Philanthropy in Santa Barbara

Bill Macfadyen is the founder and publisher of Noozhawk.com, Santa Barbara’s freshest news and information source — and its only 24/7 professional news site. Commanding a staff of seven full-time professional journalists, two full-time sales representatives and an army of community contributors, he’s on a quest to figure out how to make online local news viable and sustainable.

He was the co-founder and editor and publisher of the South Coast Beacon, a weekly community newspaper that made its debut in 2002, won the California Newspaper Publishers Association General Excellence Award the following year and went bust in 2005. Not having the sense to get a real job, he turned his attention to the Internet, where the overhead is lower and the optimism knows no boundaries.

Bill moonlights as a board member of the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce, Santa Barbara Partners in Education, Santa Barbara High School’s Multimedia Arts & Design Academy and the Westmont College Foundation. He’s also a member of the Santa Barbara Council on Alcoholism & Drug Abuse’s Fighting Back Steering Committee.

He has served as senior warden at All Saints By-the-Sea Episcopal Church, was recently elected to a second term as a Vestry member and is a past board member of All Saints Parish School. He’s also a past member of the statewide organizing committee of Common Sense California, which is now part of the Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.

In 2008, Bill was named Entrepreneur of the Year by both the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Santa Barbara Technology & Industry Association. In 2012, he received the national Journalism Education Association’s Friend of Scholastic Journalism Award in recognition of Noozhawk’s work with The Charger Account, the student news website at Dos Pueblos High School. He and Noozhawk are founding members of the Local Independent Online News Publishers Assocation (LION).

He was a California Endowment Health Journalism Fellow (Class of 2011) at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, and was the architect of Prescription for Abuse, a six-month Noozhawk team project exploring the misuse and abuse of prescription medications in Santa Barbara County.

Bill and his wife, Missy, live in Montecito with their beloved Alaskan malamute, Riley. They have three grown children, all of whom have worked for Noozhawk.