Sale of Paper Has Catalina Buzzing : Journalism: Four of the weekly’s employees quit. One starts a rival publication.

Down at Lolo Saldana’s barber shop, residents of Avalon were abuzz this week over news that the city’s longtime weekly newspaper, the Catalina Islander, had been sold to an out-of-state company.

And not only that, four of the paper’s five employees had quit their jobs. And one of them is starting up a rival paper.

All this change has come as a surprise to the 2,500 residents of Santa Catalina Island, where Donald Haney’s family had published the 75-year-old community paper since 1955.

“This was a complete shock,” said Saldana, an Avalon resident for 35 years.

Haney and his wife, Ann, who edited and published the Islander together, announced last week that they had sold the paper to Independent News Corp., a Rhode Island-based company that owns a number of news weeklies and shoppers throughout the country.

“I love the town and the people,” Haney said in an interview this week. But, he added, “I’m also tired after 35 years.” He said the couple had sold the paper for health reasons but preferred not to disclose the details.

The Haneys, both in their late 50s, plan to move back to the mainland and look for a home near Bakersfield, he said.

Last Thursday, a day after the new owners took over operations, all but one of the paper’s staff of five quit their jobs after being reprimanded by the company’s president, Ted Holmberg, for leaving the business unattended during lunch hour.

Lenni Hill, who was the Islander’s office manager, and other staff members said Holmberg had humiliated them.

“(Holmberg) said, “ ‘You’re all stupid. You don’t know how to run a business,’ ” Hill recalled.

Mary Burke, who was a typesetter at the Islander before quitting, backed up Hill’s account. “I’ve never been treated by an employer like that, and I never want to be again,” Burke said.

Holmberg, who works out of the company’s East Coast offices, could not be reached for comment, but the new publisher of the Islander, Lindsay Lewis, said she did not recall her boss using the word “stupid.”

“We wanted to institute professional, business-like attitudes,” Lewis said. “They decided that was not the way they wanted to operate and they left.”

Over the next few days Hill put together a small group of residents to start up a new paper, the Avalon Bay News.

Hill predicted that the new paper will have more community news than the Islander.

“They came in from Texas,” Hill said of the Islander’s new owners, “and they’re just not our kind of people.”

The Islander’s new managing editor, Julie Schoeneberg, is from Texas, where the company owns several newspapers.

But Lewis said the new owners realize that “we’ll have to learn” about the island. “We don’t make any presumptions that we know all about Catalina.”

The first issue of the Avalon Bay News, 24 letter-size pages, is being printed at Catalina Printing and is due to hit the streets today. Hill said Chuck Holt, the owner of the printing company, is one of four other people who worked around the clock this week to put out the inaugural issue.

For the next two weeks, the new paper will be offering yearlong subscriptions at $22.50, undercutting the competition by $2.50.

Both Hill and Lewis said they look forward to competition, which they said keeps a newspaper healthy.