Goleta Today 'Yesterday'

By Ed Piper

When I was a 23-year-old sports editor, my second job out of college, in 1977, I got my biggest scoop as a reporter.

I scooped the Santa Barbara News-Press, the biggest newspaper in the area. Phil Whalen, the AYSO commissioner and native of Ireland, and I hit it right off when he asked if my paper would run game box scores of the AYSO youth soccer games--the Santa Barbara News-Press had said "no".

I said "yes". I checked with my editor, Barbara Phillips, 32, the only one of us young reporters not in their twenties, and she said to go for it.

Well, on a weekday evening--we at the Goleta Today being a weekday morning newspaper--Phil called. It was a little before 9 p.m., with our 10:30 p.m. deadline coming up when my sports pages (usually one and a half pages of newsprint) had to be done.

"Santa Barbara is going to get a new pro soccer franchise," Phil told me. They were going to be called the Santa Barbara Condors. (They lasted a couple of years.) He had connections throughout the (then) tiny soccer community in the Santa Barbara area.

I went down the row of desks (we worked in a converted auto dealership off Los Carneros Road in Goleta, a mile or two from the UCSB campus) and told Barbara about Phil's tip. She knew all about my friendship with Phil, considering the youth box scores she willingly okayed for print some months earlier. Parents would drive up to Goleta a few miles away from Santa Barbara just to buy the paper, even extra copies. It increased our tiny circulation on those days. Barbara was only too happy to be part of that.

Again, she said to go for it. We vacated the top of the main page in the sports section with the paste-up room people, and told them we were totally redoing it. I typed out (on my manual Underwood typewriter) a headline: "Pro soccer team comes to SB". Some readers later complained that you don't substitute "SB" for Santa Barbara. I still went for it.

I wrote up a story with the Condors franchise announcement. This is the biggest thing we newspaper people do--go to print with a story before our competitors. That's what a scoop is.

The Santa Barbara News-Press was an afternoon paper. So they complained later that the Condors' announcement went to a dinky paper that came out in the morning. They didn't announce the pro soccer move until their edition the next afternoon, after our morning paper had already come out.

That's the story. We called our competitor the "Santa Barbara News-Suppress". They were old and stodgy. But they were the newspaper everybody in town read.

The reason I mention it now is that the News-Press just declared bankruptcy Friday (July 21), after 155 years of publication. A month ago they went to digital only. It didn't last. We're in a major era of change with the digital phenomenon.

And one other thing: my title above, "Goleta Today 'Yesterday'", refers to the one or two times our printing presses broke down and that day's paper didn't come out. In the newsroom on those days, we joked that the Goleta Today was the Goleta Yesterday.