Craig Smith moderated a panel discussion on the future of journalism.

In the crowd were a handful of ex-News-Press employees including Barney Brantingham, Melinda Burns, John Zant, Starshine Roshell, Sarah Sinclair, Barry Punzal, Andrea Huebner, Bob Klinger and yours truly.

Also in attendance were a few current News-Pressers Scott Steepleton, Don Katich, Marilyn McMahon and Karna Hughes. No revelent story on the News-Press website today though, don’t know if there was even a Brief in the paper – one would have to read it to be sure.  Hmmm, perhaps they were just looking. But, knowing the News-Press – it just may be in Mondays’ Edition. let me know if you Read it.

It was a capacity crowd for the evening, close to about 200 people .  After the Discussion Scott Steepleton of the S.B. News-Press walked out, foregoing the public question session. Missing the statement of David Pritchett who said that even though he refused to do a face-to-face interview with the News-Press, they incorrectly quoted material from his website and stated that the information was from his site. [ http://www.davidpritchett.org/ ]

Here is Susan Paternos’ (director of the journalism program at Chapman University) talk in its entirety.

She speaks of her News-Press Lawsuit and about the future of Newspapres in general along with other things of interest regarding journalism.

Atttended by: Jerry Roberts, former San Francisco Chronicle managing editor and former Santa Barbara News-Press editor and publisher; Nick Welsh, editor and reporter for the Santa Barbara Independent; James Rainey, media columnist for the Los Angeles Times; and Dick Flacks, UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus of sociology, radio host and community activist.

I Took a few Photographs as well just to show the size of the crowd. Additional Pphotographs provided by Robert Klinger, are available at reproduction sizes: Contact here using the comment form or the Contact page if interested. (edit: 06-20-2009 8:36p.m. -jm).