News-Press Timeline
A chronicle of the events which proceed the July 6, 2006 walkout of six senior News-Press editors and longtime columnist Barney Brantingham, and the fallout in the following week.
Year: 2006
More Mess at the News Press
Breaking News, Rumors and Opinions on our Evolving Media Scene
For those waiting for the other shoe to fall at the Santa Barbara News Press, it has. But in this case, it’s more like all the shoes from Imelda Marcos’s closet. As of today, Thursday July 6, every senior editor in the paper’s news department had quit, five in all. Resignation tendered.
The Mind of Matt McAllister
Comforting, well-balanced, and disarming aren’t the adjectives you’d usually use to describe a morning DJ, but Matt McAllister – the number-one radio personality in Santa Barbara – is all of the above. As the front man and mastermind behind 99.9 KTYD’s The Early Show, which airs every weekday from 5-10 a.m., he’s a complex man made up of calculated and unconscious contradictions.
Myths and Legends
Willy Vlautin Rides West with Richmond Fontaine
There’s always been a wonderful sense of mystique to the American West: the endless blue skies permeating the soul, the roads stretching out toward the horizon, the towns where living is cheap and freedom is plentiful. It’s been captured in films such as Paris, Texas and Don’t Come Knocking, and celebrated in the writings of Raymond Carver and Sam Shepard. And now, the West’s allure has a sonic manifestation, for it is the heart and soul of The Fitzgerald, the gorgeous new album by Portland-based band Richmond Fontaine.
Shade Of Gray
Mari Latimer captured the morning fog as it hung like a curtain
Destiny’s Child
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
At the Santa Barbara Bowl, Thursday, June 29.
From Iron & Wine’s melodious marriage with Calexico to Nick Cave’s curious flirtation with Kylie Minogue, contemporary collaboration embraces both the logical and the bizarre. So when word got out that Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris had been secretly fusing their musical skills – a partnership that gave birth to last month’s All the Roadrunning – ears naturally perked up. And in front of a near capacity Santa Barbara Bowl on Thursday night, their dueling dynamics certainly showed.
Finding an Audience
Rob Thomas and Jewel
At the Santa Barbara Bowl, Sunday, July 2.
It was a strange scene Sunday night as Jewel took the stage at the Bowl. The 12-time platinum singer is certainly no stranger to success, having ruled the MTV airwaves with hits like “Who Will Save Your Soul” and “Foolish Games.” So it seemed a fair assumption that the predominately middle-aged crowd, still filtering into their seats a few songs into her set, were there to see her rather than former Matchbox Twenty front man and teen heartthrob Rob Thomas. And yet, launching into “Hands,” her second song of the night and breakout single from her 1998 album Spirit, Jewel stopped the song, puzzled by the lack of response from the audience. “You guys know this song, right?” she joked as she restarted to scattered applause.
FISHY SCIENCE:
Curiously coinciding with Washington’s push to lift offshore oil drilling bans, two new reports were released last week hailing oil rigs as essential fish habitat specifically for the over-fished rockfish population. Researched by UCSB marine biologist Milton Love and his colleagues, the reports estimated that there are at least 430,000 baby rockfish living in and around the eight oil rigs the divers surveyed all of them in the Santa Barbara channel. The news comes as part of the ongoing debate regarding the fate of oil rigs once they stop pumping petroleum.
Oil and Trouble
House Votes to Lift 25-Year Moratorium on Offshore Drilling
For the first time in a quarter century, coastal oil development got a resounding bipartisan go-ahead from Congress. Forty Democratic representatives joined a majority of Republicans to lift the offshore drilling ban that first went into effect in 1981 and has been reaffirmed by Congress each year since. Some Republicans have been trying unsuccessfully for decades to lift the moratorium. Indeed, one such bill was handily defeated in Congress less than two months ago.
LIBRARY SUICIDE:
Kenneth Clark, a 40-year-old man with a history of mental health problems, leapt to his death from the top of Santa Barbara’s downtown library parking lot last week. Clark had recently been in a psychiatric facility due to a prior suicide attempt. In that case, he’d slit his wrists. Police officials said Clark ripped out the stitches that closed his wrist wounds before jumping.
