The New News-Press Picks a Fourth Generation Santa Barbara Guy as Its Top Business Executive

A Harvard-educated, SB native, William Belfiore played a crucial role in saving more than a century of the published history of his home town.

By Chris Woodyard /Santa Barbara News-Press

A lone voice sounded the alarm about the future of a storied Santa Barbara news institution. Now, the one who spoke out is taking its reins.

William Belfiore has been named general manager of the new Santa Barbara News-Press.

As a concerned Santa Barbara native, Belfiore played an instrumental role in warning the community that decades of digital News-Press archives were in danger of being bought by an offshore company. That foreign business appeared poised to resurrect the news site, which shuttered in 2023, as a low-quality advertising website focused solely on milking the newspaper’s good name in order to post links to other sites.

It would have been a far cry from the critical role the News-Press played as the region’s premiere newsgathering organization for more than 150 years.

Belfiore’s 2024 op-ed in the Santa Barbara Independent became a call to action, attracting the attention of a local philanthropist who, in turn, bought the News-Press’ digital assets. That property was later turned over to NEWSWELL, a nonprofit run by Arizona State University dedicated to supporting local news.

For months, NEWSWELL has been conducting listening sessions and laying the foundation to bring back the News-Press as a full-fledged addition to Santa Barbara’s news landscape, and offering its journalism for use in other media outlets. Belfiore will now play a key role in shaping the news outlet’s future, from developing strategy to hiring an editor and other key staff.

“It’s awesome,” Belfiore said of his appointment. “Being able to serve your hometown in a new venture that you think is going to have a huge impact … that’s a dream.”

In trying to bring attention to the plight of the News-Press, Belfiore never imagined he would go on to lead the operation. But Nicole Carroll, NEWSWELL’s executive director, saw him as the ideal candidate.

“Will’s heart has always been with the Santa Barbara community, and we are overjoyed he’s coming home to serve it,” Carroll said. “Through our studies and listening sessions, we’ve heard the community’s call for deeper, more meaningful coverage of the issues that shape their lives. Research shows that when people are informed, communities flourish. That’s the mission Will has embraced — to provide the insight and information Santa Barbara County needs to grow stronger, healthier and more connected.”

Belfiore will enter the media world as a new face. He has served as a consultant and clean-energy manager since graduating from Harvard University in 2019. He’s worked in Milan, New York and Santa Monica. At 28, he’s open to innovation and fresh ideas. He knows, for instance, that he wants the News-Press to be more comprehensive in its coverage of Santa Barbara County.

He said he plans to dive into market research, but with a key advantage: “I know how the community works.”

Once a Don, Always a Don. Belfiore is a fourth-generation Santa Barbara native. His mother was an English and Spanish teacher in junior high schools. His father led a small telecommunications company based in Santa Maria. For about a decade, his dad commuted to work from the family’s home in Santa Barbara’s Upper Eastside.

His local roots go deeper still: His maternal grandfather was a mechanic for the Santa Barbara Fire Department. His maternal great-grandparents arrived as Italian immigrants, with both great-grandfathers working as gardeners at Montecito estates.

Belfiore attended public schools. At Santa Barbara High, he delved into a dizzying array of pursuits. He sang in an a cappella group and played the string bass. He joined the tennis team and ran cross country. He also was active in student government, serving as student body president his senior year.

Not surprisingly given his try-anything attitude, Belfiore said upon graduation that his “primary interests were still rather all over the place.” He yearned to see the larger world and applied to Harvard.

In a serendipitous twist, the local Harvard alumnus randomly chosen to interview Belfiore in 2014 was Jerry Roberts, the respected former editor of the News-Press. Belfiore recognized the name, but didn’t know Roberts’ full background until he did some quick research before their encounter at a now-closed Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on upper State Street.

“I looked him up, and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s the (former) star editor-in-chief of the News-Press,’ ” Belfiore recounted.

The interview went swimmingly, and Belfiore was admitted to Harvard. Little did either man know their paths would cross again years later. Told of Belfiore’s appointment as general manager of the News-Press, Roberts was enthusiastic.

“I could not be more pleased for William or more delighted and excited for Santa Barbara,” he said. “He is triple smart — resourceful and determined, but more importantly, cares deeply about his community. His ethical values and professional standards are perfectly suited and essential for guiding the town’s newest — and oldest — journalistic enterprise.”

College gave Belfiore the opportunity to dabble in journalism. He penned about 10 stories for the daily student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, as well as the Harvard Political Review. But his major and primary focus involved environmental science and public policy.

After graduation, he worked as a consultant in Italy, having minored in Italian. In 2021, he joined a global renewable energy storage firm, Energy Vault, where most recently he was a senior product manager.

Through it all, he never left behind his love of Santa Barbara. While splitting time between New York and Los Angeles, he learned about the bankruptcy proceedings involving the News-Press.

The new News-Press. The newspaper traces its roots to 1868. For more than a century, Santa Barbara residents depended on the paper as their primary source of news. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for editorials critical of the right-wing John Birch Society. The paper remained under local ownership until 1964, when it was sold to the owner of the Philadelphia Bulletin. It changed hands in 1984, when it was acquired by the New York Times, and then again in 2000, when billionaire Wendy McCaw bought it.

At first, all went well. But by 2006, the staff was in open revolt over what they described as McCaw’s and her cohorts’ meddling in news coverage decisions, moves they said tainted the News-Press’ reputation for objectivity. Roberts and other editors quit. The battles would continue sporadically until McCaw’s Ampersand Publishing filed for bankruptcy protection in 2023 and shuttered the newspaper.

Bankruptcy filings do not generally make for compelling reading. But articles on the newspaper’s demise and impending sale fueled Belfiore’s curiosity. He pored over federal documents online on the PACER site, Public Access to Court Electronic Records. He described it as “sort of an odd hobby.”

That hobby turned serious when he discovered that a Maltese company appeared to be on track to buy the assets of the News-Press. Further digging revealed the potential buyer was apparently a “backlink farm,” a search-engine optimization strategy that harvests page views by using a trusted, respected web address that then directs readers to links for other sites.

On March 29, 2024, Belfiore’s op-ed appeared in the Independent under the headline, “Santa Barbara’s Collective Memory, Sold for Kindling.”

It described the likely buyer as “a no-name foreign firm headquartered in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.” Belfiore warned that if the firm were to acquire the remaining assets of the News-Press, it could ditch the newspaper’s digital archives, rather than post them for use by scholars, students and everyday readers.

“The result of this business model is as predictable as it is disturbing: high-quality online content libraries from across the human experience are impregnated with parasitic paid pablum until only a zombie site remains,” he wrote.

In addition to writing the opinion piece, Belfiore also reconnected with Roberts, the former News-Press editor, and reached out to Santa Barbara consultant, Ben Romo.

Romo worked with local philanthropist Jason Yardi, who ultimately submitted the winning bid to buy the News-Press’ online assets. The digital property was later turned over to NEWSWELL, which began work soliciting countywide community feedback to help reimagine the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Some 1,100 bound volumes of old newspapers, as well as thousands of photographs and negatives, were separately acquired by the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

That could have been the end of Belfiore’s involvement. Mission accomplished: The News-Press had been saved.

But the new news organization needed a new leader, a general manager. Belfiore told NEWSWELL’s Carroll that he hoped the News-Press could return to its role as a vital source of news and information in Santa Barbara County.

Bottom line. Now he’s helping map that course. Besides wanting to cover Santa Barbara County more broadly, he also is examining how to modernize the operation to offer a variety of distribution options — not just traditional articles, for instance, but podcast and video formats too. There won’t be any return to print for the moment.

“We’re aware of the fact there’s quite a lot of good quality journalism all over the place,” he said. “The problem is ensuring that it actually reaches audiences.” That means having trusted journalists in direct contact with the community. It also means reaching audiences that may have been overlooked.

Belfiore encourages everyone to follow the News-Press’ progress by signing up for the newsletter. There’s so much that can be done with the reimagined news organization, he said. The new News-Press can become “the largest professional newsroom in the county and potentially on the Central Coast.”

Chris Woodyard is an award-winning veteran journalist and blogger who now writes for NEWSWELL. He was the Los Angeles bureau chief for USA Today and has worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Las Vegas Sun and other major news outlets.

Image: Courtesy photo.