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Wednesday, April 4, 2007
News-Press-onward 
| | It¹s our intent to keep our Web site going until we are reinstated at the News-Press. We were fired illegally by Wendy McCaw, the owner and co-publisher, for trying to obtain a union contract. Lawyers for the National Labor Relations Board will prosecute the News-Press so that we can get our jobs back, but it may take months. |
| | We would like to thank our sponsors, the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, for helping us set up this Web site. Last fall, the News-Press newsroom voted 33-6 to join the Teamsters and seek a fair employment contract, one that would help restore journalistic integrity to our newspaper, a historic Santa Barbara institution and a public trust. |
| | The copyright line says The Santa Barbara Newsroom is supported by the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. |
| | It's nice to read stories under familiar bylines such as Melinda Burns, Dawn Hobbs and John Zant. It's especially welcome to find that each story is available for linking and not hidden behind a paywall. (See item 1 here.) |
| | It's also odd to see this paper-in-pixels as a Teamsters operation. Yes, I know that what the Teamsters are doing here is a Good Thing. But my hope for the SB Newsroom was to see a new online paper that would carry forward as its own operation, with its own publishing as well as editorial ambitions. What we have here is a new breed that isn't built to reproduce. Meaning nobody else can use it. It's unique to Santa Barbara's bizarre dispute between the owner of a paper and pretty much everyone else — especially its growing diaspora of cast-off employees. |
| | I'm also not sure that the News-Press is a "public trust." It's a private business, and always has been. Even if the Teamsters succeed in getting these reporters reinstated at the News-Press, I doubt the result will be a better newspaper than the reporters could create fresh on their own. They'll be back working for Wendy, who would not welcome them and would do everything she could to get them fired again, on who-knows-what grounds. |
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