandoval, sports editor
Diego Sandoval joined the Noozhawk team in 2023 after graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. During his time at Cal Poly, he spent two years as a sports reporter for Mustang News, the school’s student-run newspaper, and two years as the sports editor. In the summers of 2021 and 2022, he freelanced for the sports section of Noozhawk. Diego is a fifth-generation Santa Barbara native, graduating from San Marcos High School in 2019.
Reach Diego at dsandoval@noozhawk.com
Barry Punzal, sports contributor
Barry Punzal brings more than 30 years of experience in local sports journalism to Noozhawk, and served as sports editor for nearly eight years before retiring in 2023.
Before joining Noozhawk in 2016, he worked for five years at Presidio Sports, an online-only sports site that ceased publication at the end of 2015. While there, he covered the athletic teams at the area’s eight high schools and three colleges, as well as the Santa Barbara Athletic Round Table and the Semana Nautica summer sports festival.
Barry previously worked at the Santa Barbara News-Press, where he had several duties. He started as a copy editor and page designer in 1984, and later became the college soccer writer, covering the rise of UCSB men’s soccer. Barry held the position of assistant sports editor and became the sports editor in 2006.
Barry and his wife, Sheila Finn, live in Goleta, and he has two adult children, Kami and Geoffrey.
Reach Barry at bpunzal@noozhawk.com
Rebecca Caraway, staff writer
Rebecca Caraway joined the Noozhawk team in 2023 after graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. During her time at Cal Poly she worked on features and opinion columns and spent a year as the opinion editor for Mustang News, Cal Poly’s student-run news source. She also spent a year as a public records and investigative intern for the Daily Dot. She grew up in Corona before moving to the Central Coast in 2019.
Reach Rebecca at rcaraway@noozhawk.com
Michelle Nelson, associate editor
Reach Michelle at mnelson@noozhawk.com
Marcia Heller, associate editor
Reach Marcia at mheller@noozhawk.com
Melinda Johnson, special projects editor
Reach Melinda at mjohnson@noozhawk.com
Erin Graffy, Talk of the Town columnist
Dubbed “the Herb Caen of Santa Barbara,” Erin Graffy is an award-winning author of more than 150 books, monographs, features and articles on the history, social culture, people and delightful peculiarities of our highly provincial town.
She has been quoted in media from the Los Angeles Times to the international Süddeutsche Zeitung and has appeared on CNN and Univision. A sought-after speaker on history and culture, she was featured as a California historian in the 2015 Tournament of Roses Parade.
Erin previously served as editor for the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library’s La Gazette, and her research was published seven times by the Santa Barbara Historical Museum in its Noticias.
She has written the society column for every newspaper in Santa Barbara, and her former radio show, Talk of the Town, is now the name of her Noozhawk column.
Reach Erin at news@noozhawk.com
Ray Ford, outdoors writer
Ray Ford joined Noozhawk as an outdoors writer in late 2016. He has been hiking, backpacking and bike riding the Santa Barbara area since the 1970s when Dick Smith’s photography and reporting lured him to taking his first trip into the backcountry. Ray is well-known for his guidebooks and maps of our area, including Trails of the San Rafael Wilderness, Santa Barbara Day Hikes and Santa Barbara Mountain Biking. In 1990 Ray’s classic, Santa Barbara Wildfires, profiled nine of Santa Barbara’s major fires from the Refugio Fire in 1955 to the Painted Cave Fire in 1990, led him to focus on the underlying issues relating wildfires in our area and coverage of them. Since the Zaca Fire in 2007, Ray has provided in depth reporting from the field on every local wildfire, including most recently the Sherpa and Rey Fires.
Reach Ray at rford@noozhawk.com
Dan McCaslin, outdoors writer
Dan McCaslin became part of the Noozhawk flock in 2015. He has been hiking and backpacking into Santa Barbara’s rugged backcountry over five decades, often taking his young son or leading seventh-grade student groups from the local school where he taught history from 1980 to 2016. A UCSB graduate with multiple degrees in history and a published scholarly book, “Stone Anchors in Antiquity,” Dan began going “outside” into our federal wilderness zones after a first trip to Little Pine Mountain in 1971. He also serves as a USFS Archaeological Site Monitor in the PIP program for the Santa Barbara, Ojai, and Santa Lucia Ranger Districts.
Reach Dan at cazmania3@gmail.com
Dr. Dan Brennan, health columnist
Dr. Dan Brennan is a board-certified pediatrician at Sansum Clinic, after having received degrees at UCLA and Albany Medical College and residency training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is a longtime health columnist, contributes as a medical expert for several national publications, edits several parenting and nutritional texts, and has served as a medical editor for WebMD. He is a proud husband and father of three boys, and volunteers his time as a youth coach and as board president of Dos Pueblos Little League.
Reach Dan at drb@sbpediatrics.com or 805.563.6211
Sheridan Taphorn, sales manager
Sheridan Taphorn joined the Noozhawk team in 2018 after graduating from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in communications. She started out at Noozhawk as a News Reporting Intern, and transitioned into our Online Advertising Consultant to pursue her passion in Marketing and Sales. In 2021, she was promoted to Sales Manager.
In 2020 she became an Ambassador for the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce and she currently serves on the Advisory Board at PATH Santa Barbara. Sheridan grew up in the Midwest, and in her free time she enjoys exploring all of the beautiful scenery that Santa Barbara has to offer.
Reach Sheridan at staphorn@noozhawk.com or call her at 805.456.7197.
Lauren Hodgins, online advertising consultant
Lauren Hodgins joined Noozhawk in 2021 after graduating from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. During her time at the university, she studied journalism with a focus in public relations. Lauren was born and raised in Santa Barbara, and during her free time loves to read and go hiking on the local trails.
Reach Lauren at lhodgins@noozhawk.com or call her at 805.456.7268.
Jasmin Frausto, sales and marketing assistant
Jasmin Frausto became a part of the Noozhawk team in 2024. She studied at Cal Poly, Pomona, where she obtained a degree in business administration and marketing. Jasmin was born and raised in Santa Barbara, and in her free time she loves to stay active, travel to new places, and to cook new recipes.
Reach Jasmin at jfrausto@noozhawk.com or call her at 805.456.7196.
Aimee Avery, graphic designer
Reach Aimee at aavery@noozhawk.com
Will Macfadyen, Hawks Club coordinator and development and special projects manager
Reach Will at will@noozhawk.com