William M. Macfadyen

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, three 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 UCSB Economic Forecast Project, the Westmont College Foundation, the Santa Barbara Club, the Montecito Association and Santa Barbara Partners in Education, and is a former board chairman of the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce and twice served as board chairman of the Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce. 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, where he completed two separate terms 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 & 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 Association (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.