Marianne Partridge

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Marianne Partridge is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of The Santa Barbara Independent, which published its first issue 20 years ago on Thanksgiving Day.

Before moving to Santa Barbara in 1980, Partridge was the editor of the Village Voice, executive editor of Look Magazine, and senior editor of Rolling Stone magazine, where she also served as bureau chief in New York and Los Angeles. She began her career as a secretary at the original Saturday Evening Post, later working there as fiction reader and on the copy desk. She was a reporter in the Los Angeles bureaus of Forbes Magazine and The New York Times in the early '70s and a contributing editor to New West magazine in the early '80s.

Partridge was born in 1945 in New York City. As a child, her family traveled extensively throughout the country to racetracks where her father trained a stable of thoroughbred horses. A graduate of Bard College with a degree in social philosophy, she held a myriad of jobs before settling on journalism, including stints as a nanny, a waitress, a social worker, a political scheduler, a founding member of the Los Angeles Women’s Improvisational Theater, and a rejected candidate for the Peace Corps.

Partridge is a co-owner of The Santa Barbara Independent, which was founded in 1986. She has been married for 29 years to Santa Barbara cattle rancher Jim Poett, with whom she has raised their two children, and many dogs, cats, and horses.