Travis fires back in Santa Barbara

Travis Armstrong, the Wendy McCaw aide whose elevation to publisher and newsroom boss — and suppression of his DUI sentence from the news pages — sparked the mass departure of News-Press editors has posted his enemies list on the paper's editorial page. Armstrong names several local politicians and the Los Angeles Times as co-conspirators in a campaign to make him and the News-Press look bad. The whole thing is posted at BlogaBarbara, where the locals are guffawing. Here's an L.A.-centric excerpt:

Perhaps most disheartening has been the L.A. Times because of what appears in my personal view to be journalistic ethical questions involving the newspaper's coverage. The Times has set up a subscription booth across De la Guerra Plaza from the News-Press building.

In Times reporter James Rainey's interview with me while I temporarily served as acting publisher in July, I asked him if the newspaper's assistant managing editor for Page 1, John Arthur, had a hand in one of Mr. Rainey's stories on the News-Press resignations. The impression I got from Mr. Rainey's dancing around the question was yes. Mr. Arthur, before this story appeared, told one of the departing editors in an e-mail to "hang in there! Best, John."

How's that for journalistic detachment?

Another Times reporter who has written about the resignations is Catherine Saillant. She works in the smallish Ventura bureau alongside Steven Chawkins, husband of former News-Press metro editor Jane Hulse Chawkins. (Mr. Chawkins has a history of chasing News-Press stories. Yesterday, he wrote about how a veterans group is backing away from the proposal to turn Santa Rosa Island into a private hunting ground for retired soldiers. The News-Press had the story on Page 1 last Friday.)

The blog's commenters also speculate that gay employees of the News-Press are likely uncomfortable about their jobs now that syndicated advice-giver Dr. Laura Schlesinger is on board as a columnist. Armstrong notes, by the way, that he is no longer publisher. And Editor & Publisher says that two more journalists — a reporter and a copy editor — have resigned.