Since last Friday, readers who subscribe to the Santa Barbara News-Press have been wondering what’s happened to their deliveries. Several went so far as to contact the Independent to ask if we knew what was going on.
We naturally turned to Edhat and NextDoor, where rumor and commentary are regularly contributed. Speculation ran from a belief that the lightweight, four-page paper had simply blown off every subscriber’s front porch to dark musings that the paper went out of business or had been sold.
Calls to people in the know turned up no one who knew anything. City Hall, which has been attempting to converse with the daily regarding De la Guerra Plaza, had no intel to share. The chorus of “Well, that’s interesting” led to one comment that the owner would never sell anything she owned.
The obvious route for information, contacting the News-Press directly, was stymied as the paper is not answering its phones. The numbers for the news staff dropped the caller at voicemail early this morning; and calls were not soon returned. The subscription number led to a recording that stated the paper is “experiencing a high volume of calls due to switching over to a new vendor.” That was iterated in a “staff report” that ran on January 25 in which the paper said it had “problems this week” delivering the paper.
Mid-afternoon Wednesday, Managing Editor Dave Mason called to set the record straight: “The rumor is false. The Santa Barbara News-Press has not been sold,” he said emphatically, adding that the delivery message at the website spoke for itself.
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