than any of the other outlets, attracting the most readers in its history. Close observers of the news here say the presence of the upstart has pushed all the outlets in town to up their journalistic games.
“Ken Doctor seems to want to change the subject. Rather than provide real transparency about the actual performance of his website, he instead disparages an honest to goodness daily newspaper,” Guy Gilmore, chief operating officer of MediaNews Group, which owns the Sentinel, and Tribune Publishing, said in a statement. “Websites don’t fare well in competition with printed daily newspapers, so Doctor is misguided in his obsession with the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Dan Pulcrano, executive editor and publisher of Good Times, wrote an essay that not only invited Doctor to take Lookout elsewhere but said that calling Santa Cruz a news desert was “a bald-faced lie” and an insult to “the amazing work being done by local writers and editors.” “He really understands what makes the community tick,” said Bill Maxfield, principal at a local public relations firm. “There are people who will go wherever Wallace goes.”
Royal Calkins, an award-winning reporter in his days with the Sentinel and other papers, recalls when he brought Lookoutat a nursing home chain with a 92-bed facility in Santa Cruz. A Lookout editor declined to publish the story because the outlet didn’t have enough reporters for the inevitable follow-up coverage. The response felt “timid,” Calkins said, “and it made me a little sad.”
“It was very top down, not collaborative,” said one of the sources. “He only trusted his own decisions.” Doctor attributed the departures largely to the isolation of COVID-19 and the “great resignation” that hit some parts of the economy. In retrospect, it might have been best to delay the launch, Doctor said, adding: “The stress of trying to put together a team and culture is just really hard.”