About Santa Barbara Independent

Santa Barbara Independent

The Santa Barbara Independent is an alternative weekly newspaper in Santa Barbara, California, founded in November 1986 by the merger of two earlier papers, the Santa Barbara News and Review, established in 1973, and the Santa Barbara Weekly, established in 1984. Its founder and publisher was Randy Campbell, its editor-in-chief Marianne Partridge, and its silent partners were Rick Grand-Jean and Richard Parker. Published on Thursdays in tabloid form, it reported a circulation of 40,000 in 2010, the largest circulation of any paper in Santa Barbara County. Joe Cole became its president in January 2014, and Brandi Rivera became publisher in 2017. The Independent gained national attention after the newsroom exodus at the Santa Barbara News-Press on 6 July 2006, when editor Jerry Roberts and about seventy journalists resigned from the daily and many of them came to work for the Independent.

The merger that created the Independent gave Santa Barbara what few American cities of its size possess: an alternative weekly stronger than the market's ordinary economics would predict, which became, by circulation, the county's largest newspaper while a daily still published beside it. Its absorption of the News-Press's exiled journalists in 2006 then gave it a newsroom of metropolitan depth, and its history since is the story of a weekly that inherited a city's journalistic leadership by being, at the decisive moment, the independent institution its name promised.

Two Papers Merge in 1986

The Independent's roots reach to 1973, when the Santa Barbara News and Review was established as the city's alternative paper, chronicling a community defined by its coastline, its university and its counterculture. In 1984 the Santa Barbara Weekly appeared as a second alternative title. In November 1986 the two merged to form the Santa Barbara Independent, consolidating the alternative market behind a single stronger paper. Randy Campbell led the new enterprise as publisher, with Marianne Partridge as editor-in-chief and Rick Grand-Jean and Richard Parker as silent partners, a founding structure that combined working leadership with patient capital of the kind alternative papers rarely enjoyed.

The name chosen for the merged paper, Independent, declared its position in a one-daily city. Santa Barbara's established paper was the News-Press, a daily of long local ownership; the Independent offered the alternative account, in a free Thursday tabloid mixing investigative reporting, city politics, arts and the region's celebrated food, wine and cultural life. The merger's wisdom showed in durability: instead of two weak alternatives competing for the same advertisers, Santa Barbara had one substantial weekly, which grew over twenty years into the county's circulation leader before its defining moment arrived.

Campbell and Partridge: The Founding Leadership

Randy Campbell's publishership and Marianne Partridge's editorship gave the Independent a stable founding regime. Publisher and editor-in-chief in an alternative weekly must balance each other, commerce against editorial risk, and the Campbell-Partridge pairing carried the merged paper from 1986 into its maturity, building the circulation that reached 40,000 by 2010. Partridge's editorial leadership in particular became associated with the paper's identity as a serious journalistic enterprise and not merely a listings weekly: the Independent under its founding editor developed the investigative and cultural authority that made it the natural refuge for professional journalists two decades later.

That authority accumulated through the ordinary alternative weekly subjects handled with unusual thoroughness in Santa Barbara: development and preservation in a city fiercely protective of its built beauty, the politics of water and coastline, the university's town-gown relations, the county's courts and the arts scene of a small city with metropolitan cultural ambitions. The founding leadership's achievement was to make the weekly indispensable to the class of readers, educated, affluent and civically engaged, that advertisers most value, which is why its circulation leadership in the county translated into business strength.

The News-Press Exodus of July 2006

On 6 July 2006 the Santa Barbara News-Press, the city's daily, underwent the most famous newsroom collapse in modern American local journalism: its editor, Jerry Roberts, and about seventy journalists resigned in protest at interference in the newsroom by the daily's owner. The resignations stripped the News-Press of most of its professional staff in a single day and became a national story about ownership and editorial independence. For Santa Barbara, the immediate question was where its journalism would now live.

The answer, in large part, was the Independent. Roberts and many of the exiled journalists came to the weekly, bringing daily-grade reporting talent, source networks and professional standards into an alternative paper that already had the city's trust. The influx, documented by Editor and Publisher and national coverage at the time, transformed the Independent's capacity overnight: a weekly founded by merger in 1986 now employed the core of the newsroom that had produced the city's daily, a transfer of journalistic capital without precedent in a market Santa Barbara's size. The Independent's name, chosen in 1986 as a brand, became in 2006 a description of where the city's independent journalism actually resided.

Largest Circulation in Santa Barbara County

By 2010 the Independent reported a circulation of 40,000, the largest of any newspaper in Santa Barbara County. A free alternative weekly out-circulating the paid daily in its own county is a striking market fact, explained by the combination the paper had assembled: free distribution across the county's prime locations, the founding generation's two decades of brand building, and the post-2006 newsroom whose work gave readers daily-paper substance in a weekly form. Santa Barbara's demographics, a highly literate population concentrated along a narrow coastal strip ideally suited to free distribution, completed the conditions.

Circulation leadership changed the paper's civic position. Advertisers followed the audience, officials reckoned with the weekly as the county's most-read paper, and the Independent's endorsements, investigations and cultural coverage carried a weight that alternative weeklies seldom achieve beside a surviving daily. The paper had become, functionally, one of two full news institutions in its county and by reach the first of them, a status its subsequent leadership inherited as an obligation as much as an asset.

Leadership After the Founders: Cole and Rivera

Joe Cole became the Independent's president in January 2014, leading the company through the decade in which its print strength had to be matched with digital scale. Brandi Rivera became publisher in 2017, succeeding to the office Randy Campbell had held at the founding, and has led the paper in its recent era. The succession from founder-publisher to professional successors, like the earlier succession from founding editor to the post-2006 newsroom leadership, marks the Independent's passage from a personal enterprise to a durable institution, the transition that determines whether an alternative weekly outlives its creators.

Under Cole and Rivera the paper continued its Thursday print publication while building the digital presence through which its journalism now principally reaches readers, at independent.com. The website's name, simply the paper's founding adjective, proved as apt online as in print, and the Independent's digital archive extends its record back through the merger era, giving Santa Barbara a searchable account of its own recent history produced largely by the paper itself.

The Independent's Santa Barbara

The paper's subject is one of America's most distinctive small cities: a coastal community of Spanish colonial revival architecture, a major research university at its edge, wine country inland, and politics shaped by wealth, environment and preservation. The Independent covers that whole territory, city and county government, courts, education, the arts and the restaurant and wine culture that draws the world's visitors, with the alternative weekly's freedom to write long and critically. Its cultural coverage in particular, theatre, film, music, books and dining, serves a readership whose cultural consumption exceeds its city's size, and has made the paper a tastemaker as well as a watchdog.

Environmental and land-use questions supply its hardest news. Santa Barbara's history includes the 1969 offshore oil spill that helped launch the modern environmental movement, and the tensions between preservation, housing, water and growth remain the county's permanent politics. A paper born from alternative titles in 1973 and 1984, consolidated in 1986 and strengthened by the journalists of 2006, has covered those tensions with institutional memory few competitors can match, knowing where each contested parcel, policy and promise began.

A Model for the Post-Daily City

The Independent's history after 2006 anticipated a question American journalism now asks everywhere: what happens to a city's news when its daily collapses in credibility or in fact? Santa Barbara's answer arrived early. The daily did not close, but its newsroom's talent migrated to the weekly, and the weekly, because it had spent twenty years building circulation, trust and business strength, could receive them. The lesson other cities draw from the case is that the receiving institution must exist before the crisis: an alternative weekly of substance, locally owned and editorially credible, is a city's insurance policy for its journalism.

Editor and Publisher and other industry chroniclers documented the Santa Barbara transfer as it happened, recognizing its rarity. National attention returned to the Independent periodically thereafter as the News-Press's own troubles continued, each time finding the weekly enlarged in role. Few alternative papers have so completely become their city's paper of record in substance while retaining the alternative form in name, schedule and style.

The Independent Today

Today the Santa Barbara Independent publishes on Thursdays in print and continuously online, under publisher Brandi Rivera, as Santa Barbara County's largest-circulation newspaper tradition and its principal alternative voice. It carries the combined inheritance of the News and Review of 1973, the Weekly of 1984, the merger of November 1986 and the newsroom migration of July 2006, a four-layer history no other paper in its county can claim.

For Santa Barbara, the Independent is proof that a city's journalism can survive the failure of its oldest institutions when a younger one has been built honestly. Founded on independence as a name, the paper was required in 2006 to be independent as a fact, and it was. That fulfilment, more than its circulation figures or its longevity since 1986, is the Santa Barbara Independent's distinction in American newspaper history.