For 155 years, the Santa Barbara News-Press and its predecessors played a fundamental role in the California coastal city as its primary broadsheet newspaper. The paper’s historic legacy is messy, especially in the modern era.

But even a complicated legacy, marked by years of decline, deserves better than fears that it could live a second life as a “zombie website,” a type of news site infamous for replacing high-quality archives with low-quality or even AI-generated content.

The News-Press’s July 2023 bankruptcy and closure, and the paper’s faraway proposed buyer, have put a specter over its digital assets—leading to a live auction next week at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Barbara, where interested parties can try to outbid the proposed European buyer.

To be clear, the company with a tentative agreement to purchase those assets, Malta-based Weyaweya, has denied that it has dramatic changes in mind. Principal Max Noremo, who lives in Spain, has expressly said Weyaweya would not modify the website’s content.

“The plan is, if we do buy the domain, to revive the site with its previous content and find a buyer,” Noremo said in comments to the Santa Barbara Independent. “We do not plan to add any new content. The site will simply be restored; assuming the backup files of the website are complete, all the old articles will be preserved.”

(Noremo did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment.)

But it was nonetheless an out-of-nowhere situation that caught William Belfiore, a renewable energy worker who grew up in Santa Barbara, off-guard, because Weyaweya seemed to be paying what he felt was a surprisingly high amount of money for a distressed local news asset.

“There’s a bunch of real estate and other stuff that’s not being dealt with yet, and there was already a purchaser for it,” he said. “And they were looking to buy the entire trove of archives—web content, trademark, social media accounts—for $250,000. Which, even just reading that very dry court record, sort of jumps out at you.”

It was a discovery that has put Belfiore at the forefront of a movement to keep a local paper’s ownership local.

Why would a company like Weyaweya Ltd., which has no website, be interested in a random news website near the Pacific Coast? One answer might be the newspaper’s web domain. Purchased in 1995, when the New York Times Co. owned the paper, NewsPress.com is currently offline. But it’s particularly valuable from a search engine optimization (SEO) standpoint. It would likely still drive attractive search engine results, even without its history attached.

And digging a little deeper into Weyaweya, as Belfiore did by looking at Maltese business records, highlights that Noremo is an expert at this kind of work. A longtime affiliate marketer associated with Malta’s legalized online gambling industry, Noremo is tied to the 2018 purchase of online.casino, a $510,000 acquisition that is one of the largest of its kind, along with SEO firms through the holding company Red Earth Ltd. More recently, I helped reveal that Noremo was one of the owners of Lineup Publishing, the similarly opaque new owners of the once-iconic sports website Deadspin, ultimately culminating in a 404 Media story last month.

That company announced Deadspin would be redesigned to support “partnerships within the sports betting industry.” But does that mean a similar fate faces NewsPress.com?

The natural concern around that question has spurred Belfiore and other people with ties to the Santa Barbara community into action.

A concerned former citizen goes digging

The twentysomething Belfiore, concerned about what was happening in his hometown, kept close watch on what was happening in legal proceedings. Eventually, his curiosity about the issue and confusion about what would attract such a faraway buyer led him to seek assistance from his cousin, Zachary Grimshaw, an Arlington, Virginia-based digital strategist. Grimshaw immediately surmised the domain was valuable from an SEO standpoint, but was skeptical of the price tag.

“Why are they valuing just this domain at $250,000? Because the other assets couldn’t possibly be useful [for this purpose],” Grimshaw said, referring to the archive of content and the newspaper’s branding.

Additional digging into the issue, including legal document requests and online searches, led Belfiore and Grimshaw to Noremo and his background in online gaming, including extended interviews highlighting Noremo’s philosophy on SEO.

“They have a whole background in what they call iGaming, which is, you know, online gaming,” Belfiore added. “So that whole narrative fit. And then it ended up being totally backed up by basically all the business records we could find.”

The duo put together an op-ed for the Independent breaking down their findings, complete with a Google Drive link of their research. (Disclosure: My name pops up a few times.) Their goal was to encourage the community to put together a competing bid.

Noremo’s tie to the Deadspin sale, which they uncovered just before they published the piece, bolstered their suspicions about the News-Press’s possible fate. “We just stared at it for like 20 minutes, and we’re like, this is incredible,” Belfiore recalled. “It made us feel less crazy. It gave a lot of legitimacy to our story.” 

(In Noremo’s comments to the Independent, he emphasized that the News-Press purchase was unrelated to the Deadspin acquisition.)

Fear of AI-generated zombie news

The tale of the News-Press, even with its wrinkles, is not unique—though it usually doesn’t get this much attention. The first notable example of an established site being repurposed as an AI-powered SEO engine, the women’s site the Frisky, led to a successful secondary career for its owner, Serbian DJ Nebojša Vujinović Vujo, as Kate Knibbs reported for Wired in February.

This approach has come to affect websites as diverse as the political news site the Washington Independent, Iowa’s Clayton County Register, and the alt-weekly Philadelphia Weekly. In these situations, the old content largely stays put and is augmented by AI-generated copy. The goal: Use the archives to raise the presence of presumably more lucrative newer content.

As Grimshaw notes, this can have a long-term impact on our reliance on the news.

“Newspapers historically have been this public trust, something people turn to for credible and reliable information,” he said. “And if you’re Googling around, ending up on this page, and it’s not entirely clear that this is no longer an actual newspaper that’s run by someone who has intentions to actually publish credible and reliable news, that’s a whole different ball game.” 

Noremo and his business partners do not have clean hands on this front. As freelance journalist Michael Greshko uncovered in a series of posts on Bluesky last month, Noremo was involved in the purchase and operation of two niche content sites, Gambling Times and CricFolks.com, that have seen their articles replaced with low-quality or even AI-generated content.

There is a chance that Google could minimize the effect of AI-generated content of this nature. That’s one goal of the company’s latest update to its search algorithm, but it’s still to be seen what effect it will have long term.

So it’s with this in mind that Belfiore and Grimshaw published their op-ed last week—which appears to be building momentum in favor of a community-led purchase of the assets. Jean Yamamura, the opinion editor for the Independent, says the op-ed drew a strong community response.

“All I can tell you is that these two young men started something,” she wrote in an email. “We and others have begun to get inquiries, and we’ve sent them on to the bankruptcy trustee.”

A complicating factor in a complicated history

To be clear, this is just one twist and turn in a community media picture defined by them.

Brought together in its final form by longtime owner (and, briefly, U.S. Senator) Thomas More Storke in 1932, the Santa Barbara News-Press began to draw national attention in 2000, after billionaire local resident Wendy McCaw purchased the paper, beating out three major newspaper chains. The move was cheered at the time it happened, but quickly became a cautionary tale of how local ownership of a media asset can go very wrong.

The first few years after McCaw’s purchase were uneventful, but in 2006, she took a more active role in the paper’s editorial coverage, after which numerous labor disputes emerged, including a mass walkout of editorial staff members and attempts at unionization. Former employees, as part of the protests, even publicly encouraged readers to cancel their subscriptions.

“What McCaw didn’t seem to realize is that she had not bought just any daily; she had bought a daily paper in a town where people care passionately about every little thing,” the Independent wrote of its competitor’s demise last summer.

The News-Press had a long history of investigative coverage of local news, and the journalists who worked there had not lost that fighting spirit, even in the midst of its controversial ownership and declining headcount. But by the end, the paper was starved of resources. For example, as Belfiore and Grimshaw note, its real estate assets, which many owners might look to sell to raise revenue, were separated away from the newspaper itself. The publication shut down with less than $50,000 in assets and between $1 million and $5 million in outstanding debts, the Los Angeles Times reported.

From the perspective of a trustee in a bankruptcy court, an infusion of money well above the asking price of the paper’s assets must seem appealing, given the many creditors the defunct paper still owes. But the purchase price may not be worth the cultural cost.

The case for (and against) fighting back

Given Belfiore and Grimshaw’s efforts to fight the asset sale, I asked them about the bigger picture: If your local paper is about to be purchased for its domain, or to publish AI-generated copy, is it worth fighting back in this way, starting a campaign to up the funds to help buy a website, so it doesn’t land in the hands of spammers or anyone else with less-than-ideal interests at heart?

Belfiore took a realist angle on the topic: “You’ve got to say, to be honest, how much are you willing to fight for the maybe historic name and brand of what was your local paper, digital, print, or otherwise? And is that something you need to go after, given these price tags?”

Starting something fresh with new resources, Belfiore added, might be a somewhat easier road, but not by much.

“It’s tough,” he said. “Basically, in both cases, what you’re asking for is significant community buy-in and collective action, right?”

Santa Barbara appears to be going down both roads. On top of hinted-at community bids during next week’s bankruptcy auction, the city and its surrounding county have come to support a bevy of other news outlets.

Beyond the 38-year-old Santa Barbara Independent, the websites Edhat and Noozhawk have helped fill the gap lost by the News-Press. Santa Barbara can survive without the historic paper, but keeping its archives and history local, in both physical and digital forms, would certainly be better than the alternative.

At the start of Citizen McCaw, a 2008 documentary about Wendy McCaw and the messy labor disputes around the Santa Barbara News-Press, a narrator introduces its complex subject by stating, “The situation in Santa Barbara is really the future of journalism in a nutshell. Is it about money? Is it about ethics? Is it about responsibility?”

In many ways, even in death, the city’s daily newspaper of record still raises those very questions for the rest of the journalism industry. Here’s to hoping that it doesn’t mean a paper near you is under threat of becoming an AI-generated mess.