In a world full of mosquito-sized attention spans, alt-weeklies have always been a home for quality longform journalism. For us, longform is more than just a hashtag, it's at the core of who we are.
Joseph Cole appointed after four-year-old ownership lawsuit concludes.
The decision affirms a 2011 ruling that Santa Barbara Independent publisher Randy Campbell sell his stake in the paper to editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge.
Santa Barbara Independent publisher Randy Campbell will appeal a judge's decision which ordered him to sell his shares of the paper to editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge.
A judge ordered Monday that Randy Campbell, publisher of The Santa Barbara Independent and its majority shareholder must sell his shares for more than $1.3 million to Marianne Partridge, editor-in-chief and minority shareholder.
In what it calls "an admittedly awkward, after-the-fact effort in filling the gap," the Independent has laid out the rest of the story on the contract dispute between editor-in-chief and minority owner Marianne Partridge and publisher and majority owner Randy Campbell. "What we failed to cover ... were the arguments that Campbell and his attorneys provided in their responding papers," news editor Nick Welch writes. "As such, The Independent's coverage of its own internal struggle has been somewhat one-sided." To rectify the situation, the paper will not be covering the dispute in a traditional way as it moves along; instead, it will present readers with links to the relevant court documents themselves (this latest story includes 13 legal documents the case has produced to date).
Judge Denise deBellefeuille has granted an injunction sought by Independent co-owner and editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge in her contract dispute over the paper's sale with publisher and majority owner Randy Campbell. The injunction effectively bars Campbell from selling or distributing his shares of the Independent until the conflict with Partridge over the sale of his shares is finally resolved, the paper reports.
Editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge has sued publisher Randy Campbell in Santa Barbara County Superior Court for breach of contract in a legal dispute that Independent reporter Nick Welsh says "could have major ramifications for the ownership structure" of the paper. Partridge, a minority shareholder, claims that Campbell -- who owns 51 percent of the company -- is in violation of contract language that requires him to offer to sell his stock to Partridge or one of the other two minority owners before selling to anyone else. The dispute stems from Campbell's apparent desire to sell his share of the Independent to Valley Printers, which prints the paper and is owned by Southland Publishing, the parent company of four Southern California AAN member papers.
IndyAlert will provide email, text message, and radio announcements (via partner station KCSB-FM) "during emergencies and public safety challenges." The service is free, but users must subscribe. "In the past two years we've been on the literal front lines of many of Santa Barbara's disasters and emergencies, with our website providing timely coverage we couldn't achieve with the weekly newspaper. But we sometimes found the immediacy of our website was inconvenient or unavailable," publisher Randy Campbell says. "By adding text messaging and email alerts, we can use the wide availability of cell phones to keep our subscribers informed. Add radio to the mix and we've got particularly valuable tools for communication during a power outage or on the go."
Independent.com has won the EPpy for the best weekly newspaper-affiliated website in the country, Editor & Publisher, which sponsors the contest with Mediaweek, reports. The winners of the annual awards honoring online work were announced yesterday in Las Vegas, and publisher Randy Campbell was there to accept, thanking his staff "for their hard work in taking the website from a skeleton to a fully operational daily source of news for the Santa Barbara community," the Independent reports. "There are no secrets to publishing, either online or in print, so I'm thrilled the hard work and commitment of our web team has been recognized on a national level," said Campbell back in April when the site was first nominated.
