Community Post: Operation Cold Shoulder

NEWS MEDIA ADVISORY
For Immediate Release – February 15, 2007

Wake-Up Wendy Wednesday
A Rally to Launch Operation Cold Shoulder

Wednesday, 21 February 2007
12 noon to 1 pm in De La Guerra Plaza, downtown Santa Barbara

SANTA BARBARA – Organizers expect hundreds of people to rally and show support for the newsroom employees of the Santa Barbara News-Press. Nearly 50 writers, editors, and other staff have been unfairly terminated from their jobs or have resigned out of principle since the well-known meltdown of this community institution last July. This demonstration will be an opportunity for people to advocate for worker rights and a credible free press that actually reports on itself. Creative picket signs and costumes are encouraged.

Speakers will include:
· Brian Barnwell, Santa Barbara City Councilmember
· Elizabeth Robinson, KCSB radio and community TV journalist
· Bill Connell, the Hot Dog Man
· Kathleen Rodriguez, sports fan
· John Zant, 38-year veteran sports reporter recently terminated
· Newsroom Employees with personal stories, updates, and announcements

This rally aims to inspire action. Operation Cold Shoulder will be launched as a community response to the continuingly abhorrent behavior practiced by the News-Press, such as terminating loyal employees who write the truth, refusing to meet with neutral community leaders, intimidating local small businesses, suing other journalists doing their job, declining to publish well-reasoned but contrary opinions, allowing the important news to go unreported, and other insults. The News-Press is violating the public trust as part of its business plan, and now needs to be shunned and given the Cold Shoulder until it becomes the valuable and meaningful newspaper and community asset it once was only 8 months ago.

Operation Cold Shoulder includes these and other actions that everyone is encouraged to follow:

• Continue cancellations of newspaper subscriptions.
  
• Urge advertisers to stop buying ads in the newspaper and at the News-Press controlled radio station, KZSB-AM.
  
• Find the news in other newspapers and media, such as radio, TV, web sites, and blogs.
  
• Suggest that individuals, public agencies, community organizations, and political leaders stop sending news releases and announcements to the News-Press, and stop giving interviews and returning calls and emails.
  
• Ask the public to stop placing classified ads, calendar listings, garage sale notices, wedding announcements, and obituaries in the News-Press and instead place them in other publications.
  
• Request non-profits NOT to invite the News-Press society-page writers to their charity events.
  
• Encourage news sources, individuals, and organizations NOT to participate in any of the KZSB radio programs, activities, or public service announcements.
  
• Write letters to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expressing concern that the News-Press controls a radio station and a newspaper in the same town.
  
• Raise awareness that the News-Press owns and controls the other local publications Goleta Valley Voice, El Mexicano, and Blue Edge Magazine.
  
• Picket every Wednesday at 12 noon through the end of March.
  

Operation Cold Shoulder and this rally are a community-based campaign separate from the Union activities of the newsroom employees. This campaign is by local people concerned about the continuing decline of this daily newspaper of record for the Santa Barbara area.