Santa Cruz Sentinel

Ever since I moved to Santa Cruz in 1989 The Sentinel has been a poor newspaper, however I find it hard to believe that it manages to always get progressively worse. The Sentinel prints absolutely no actual news. I just got done looking at today’s edition & it is filled with hagiographies of local residents (a lawyer, a guitar player)…which basically amounts to free advertising for whatever the industry they are in. To add to the lack of any useful content, the writing is atrocious. Seriously, their writers need to take a 7^th grade grammar class to get them to at least the standard of most US papers. If you need to have the SC Police Department’s press releases simplified by a few sentences, then you might enjoy this paper. There may be some entertainment in reading the online comments from Santa Cruz High School dropouts, but for a town that houses a university like UCSC, The Sentinel amounts to the most pathetic excuse for a town newspaper I have ever seen. The only mystery is how this destruction to trees has managed to continue for so long in a place where most people would like to think they are concerned about the environment.

this is not in any way a NEWS paper. it is ONLY ONE SIDED and blind to all of the rest of the countys resendents who have an open MIND and able to think for our selves.

I’ve been a subscriber of the print edition for years. Unfortunately, the Sentinel has recently taken a turn for the worse. The paper edition keeps getting thinner and thinner. Even the Sunday edition has gotten so thin that it doesn’t even feel like a Sunday paper any more.
To make matters worse, the subscription price went up after they added the online access. People who subscribe to the printed version don’t need the online version, yet it’s impossible to subscribe to the print version only (there’s a reason people subscribe to the printed version… it’s because the online version is a pain to read!).
I also notice many, many mistakes (spelling, grammar, etc.) in the articles all of a sudden, and many articles all of a sudden don’t even pertain to Santa Cruz County any more but report about unimportant news events in San Jose.
Other than that, it’s a pretty good paper.

i had a subscription for yrs… i let it lapse because i was out of town a lot… i looked on line to restart the delivery… no record of my account… finally called the local number… apparently a small amount is due… news to me… i have no bill for that… the guy i talked to was helpful… but not interested in ways to make this easier for a customer… going to send me a new bill… but the past due amount will not show up… i have to add it to the bill… i said fine… feel like i am really putting an effort into being a customer of this small local paper… he asked me if i wrote down the amount of the past due so i would remember it ??? nice… worry more about what u can do to streamline customer service… maybe u would have more customers…

Wow Santa Cruz Sentinel way to lose a customer. Maybe in the future you can pretend to care. All we asked for the 10 000 time was to have the paper here on time. Rudest customer service ever. Wish they had negative stars.

I’m writing this as a paid subscriber to their eEdition, preferring to read the «local» paper each morning on my iPad or iPhone. I’ve done this for almost three years, and quality keeps going from awful to awfuller.
eEdition is a typo-​ridden nightmare: broken articles, chopped up headlines, typos in every article, and no integration with digital resources. I’ve been reading for almost three years, and it only gets worse. It’s appalling that the Sentinel considers this to be an acceptable product for us PAID CUSTOMERS; I guarantee that if the printed paper went out with 10% of the errors of the eEdition, heads would roll until it got fixed.
PLEASE SENTINEL, treat your eEdition as an important product and FIX IT. What you’ve been putting out for years is very bad and only getting worse. Who is accountable for this? One star, because frankly anyone paying attention would be ashamed to let this out the door.

It’s not the New York Times. It is a local paper with a fairly small population. It does a reasonably good job on local affairs. Entertainment must be looked for. Regional coverage is gotten from the Murky News, sometimes. The rest is off the wires or are op-​ed pieces gotten from the NY Times, actually.
If you want to track Santa Cruz politics and other goings-​on, subscribe.

Warning! Incredibly bad service for classified ads!!! Where are the negative stars? There were a multitude of problems I needed to contact them about in the course of one ad listing. The main issue was communication between their print ads department and their IT department for online listings. When I placed the ad, the print ad listed fine but the online ad was not listed. I phoned about this numerous times and the woman finally said it had been taken care of, but when I looked again the ad was still not posted online. I finally had to do the work for them as, after about the forth phone call, they ended up giving me the name and number for the contact in their IT department! This finally fixed the online ad issue, but only for the moment. When I decided to change the ad a few weeks later, the entire situation ended up pretty much repeating itself all over again! There were other issues as well, and the amount of time I was putting in to phone them regarding these and other issues was ridiculous.
Also, since my online ad was not listed until about a week later because of their screw up, I had to ask them for a credit (no, they would not just automatically give it to me, and no apologies or anything). When my credit should have kicked in at the end of my paid listing period, the ad disappeared, and I needed to phone them once again to inquire about my ad credit. When I called I specifically asked for the woman I’d been communicating with by name but the person who answered said she was no longer working there. I discovered they had no recollection of my credit or why I would have even received it in the first place! And I had to explain my story all over again.
Finally after this call, I didn’t even bother to see if the credited ad actually posted online for the final week. These fools just aren’t worth my time anymore and I’m never using the Sentinel again. Sentinel = $ 200 for 2 months ad plus all this hassle, or Craigslist = free, more exposure, and totally reliable… think about it folks!

Mostly regurgitated wire service news. The local news it does carry usually has incorrect facts with a definite editorial bias. Hardly any in-​depth investigative reporting, just press releases of whatever organization in vogue that has their current «in» factor. The Senile gives attention to the most inane, the most destructive of our community and by doing so, gives them a certain amount of legitimacy.

I love to read the local news, but God I wish these people could get their act together! Delivery is spotty, and don’t sleep in on the weekends, because there won’t be anyone staffing the customer service dept if you get up late and find that you don’t have the Sunday paper AGAIN.
Also, payment is made to some newsgroup out of town (Los Angeles). For some reason, although they have no problem taking your money they seem utterly lost when it come to crediting your account. The local cust. service solution for this is to give them ANOTHER payment over the phone w/​a credit card. Excuse me, but I don’t pay twice for the same thing. If you cashed my check then make some damn effort to find out what your did with the money.
Oh — did I mention they put some other person totally unknown to me and unrelated to me on my account? I don’t even know how something like that happens. I may just need to switch to the San Jose paper

This is THE most pathetic newspaper I’ve ever seen for a town of Santa Cruz’s size. The only decent thing about it is they do a somewhat decent job covering the «major» local news but it ends there. And you can read that stuff online. The Business section was OK — especially on Sundays — except they recently slashed that section so you get about ½ page of business during the week and a page or two at best on weekends. In fact, they called their recent design an enhancement but all they did was increase the font size so they could include less news and sell the same ad space.
The paper is not even located in Santa Cruz as they print it over the hill. And the HQ is out of state I believe.
Go to Google News and save the coin.

My grandpa, God rest his soul, called the Sentinel the «Senile» because he thought it did a bad job covering our community.
Like everyone below says, the writing is pretty average. And the paper certainly won’t be winning any beauty contests or design awards, although I’ve seen much worse.
I think their big problem is that they run a lot of wire stories from the Associated Press or other papers. I feel like people don’t go to the Sentinel for world or even national news necessarily — they can get this anywhere else. The Sentinel, therefore, should devote more time and resources to getting better local news and more original content.
I will say I appreciate that they let you write obituaries for your loved ones. Not all newspapers do that. My grandma wrote a nice one for my grandpa when he passed away. Ironically, in true «Senile» form, there were typos and misspellings in the copy. My grandpa had the last laugh, I guess.
P. S.: The paper is owned by MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper chains in the U.S.; it also owns the Merc.

For a medium size town, the Santa Cruz Sentinel must be one of the worst papers in California. Poor writers writing about subjects that no one cares about. Abysmal entertainment news, how do we ever know who is playing, when and where. You only find out AFTER they have played, not before and what good is that? And when was the last time they have ever broken a truly big story? I literally can’t remember. Do they sleep all day?
I have never and would never pay for it. It’s always available for free at the library or at Gayle’s. Besides, you can just get the free papers (Good Times, Metro) if you want in depth local stories and information.
SC Sentinel, the internet will kill you off and no one will ever notice.

The sentinel has always been a subpar newspaper with sometimes awful writing. Also, it has not been based in Santa Cruz since sometime at the end of last year. Their website says their new address is
1800 Green Hills Road, Suite 210, Scotts Valley, CA 95 066

STOP CALL MY HOUSE AND ASKING ME IF I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR PAPER. AFTER THE FIRST TWO YEARS I STARTED ANSWERING MY PHONE IN SPANISH SO YOU WOULD LEAVE ME ALONE! Thank god they haven’t caught on yet… although it surprises me they don’t have Spanish speaking telemarketers.whatever. I usually get the local news on television. I personally prefer the San Jose Merc… what can I say, old habits die hard.

Pretty decent local news coverage. Does anyone actually read it? Seems more people read Good Times and SC Metro.
Subscription price is reasonable.
Sunday comics are okay, but not as extensive as SJ Mercury News.
Regional, National, and Global coverage is lacking.