Santa Barbara’s Collective Memory, Sold for Kindling

History rarely feels like history when you’re living through it. But if you have spent even a day in Santa Barbara anytime since 1868, you have played a part in a continuous community story catalogued by the former newspaper of record, the Santa Barbara News-Press. Until its bankruptcy last year, the News-Press provided an unbroken 155-year chronicle of a place and its people. In so doing, a hometown newspaper recorded our history, from notices of birth and graduation to weddings, obituaries, and everything in between.

The Santa Barbara News-Press was delivering our history to us in real time, six days a week. Many of us know it as the paper we picked up on our doorsteps, but for the last 30 years or so, we could also read the stories of our community online. It is this digital archive that is now in imminent danger of being lost forever as assets of the bankrupt paper go to auction.

The Sandbagger

As many locals will remember, the Santa Barbara News-Press was purchased in 2000 by reclusive local billionaire Wendy McCaw from The New York Times Co. for somewhere around $110 million. Beginning in 2006, McCaw began meddling in the editorial independence of the newsroom, attempting to alter and sandbag legitimate stories she believed would embarrass her inner circle of the rich and powerful. As one might expect, such brazen attempts to put a thumb on the scale of factual “straight news” ran afoul of journalism’s accepted standards of professional ethics.

Under the leadership of then-editor Jerry Roberts, the newsroom rightly chose to publish the stories anyway, setting in motion an eventual mass walk-out of the paper’s staff and triggering a decade-long scorched-earth legal and public slander campaign by the billionaire owner to discredit her former employees. Our homes and businesses boycotted the paper, braving a volley of coercive “cease and desist” letters from McCaw in a show of solidarity for the journalists. The debacle received national press attention and, buttressed by the endlessly wealthy and cartoonishly malicious newspaper owner, became the subject of the aptly named 2007 documentary Citizen McCaw.

It is under this unfortunate tutelage — or more rightly, terror — that the former Pulitzer Prize–winning paper is eventually reduced to a shell of its former self. Though the handful of reporters that remained continued to dutifully report on our community, the damage was already done. The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control. The newspaper’s undigitized physical archive of microfiche and newsprint, presumably locked inside these buildings, are similarly held hostage.

The bankruptcy attorneys have rightly called the property transfers a sham intended to shield the assets from liquidation, though the legal wrangling to prove foul play may take years.

The Backlinks Endgame

It is, however, this complication that has set the stage for what is perhaps the most bizarre twist yet in the Santa Barbara News-Press saga.

In an attempt to rustle up some amount of money to repay the paper’s nearly 900, mostly local creditors, the Bankruptcy Court has now turned to liquidating the paper’s “Online Assets.” Overseen by bankruptcy trustee and Santa Maria attorney Jerry Namba, the move is — at least in principle — a perfectly reasonable one.

According to court documents, the trove includes the paper’s online content, amounting to perhaps 30 years of digital archives, as well as social media accounts, trademark, and the website domain names “newspress.com” and “sbnewspress.com.” All told, the contents will allow a buyer to become the paper’s rightful legal owner, albeit without any real estate property.

As of March 7, 2024, an entity listed as Weyaweya, Ltd., incorporated in the European island nation (and oft-cited corporate tax haven) of Malta, has already entered into tentative agreement to buy the lot. The as-of-yet unfinalized sale agreement has been signed by a Max Noremo, to the tune of $250,000.

For the Santa Barbara community living through its own history, a quarter-million price tag to preserve roughly 30 years of digital primary source archival records may not seem altogether ludicrous. A no-name foreign firm headquartered in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea shelling out the same for a small town’s Podunk paper, however, stretches the limits of credulity. Even accounting for the potentially valuable website domain name newspress.com, the facts of the case give pause.

What value could such a company see in a record of our community’s collective memory?

A cursory online search for Weyaweya, Ltd. turns up little, while a bit of digging makes clear it is likely an entity set up expressly as a vehicle to acquire the News-Press assets. A bit more dogged digital spelunking uncovers a disturbing potential endgame for our small-town archive.

The party looking to buy our archive is but one node in a network of shell companies associated with Noremo. At the center of the scheme is a small Malta-based company called Link.Builders, which provides Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to online customers. SEO companies assist other businesses in ranking more highly in online search engine results pages, such as from Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. When websites rank more highly in online search results, they receive more online traffic, earn more advertising revenue, and make more sales. As a result, SEO service to companies looking for improved search engine placement has now exploded into a multi-billion-dollar global industry.

Noremo’s company specializes in a particular subsegment of SEO providing what are known as “backlinks,” or simple internet links that take a user from one website to another. Backlinks can be important to a website’s profitability because search engines such as Google view a website with many high-quality backlinks from reputable and relevant third-party sources as more trustworthy and authoritative. As a result, some companies will pay to place “artificial” backlinks into third-party websites in order to boost the search result ranking of their own site.

Increasingly central to the business model of backlink selling are the purchase and maintenance of websites with reputable content archives within which a company such as Link.Builders can then insert customers’ paid backlink content. In this way, the low-quality, pay-to-play content that search engines like Google would otherwise deprioritize in their search results are effectively camouflaged within a preexisting content archive that Google already trusts.

The practice is controversial within the SEO industry for its ethically dubious methods, but the rise of AI-generated content has only supercharged the profitability and proliferation of such so-called “backlink farm” operations. The result of this business model is as predictable as it is disturbing: high-quality online content libraries from across the human experience are impregnated with parasitic paid pablum until only a zombie site remains. Indeed, such sites already teem just below the surface of the relatively well-curated internet most of us use in our daily lives. Ever venture even so far as the second page of Google search results? Increasingly, it’s best not to.

Noremo is directly associated with several known zombie websites, including GamblingTimes.com and CricFolks.com (covering the sport of cricket), both of which began life as legitimate news sources before being acquired and reintroduced as AI-generated content farms for SEO. In just the past week, a group of online sleuths uncovered Noremo’s role in the shadowy recent purchase of former popular sports blog Deadspin, previously part of Gawker Media.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers for the express purpose of turning them into highly profitable backlink farms. Iowa’s Clayton County Register and Minneapolis’s Southwest Journal are just two painful recent examples of former local newspapers whose websites and historical archives have been summarily obliterated by this new wave of legalized cyber marauding.

And indeed, the Bankruptcy Court’s paper trail seems to confirm that the case of the Santa Barbara News-Press is headed for the same fate. The tentative sale agreement document with Weyaweya, Ltd., shows the Trustee’s scanned signature dated February 16, 2024, three weeks before general notice of the asset sale was made available publicly on March 9, 2024. This supports the likely event that Noremo had been on the hunt for distressed U.S. media companies of repute and independently reached out to the court’s Trustee to suggest auction of the newspaper’s digital estate.

The Public Responsibility

Despite being private enterprises, newspapers have long been able to operate as if they were a public trust, cultivating loyal readerships by providing critical community reporting, and in exchange collecting revenue from advertisers looking to tap the same audience. The present irony of butchering a historic, high-quality archive representing millions of hours of embedded human labor, in order to feed a temporary advertising clickbait factory, should be lost on no one.

The implications of our current situation are distressing. Like a giant sequoia felled for firewood, an authoritative archive of our community is on the brink of being run through the digital woodchipper to provide mulch for websites wanting a fleeting bump in search engine results.

If Noremo is successful in this purchase, the Santa Barbara News-Press will go down as but the latest conscript in the manifest of an ever-growing armada of digital ghost ships.

Unless we save our history.

After all, the archive is our collective memoir, if we can keep it. No complete digital record seems to exist in any other one place — not the Santa Barbara Public Library, UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Project, the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, or the like.

A last chance to win the day will take place at 2 p.m. on April 9 in room 201 of the United States Bankruptcy Court, 1415 State Street, Santa Barbara. There, a live auction will occur whereby the current price of $250,000 may be bested only by in-person bidding.

To those community members in a position to purchase the archive and save our decades of stories — heads of our surviving news outlets, managers of local nonprofits, city officials, business leaders, and concerned citizens — time is of the essence.

Whether you place the winning bid with intent of returning our community daily to its former glory, or simply to save our records from oblivion, you have the chance to make our history.

Sources:  A repository of source material is available via the following shared Google Drive.