After Wendy McCaw destroyed the city’s daily paper, I read a number of posts that began the same way: “My first job was delivering newspapers for the Santa Barbara News-Press.” As if it were mere nostalgia, like a Leave It to Beaver rerun. On the other hand, most pro assessments I read described the paper’s demise only in terms of the horrible woman who strangled it. Hubris, narcissism, etcetera. And these inferred that the paper was a brilliant and precious memory, sorrowfully squandered, now gone.
But how much did the News-Press really mean to us and what have we lost?
A famously talented art photographer once got perturbed with me because I used an old joke in print, referring to the paper as the News-Suppress. “I used to deliver that paper” he said. “It was my first job.”