Summer of Discontent Heads for Fall

Locals might remember the national championship brought home by the local amateur baseball team. Or the squabble over the size of actor Rob Lowe’s dream home.

But the steamy summer of 2006 will almost certainly be recalled here as the time when a feud between billionaire newspaper publisher Wendy McCaw and her staff exploded into a cause celebre.

Two months after a mass resignation by its top editors, the Santa Barbara News-Press limps into fall with one-third of its news staff departed, workers and management in a tense standoff over a plan to unionize and several former editors and reporters threatened with legal action.

At a time when most American newspapers are fighting to bolster their credibility and expand readership, Santa Barbarans face an extraordinary spectacle: The News-Press’ owner and its workers say they must take shots at their newspaper to save it.

Dissident journalists and a group of prominent citizens held a news conference this week urging readers to cancel their subscriptions. They said only a hit to McCaw’s pocketbook would force her to stop tilting news coverage in favor of her allies.

Days earlier, the publisher’s editorial page charged that it was the paper’s recently departed editors who “failed readers” by allowing reporters’ biases to infect the news pages.

The controversy has been regular fodder on Santa Barbara’s local television news and in other papers in the area, with McCaw taking hits from all sides. The city’s liberal political establishment -- often the target of negative editorials -- launched many of the complaints. But others have joined the chorus, including two journalistic luminaries who live in the area -- Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon and onetime network television correspondent Sander Vanocur.

Last week, the circle of disdain widened again, when 20 local religious leaders published a letter chastising the newspaper’s management for ethical failures that the clerics said led to “an erosion in our ability to trust the reported news.”

But McCaw and her top loyalist at the paper -- editorial page editor Travis Armstrong -- said they have been targeted largely because they have taken on local powers. A friend of Armstrong, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “There is probably something to be said for a paper that has an adverse relationship with the town mothers and fathers.”

The journalists hope to vote by the end of the month on whether to unionize under the Graphic Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. But no one expects the fight to end there.

“As ‘The Terror’ at the newspaper enters its third month, I sense a growing restlessness around town,” Craig Smith, a local lawyer, wrote in a recent posting on his blog, which has recounted the newspaper’s travails in painstaking detail. “People want their newspaper back.”

McCaw bought the News-Press in 2000 from the New York Times Co. and newspaper analysts said that her fortune -- built on a divorce settlement she won from cellphone magnate Craig McCaw -- might insulate it from the staff reductions hitting other papers.

Questions arose almost from the start, however, about whether McCaw would honor the traditional boundary that separates a newspaper’s owners from its reporters and editors.

The current crisis came to a boil after McCaw blocked publication of a story on Armstrong’s drunk driving conviction and, on another occasion, reprimanded journalists for publishing actor Lowe’s address -- something she called an invasion of privacy.

The disagreements boiled over when McCaw left for her annual summer cruise aboard her yacht in the Mediterranean and put Armstrong, 41, in charge of the paper. Many in the newsroom complained that oversight by the once-and-future opinion editor might blur the line between news and editorial opinion.

Editor Jerry Roberts returned from his summer vacation in Crete and promptly resigned, to be joined by the paper’s managing editor, deputy managing editor, metro editor, business editor and Barney Brantingham, the venerable columnist whose 46 years on the job made him the public face of the News-Press.

Despite a bleak market for jobs elsewhere, the exodus continued into this week with the departure of the sports editor, design editor, seven reporters and four copy editors. That brought the total number leaving the News-Press to 19, from an editorial staff of 57.

The paper says it has hired an equal number of employees to replace those who have left. But critics say it’s obvious that much of the operation has been turned over to raw rookies.

Particularly amateurish, they charge, were some features that ran over the long summer, including one that pondered how a devastated basil crop in Italy might affect local gourmands. Although Santa Barbara chefs said there would be no impact whatsoever, noting that their basil comes from Mexico, the News-Press splashed the story and a photo on Page 1.

McCaw, 55, declined to be interviewed for this article and others, even to provide evidence of the bias she says tainted her onetime employees. She has ignored advice from some of her advisors that her silence has contributed to increasingly caricatured portrayals of her in the press.

The publisher’s only public communications have been a pair of letters to readers, one of which insisted that “the best is yet to be” at the 42,000 circulation newspaper.

The continuing complaints against the News-Press have been fanned by a “cabal” of disgruntled employees, political enemies and rival media (including the Los Angeles Times) that hope to improve their own standing, according to a column by editorial page editor Armstrong.

“If they don’t like your opinion, one course is to try to shut down the locally owned free press,” Armstrong wrote last month, “and personally attack those who dare to attempt to hold government officials accountable for their policy decisions.”

The high emotions surrounding the dispute have boiled over several times inside the News-Press, headquartered in landmark Spanish-style offices in the city’s historic downtown.

When some of the scribes marched through the newsroom to McCaw’s adjoining office late last month to demand a meeting, they were promptly ordered back to their desks by Scott Steepleton, a 43-year-old reporter who has been elevated to the top editing position.

Steepleton subsequently suspended 11 of the journalists for, as one was told, “a clear and outrageous attempt to physically intimidate Mrs. McCaw and everyone else in the workplace.” (The publisher happened to be out at the time).

Several former employees have received letters threatening legal action if the publisher believes their complaints disclose company secrets. McCaw’s holding company is seeking a restraining order against one of the departed editors. And the public relations consultant she hired at the start of the crisis was promptly let go when he told some in the media that he respected the departed Roberts.

On Tuesday, at the latest of a series of public events, a committee of community activists asked readers to honor earlier pledges to drop the newspaper because of McCaw’s alleged intransigence. Union lawyers said hundreds have already dropped the paper and about 3,000 more have promised to do so, although McCaw previously said circulation was growing.

Little that happens at the paper goes uncontested these days. McCaw recently killed a Sunday lifestyle column by feature writer Starshine Roshell and eliminated columns by five community freelancers. The newspaper’s spokeswoman, Agnes Huff, said the writers lost their jobs “in line with the whole direction the paper is going -- less opinion and more hard news.”

But critics noted that Roshell, a union backer, had written favorably about the departed journalists. The community writers were hired by Roberts; one wrote a column saying that Santa Barbarans were comparing McCaw to notorious hotel baroness Leona Helmsley.

McCaw has been searching for a new executive editor to help her remake the paper. But, despite a salary offer of up to $200,000, she so far has found no takers. Word of her $500,000 legal claim against former editor Roberts -- for allegedly damaging the News-Press -- came in the midst of the search.

Vanocur said that in more than half a century in the news business he has never seen a fight quite like the one that swept Santa Barbara this summer.

“It may be,” he said, “that this whole matter has gone beyond the gravitational pull of reality.”

james.rainey@latimes.com