Still Very Lucky

Writing in the May-June 2024 issue of Mother Jones magazine, CEO Monika Bauerlein notes that this has been a brutal year for journalism. “We are losing newspapers at the rate of 10 a month,” she writes, and goes on to report that some of the biggest newsrooms of the digital age have shut down or are about to. Layoffs are also happening at the Washington Post, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. Bauerlein is a clear-eyed realist about what afflicts the news business: “No smart guy or better mousetrap is going to get us to a world where quality journalism makes enough money to survive as a for-profit business.”

Santa Barbara is still very lucky: We have the Santa Barbara Independent, which continues to defy the odds and retain its place as our “paper of record.” As with Mother Jones, the Independent is guided in this perilous age by women: Editor in Chief Marianne Partridge and Publisher Brandi Rivera. To both I offer my appreciation.

As a born and bred native, I grew up reading the News-Press; I also delivered that paper on my Schwinn bicycle and collected monthly subscription fees door-to-door. The News-Press was a staple, a companion, a symbol of continuity. Although I didn’t care for what it became in the late stages of its existence, I still miss what the News-Press represented to this community for so many decades.

It’s a sad and terrible thing when a newspaper ceases to be, and I don’t want to contemplate Santa Barbara without the Independent. (Full disclosure: my wife is employed by the paper as the Calendar Editor and I am a past contributor.) Imagine our city without Nick Welsh’s trenchant, biting, and amusing reporting about local government and the machinations of real estate developers or Tyler Hayden’s investigative pieces or Matt Kettmann’s writing about the food and wine scene. Lose those voices, and many others, and our community is diminished; lose local journalism and our democracy is finished.