More News-Press shenanigans

Journalists at the Santa Barbara News-Press are holding another press conference outside the newspaper today, this time to complain that eleven staffers have been suspended for trying to present a union letter to owner Wendy McCaw. Remaining newsroom employees have been seeking to bring in a union ever since the paper's top journalists quit in protest over McCaw's ethics in July. The paper also has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board over the Aug. 24 attempt by reporters and editors to deliver a letter to McCaw. This past weekend, McCaw's editorial page editor Travis Armstrong (whose temporary elevation to editor in chief sparked the July resignations, along with McCaw's ban on reporting his drunk driving sentence) ran a piece in the paper that called the union drive the work of "outsiders." A commenter at the Santa Barbara Independent's media blog laughed at that, saying that in Santa Barbara McCaw and Armstrong are considered the outsiders.