In a hearing that was both anticlimactic and exciting, the sale of the Santa Barbara News-Press physical archive to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum was approved on Tuesday afternoon by Bankruptcy Court Judge Ronald A. Clifford III.
The daily paper’s 150 years of bound volumes, clippings library, photo files from about the 1940s onward, and other aspects of the physical archive were sold for $70,000 into what can only be described as the good hands of the Historical Museum. Dacia Harwood, director of the museum, said that donors had pledged to fund the archive purchase when news of the bankruptcy first emerged in 2023. No other bids were made during the sale.
During a visit to the museum earlier this year, archivist Chris Ervin and Harwood took the Independent through the temperature- and humidity-controlled space — the equipment cost about $400,000 to install — where the museum stores its susceptible goods: bound newspapers, periodicals, books, and about 4,000 maps and drawings. The entirety of the lower level holds paintings, furniture, glassware, clothing, and more from Santa Barbara’s past, which frequently make their way upstairs to form exhibits.
A bound Santa Barbara Weekly Press from 1881 was the museum’s oldest volume at the time, Ervin had said. While the museum had good continuity until 1950, there was an eight-year gap, and the museum had most of the volumes through 1986. The bound volumes had been donated by the Storke family, publishers of the News-Press for just over a half-century.
The current break in continuity occurred when Wendy McCaw, the owner since 2000, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after a public fight in 2016 with her employees over control of the newsroom. That fight came to involve the Teamsters and the community, which backed the protest by canceling subscriptions. The paper dwindled to a four-pager, then went online only when the press went down — apparently because Edison was owed $176,000 — before throwing in the towel on July 21, 2023.
The new purchases will fill not only the Historical Museum’s gaps in time but also the gaps at Newspapers.com, where Santa Barbara media are digitized and available through the public library. The museum also adds the daily paper’s immense clippings file to those it acquired from the library.
Harwood said they planned to have experts examine the mold on the bound volumes to see what it would take to restore them before bringing them into the museum.
“Now comes the big work of rescuing it all out of there,” she said.
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