SANTA BARBARA — After seven months of intense drama -- firings, walkouts, boycotts, legal challenges and a union drive -- the simplest measure of the impact here from billionaire Wendy McCaw's showdown with her newspaper staff is told by Johnny Morosin.
Someone Morosin knows died recently, and he didn't find out until a few days later. Like countless others, Morosin no longer reads McCaw's News-Press, so he missed the death notice.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday February 12, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
News-Press: An article in the California section Saturday about fallout at the Santa Barbara News-Press said journalist Susan Paterno was based in Fullerton. She lives in Rossmoor.
"Now I don't know all the little stuff I used to read," Morosin, 44, said as he rang up lunch-crowd customers at his family's Italian & Greek Market near the newspaper's downtown building. "It'll never be the same.... It's just a crying shame."
Earlier this week, six more members of the News-Press staff were fired for "disloyalty" after holding banners on a freeway overpass backing a union boycott of the paper. On Wednesday, investigators from the National Labor Relations Board were in town, taking affidavits for yet another complaint that McCaw had fired workers for union activity.
Perhaps more significant, John Zant, a popular sportswriter with 38 years at the paper, was among the latest dismissals, an action that outraged the local sports community, which until now had largely ignored the controversies.
"John is an icon," said Barbara Bartolome, a local scrapbook shop owner and ardent fan of UC Santa Barbara's women's basketball team, which Zant covered. "You touch John, and you're breaking a lot of people's hearts."
Of an editorial staff that former workers say totaled 54 people at the start of last summer, 38 have been fired or have quit since July, when internal tensions exploded over how the paper had covered the DUI arrest of its own controversial editorial-page editor, Travis Armstrong.
The ramifications have been broad. It has been a godsend for the Daily Sound, an upstart paper; the Independent, an alternative weekly that has ramped up its online delivery with as-it-happens updates of local news; and for bloggers like Craig Smith, a law professor whose previously ignored "Craig Smith's Blog" about local news peaked this week at 2,200 daily unique visits.
But the cost has been high. In a small city, the local newspaper serves as the surrogate town square, where events are reported, analyzed and debated. Though the News-Press has filled a few slots, fired staffers this week counted only two reporters, one of them a recent hire, on a local news staff that a year ago totaled 14.
