SBMS Teen Press team logo

The SBMS Teen Press represents teens and families in the Santa Barbara area and the local region, covering newsworthy events and individuals, and reviewing films, concerts and performances in Santa Barbara and beyond.


Operating out of Santa Barbara Middle School, the Teen Press has travelled to Washington, D.C. to cover the inauguration of President Obama, to Austin,TX to cover South by Southwest Festivals, twice to Las Vegas to INTERBIKE to review products and interview bicycle noteworthies, and twice to San Francisco to cover Macworld Expo. The Teen Press was originally formed in order to cover the 22nd Santa Barbara International Film Festival, which it continues to report on annually, and has since covered diverse topics including the controversy surrounding the Santa Barbara News Press, city planning and global warming. Some notable figures interviewed by the Teen Press include former V.P. Al Gore, candidate for President Dennis Kucinich,the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Congresswoman Lois Capps, Anglelina Jolie & Brad Pitt, Helen Mirren, Will Smith, Forest Whitaker, Ray Bradbury, and many others. The Teen Press is happy to be a partner with The Lobero Theatre, providing coverage of select live performance events to our teen audience.


The Teen Press is comprised of student journalists who research, schedule and conduct interviews for their own stories, as well as write, create audio blogs, shoot and edit videos for online publishing under the direction of faculty advisors John Seigel Boettner, and David Teton-Landis. Teen staff members change three times in the academic year, and are admitted to the Teen Press on the basis of an application, sample work and teacher recommendations.


The Teen Press website has had over 62,000 viewers in the last twelve months, including visitors from North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. As of late January, 2012, our YouTube channel statistics show 191,202 video viewings.








The SBMS Teen Press wishes to thank all of those individuals and organizations who have made it possible to explore the world of journalism by giving us their time and/or resources, in the form of an interview or by facilitating our access, or by sponsoring our activities.

A VERY SPECIAL thanks to:

  • Santa Barbara International Film Festival & Carol Marshall Public Relations for superlative support in our ongoing access to and coverage of the film festival and related events

  • The Lobero Theater for support during the film festival and our new partnership for covering live performances at the Lobero!

  • South by Southwest Festivals for generous support for our coverage of the 2010 festivals,

  • Sennheiser, Inc., for providing us with a wireless microphone set, a shootgun microphone, and innumberable headsets for editing and quality control.

  • Vestalife, for providing us with Ladybug speaker sets to review (and to very pleasureably use!).

  • ifrogz, for providing us with some great headphones during MacWorld Expo 2009!

  • Apple, Inc. for granting us access to Macworld Expo 2008, including the keynote speech by Steve Jobs

  • The Mandalay Bay for granting us complementary rooms for our coverage of Interbike 2007 in Las Vegas, and Jay Wolf at Helen's Cycles, who provided us with our show passes

Click on an image or link to see the interview...