Talk to anybody in Santa Barbara for more than five minutes these days and you're likely to hear an opinion about the ongoing drama at our venerable old newspaper, The Santa Barbara News Press. I have to say the current story line knocks the stuffing out of anything the writers of the old "Santa Barbara" soap opera ever created.
For the back story visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Barbara_News-Press
For current news, opinion and discussion visit:
http://blogabarbara.blogspot.com/
http://www.west.net/~smith/blog/index.shtml
http://independent.com/
http://edhat.com/
And these are just the most active sites. There are many more.
Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. The blogosphere is on this story like grape jelly on a two year old. If you review just one or two of the sites above, you'll be linked to video, audio, pdf files of letters and related documents, photos, solid news content and a blazing public debate.
Ironically, the struggle at a traditional printed news institution is launching an entirely new and increasingly popular news medium. This fact is actually more important than the story that started the whole thing. Because no matter what happens to the newspaper, local on-line news is being pioneered in Santa Barbara and it's here to stay.
Doc Searls ( http://doc.weblogs.com/ )
hosted a seminar called "Newspaper 2.0" at UCSB last weekend. The seminar featured the discussion of exactly what an on-line local news source could be.
Taymar Pixley was there and filed a review of her experience:
http://www.pixleyflix.com/blogger/
There. Now you are linked to all the news that's fit to print...and then some!
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