After slogging in the salt mines of local journalism for roughly 57 years, writer, reporter, and editor John Hankins was recently awarded the National Sierra Club’s “National Communication Excellence” award.
Hankins grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, where his parents raised 100 chickens. Instead of having a paper route, he delivered eggs. Wanting to see the world, Hankins joined the Navy after high school, and saw enough of the Pacific Ocean to settle briefly in Oakland. There, he worked for the Oakland Tribune and then moved to Santa Barbara to attend UCSB in the late 1960s. He reported for the campus paper, then the Daily Gaucho, covering the bank burning, the burning of the ROTC building, and other riots. At the latter, he noted, protesters demanded he and his photographer turn over their film and notes; they both refused. Later the FBI would ask for the same; they too were refused.
Hankins also covered the oil spill of 1969, getting to work alongside Bob Sollen, who during his days at the Santa Barbara News-Press pioneered the field of environmental journalism. Hankins would be hired briefly by the News-Press, put in some time with a Goleta paper, but eventually created his own enterprise, the County News Service. With that, he functioned as the local equivalent of a wire service for local publications that came to rely upon him for his straight-down-the middle account of what the county supervisors were doing every Tuesday. For new reporters, Hankins’s questions at various county press conferences were invariably far more illuminating than the answers given. In 1986, the supervisors issued Hankins and County News Service an official proclamation, noting that after writing 6,000 articles, he’d never had to issue one retraction…