Like archaeologists digging through dusty artifacts, a team of data specialists has been working to recover a slice of Santa Barbara newspaper history tucked away in a midcentury office building off State Street.
Spread over three rooms are the digital archives of the Santa Barbara News-Press, which ceased operations on July 21, 2023. The materials are a historic treasure trove of CDs, floppy disks, servers, hard drives and some 60 ancient computers left over from the decades when the storied newspaper was the city’s most dependable and comprehensive source of local news.
Now, information technology experts working with NEWSWELL, the news nonprofit that acquired the digital assets of the News-Press earlier this year, are seeing what can be salvaged from the archaic digital assets. The hope is they will prove valuable as NEWSWELL begins its launch of the News-Press.
After all, if you’re going to have a future, it helps to look to the past.
“It was fascinating. It was like going into a time machine,” said Christina Leonard, NEWSWELL’s director of operations and transformation, who had an early peek into the storage rooms. Ultimately, the team hopes to make as many News-Press stories, photos, illustrations and other features as possible available to readers in an online format.
The physical archives of the News-Press — including bound newspaper volumes, clippings and photo files — were acquired last fall by the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, which placed the only bid on the materials during bankruptcy proceedings.
The digital archives were acquired by local consultant Ben Romo and philanthropist Jason Yardi, who also bought the trademark, internet domain and social media accounts of the News-Press out of U.S. Bankruptcy Court and donated the property to NEWSWELL, part of Arizona State University’s Media Enterprise.
After Leonard and other NEWSWELL editors got an initial look at the digital archives, a team of IT specialists arrived to more fully inspect the hodgepodge of relics.
Just in time, too. The building housing the materials is slated to close for renovation in the next few months, which would have required the digital assets from the former newsroom to be moved.
The team pawed through floppy disks — a technology not seen in decades — and inspected vintage desktop computers, including vintage multicolored Macs. Massive servers were stacked at the back.
Sapna Satagopan, NEWSWELL’s director of product and innovation, called it a “first pass” through all of the assets. As she walked in, it struck her as “kind of a device museum. … They did a good job of holding on to things.”
The challenge was to figure out how to access the items and see whether they contained relevant data. When the group arrived, its members weren’t even sure the old computers would boot up.
Even though they were aided by a former News-Press employee with knowledge of the systems, the IT specialists had to get creative — plugging in a computer and hoping to find a compatible monitor to display the data. It felt like “we were putting Frankenstein together” from all the mixing and matching, said John Rome, ASU’s deputy chief information officer.
The group came armed with a list of passwords. Some worked. Some didn’t. After firing up a few computers and rooting around, the team eventually filled a backpack with hard drives for a later, more comprehensive look.
Though work is still underway, the tentative assessment is that there is a good chance that most of the News-Press stories from 2000 to 2019 can be restored online, Rome said. The team also believes it has access to digitized copies of News-Press stories from 2019 until the newspaper ceased publication in 2023. Other data will have to be evaluated to see what can be brought back to life.
Before leaving, the team came across a surprise — a truly authentic piece of Santa Barbara’s newspaper past. Mixed amid the technological devices was a paper-and-ink version of the news that graced Santa Barbara doorsteps for more than a century: a copy of the News-Press from the late 1800s.
After having spent hours trying to unlock secrets from the digital world, stumbling across a physical piece of the city’s long-ago history was a thrill.
“I mean, I’m literally holding history in my hand,” Satagopan said.
