In the past week, federal bankruptcy judge Ronald A. Clifford III found himself once again wrestling with what to do about the smoldering remains of the former Santa Barbara News-Press and all the unresolved claims made against that paper and its embattled owner Wendy P. McCaw.
McCaw will be demanding a change of venue from the downtown bankruptcy court — a building she happens to own—because there had been talk this past August of some building tenants of withholding rent to McCaw because they were upset the air conditioning system gave out for eight days during a particularly hot spell. The judge in the case was initially upset that McCaw had come to have access to such in-house communications, but then it emerged that the minutes of such conversations had been forwarded to McCaw’s real estate attorneys as a matter of course.
Should McCaw prevail in this latest motion, the judge made it clear, a change of venue would mean the case may have to be heard somewhere outside the Central Court district lines. Those lines extend from San Luis Obispo to Irvine and Riverside. The point seemed to be that any such change would be hugely inconvenient for all parties involved. Nonetheless, he set the motion to change venue for March 11, 2026.
In the meantime, the News-Press name, masthead, and logo has been recently resurrected by a nonprofit media enterprise affiliated with Arizona State University, which just hired longtime Noozhawk reporter and podcaster Joshua Molina to serve as the new, old, and exclusively online publication’s managing editor. Before that, Molina covered City Hall and politics for the News-Press itself but resigned from that in 2012 when relations between the newsroom and McCaw reached new lows.
Jean Yamamura contributed reporting to this story.
Editor’s Note: The nonprofit media enterprise that resurrected the News-Press is affiliated with Arizona State University, not the University of Arizona as originally reported.
