Full Belly Files: My ‘Indy’ Origin Story

One of my original keyboards. I still own this, but don't use it anymore!

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My journalism career nearly died before it was ever born, as I almost forgot all about my interview for an internship at the Santa Barbara Independent. It was a typically foggy Isla Vista morning in the winter quarter of 1999, and my girlfriend — who’d found the internship for me in the first place — cut through my waking haze with a friendly “hey-don’t-you-have-that-thing?” reminder.

Already in our senior year, we’d been fans of the weekly newspaper for a couple years at that point, spending our Thursday lunch sessions at IVBC or Javan’s, flipping through the pages while scarfing sandwiches. I was in the guinea pig class of UCSB’s brand new professional writing minor, and its main redeeming quality back then — aside from having soon-to-be-superstar Steve Aoki in my study group — was requiring students to get an internship. (Now the program is its own well respected mini-department.) My girlfriend and I both thought it was cool that I might write for the Indy one day myself, or at the very least hang out there and meet some of the names we’d come to know.

An hour later, I was being questioned by Audrey Berman, the paper’s editorial director, who seemed mildly enthused about my prospects. “Do interns get to write?” I asked, knowing that was possible at the other internship I was considering at Islands Magazine. But those editors wanted me to drive down from I.V. to Carpinteria every Friday of my last quarter of senior year for full eight-hour shifts.

“Not really,” Audrey replied, coolly but kindly.

Here I was in Isla Vista around the time of my original Indy internship. I still own that helmet.

Oh well, I thought, and took the Indy gig anyway, figuring that two four-hour shifts midweek in downtown Santa Barbara would still be a better graduating-senior situation than the weekly hauls to Carp.

On my second real day of the internship, Audrey was out, but left a note on her desk, telling me to call the travel editor, Leslie Westbrook.

“Hi, uh, this is Matt, an intern at the Independent, and Audrey told me — “

Leslie jumped right in. “Hey, I need you to do some research for me on this new Internet trend of buying airplane tickets on the internet.”

Here was Priceline.com’s flight search page in 1999, per the Wayback Machine.

I’d heard a bit about Priceline, so I was up for the task. I sat down at the only dial-up computer in the entire Indy office, and started investigating. As a humming fax machine churned out press releases into the newsroom nearby, I explored the site as much as possible without buying tickets, took some notes, and then logged onto my UCSB Umail account to tell Leslie what I learned.

I never even considered writing this email in an article form — I didn’t really know what that was. Instead, I merely tried to clearly describe in a grammatically correct albeit conversational way what it took to book a plane flight on Priceline. It was pretty easy to do, given that the intel was all pretty straightforward and rather obvious back then, being that only one website existed for such a service.

“This is great,” Leslie replied to my email. “I’m gonna run it.”

And this was Independent.com, so Priceline had a leg up on us!

That very next week, Leslie affixed my reporting to the bottom of her longer feature, and there it was: My name, spelled correctly, in black type. Two days on a job where I was told writing wasn’t gonna happen, and I had my first professional byline — really, my first byline ever, save for an article I wrote in high school about the JV football team. (The guy I interviewed for that one became one of my best friends, and remains so today.)

“That’s pretty cool,” I thought upon seeing my name in print, a buzz of professional recognition and visually confirmable accomplishment and certainly some ego swirling in my 21-year-old head. “I think I’d like to do that again.”

Leslie, who remains a journalist and friend of mine today, took the whole bewildering experience one step further. She took me onto a S.B. News-Press–affiliated travel radio show hosted by columnist Barney Brantingham and bon vivant Arthur von Wiesenberger, close friends before that paper’s demise tore their relationship apart. I remember going into the studio, but don’t recall anything of what I muttered into the microphone. I think it went well.

I was able to write a little bit more during the rest of my internship, then graduated and traveled around Europe for six weeks that summer, penning my own travelogue daily into a digital device that would later erase everything. My announced intention to pursue a higher degree and become a professor of anthropology started to quickly become a whisper once writing for a living seemed like an actual option.

One of my early assignments involved hiking to the source of El Capitan Creek and receiving a nasty case of poison oak as a reward.

I came back to Isla Vista for the end of summer, moved downtown to Santa Barbara, and got a part-time proofreading gig at the Indy in the fall, earning $7 an hour. It wasn’t much, but why should I go back to school for 10 more years, accrue a pile of debt, and then not make much money when I could just start not making much money right away?

That I could also earn 10 cents per word for my writing pushed me into covering every topic I stumbled into, and helped me pay my share of a $1,400 rent for a two-bedroom, green-and-yellow shack on Santa Barbara Street. I was a full-time news reporter by the spring of 2000, and never looked back. I’ve been here — and many other places — ever since.

Your Own Indy Story?

Do you have any stories about your relationship to the Santa Barbara Independent? We’d love to hear and share them. Send your ideas and/or finished stories to birthday@independent.com.

From Our Table

A dessert at Caruso’s using the sustainably crafted chocolate | Credit: Courtesy

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