Posted on May 18 at 12:57 p.m.

Yikes! What a personal attack on Orsua. In my opinion. Orsua was a quite credible reporter at the News-Press, working under difficult conditions (viritually no editorial direction or focus). Her stories on the subjects that were covered by other media sources in town, including the Indy, seemed, for the most part, at least reasonably up to par.

And, once again, the Indy media blog has its facts wrong, or at least out of date. Orsua was on air yesterday at both the 5 and 6 p.m. newscasts -- one day after beginning work. You might want to correct your story. (And grammatically speaking, it's "has yet to appear," not "is yet."

On Leana Orsua Goes to KSBY

Posted on May 15 at 12:55 p.m.

Since you have appointed yourselves the watchdogs of the Santa Barbara News-Press, you might want to be extra careful to be as accurate, and transparent, as possible.

Therefore, I would make a couple of suggestions regarding the above article.

1) By the time I read this, there were no misspellings, so I imagine someone made the corrections alluded to in David Pritchett's comment. You should follow the New York Times model and note all corrections that were made to online articles so that readers will know what was posted when.

2) Your statement about Orsua is grossly misleading, and -- I imagine you will pale reading this -- akin to the News-Press's original front-page story about Roberts and the porn-filled computer hard drive. Let me explain.

You wrote: "Former reporter Leana Orsua quit two weeks ago after Scott issued a gratuitously humiliating front page correction for a hefty exaggeration that appeared in an article she wrote describing this year’s immigration rights rally in contrast to last year’s."

But Orsua has already denied that the correction had anything to do with her leaving, as indicated in a Craig Smith's blog column dated May 4. Here's excerpts from that column:

..."when the Santa Barbara News-Press ran a front page story on April 22nd that attempted to link its former executive editor to kiddie porn, News-Press staff writer Leana Orsua had enough. By the very next day, she made up her mind that she was resigning....I asked her if a particularly harsh front page correction which appeared in Wednesday's paper and appeared to single her out played any role in her decision to quit. "Absolutely nothing to do with it" she said. The fact that she, according to others at the paper, had taken a number of sick days off in the past week (knowing she was a short-timer) would appear to corroborate that."

Note that you didn't actually STATE AS FACT that the correction is why Orsua left; but you made that strong implication, just as the original N-P article about Roberts made the implication that he was connected to the porn, without making a factual assertion.

Your statement -- while obviously not at all mean-spirited towards its purported subject as was the N-P's assualt on Roberts -- is equally misleading.

(I'm assuming Mr. Welsh reads Smith's blog on a regular basis, as any good reporter would. If not, there's a big enough problem anyway.)

You should correct this statement, issue an apology, and endeavor to be more accurate in the future.

Make no mistake about it -- I am no supporter of the News-Press. But it's just this sort of misleading reporting/writing that lends ammunition to the N-P's charges of bias. And we sure as hell don't need that!

On All the Snooze Too Fat to Print