This week is an especially sad one in the hometown of our editor. Following the termination last year of the publication of the once-proud Santa Barbara (Calif.) News-Press after over 100 years, this week its remains were being sold off in an online auction, bit by bit, for literally pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, the beautiful Old Spanish Days-styled News-Press building downtown is gutted, like mugged, stabbed and left for dead behind a dumpster, where so much activity and discourse on the direction of the community took place daily for so many years.
A supporter of this News-Press for which this Falls Church one (named for the Santa Barbara one where our editor began writing while in high school), made the point last week talking about the importance of community newspapers: It’s not just about news, per se, but about the dialogue on the interests and future of the community that is a local newspaper’s essential component. It isn’t about whether or not a newspaper’s slant or editorial content is agreed to or not, but it is the way in which the newspaper enters the homes of residents, by way of being gathered off the roof or out of a rose bush as tossed by a wayward delivery boy, and read and discussed for its contents in the midst of the daily life of the community which makes it so essential. It is the entry point for a community-wide dialogue involving everyone. It is a proxy for the community itself, as it were, its agora, or public meeting space as per the ancient Greek city states, delivered to every home where matters are fleshed out and elevated to everyone’s common interest and concern.
This is what a newspaper is, and to be its best, it has to be in print form, in full physical, sensual and tactile presence, to function most adequately and widely where no element of an entire community can be neglected or dismissed. Also, at best it is the product of a member of that wider community, a citizen exercising a calling to provide the service in question according to the highest of principles, and not the government, to most effectively trigger that community engagement.
In the case of the Santa Barbara News-Press, its founder and publisher Thomas More Storke grasped the concept of the essential role of a newspaper -in- community, much as the legendary William Allen White of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette did who fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and homegrown fascists in World War II as a champion of FDR’s New Deal and small town American values.
But alas, Stroke sold his Santa Barbara News-Press to the Philadelphia Enquirer in the late 1960s, which in turn sold it to the New York Times, which lacked the sense of community, changed course and sold it to a rightwing Trumper who turned it against the community it was created to serve and drove it into the ground.
