Weekend Open Thread: Say Hello to “the Los Angeles Register of Santa Ana!”

By
Greg Diamond
– December 13, 2013Posted in: "The OC", Fresh Juice, OC Register
OC Register of OC

Apparently, we shall soon have to begin to specify.

Oh yes.  In the spirit of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and the KOCE becoming PBS SoCal, the Orange County Register has tipped its cards.  What Los Angeles journalism needs right now is a big honking paywall!

The news is so big that the Register’s current paywall could not even contain it!

The co-owner and publisher of the Orange County Register announced Thursday that the company will move broadly into Los Angeles County early next year and publish a new, seven-day-a-week newspaper, the Los Angeles Register.

“We will be delivering a Los Angeles Register to the entirety of Los Angeles County,” Aaron Kushner told Orange County Register staff at a town hall meeting.

Kushner said specifics of the expansion are being worked out but that the new newspaper will be launched “soon” and will emphasize local Los Angeles news just like the Orange County Register covers its communities.

“It will be a daily newspaper of not quite the heft of the Orange County Register,” Kushner said, adding the publication will be larger in total pages than any of the existing newspapers in Los Angeles. In addition, he said, the Register would launch an unspecified number of Los Angeles community weeklies.

The reaction of the Los Angeles Times was to start trembling and then completely freak out at the impending arrival of the Los Angeles Register of Santa Ana.  (Or, perhaps, the Orange County Register of Los Angeles.  This is so confusing!)  Well, actually, that’s only a guess.  Let’s check:

The media conglomerate, which earlier this year started a Long Beach edition, announced the L.A. newspaper at a staff meeting Thursday at its Santa Ana headquarters.

…

“It’s a fabulous market,” he said. “We’re excited to bring our brand of community building, local newspapering and our political perspective to Los Angeles.”

The Los Angeles Register would be a stand-alone product separate from the Orange County Register, he said. He declined to provide details about the size of the staff or the size and sections of the newspaper.

…

The company closed the $27.25-million purchase of the Riverside Press-Enterprise last month after launching the Long Beach Register in August.

OK.  Not entirely trembling.  But as one of the Register’s prime “journalistic” competitors in its home county, we warn you, Los Angeles Times: “Registance is Futile!”

I missed doing last week’s promised Dearthwatch, and I think that we can all agree that this is obviously why I waited a week!

This is your Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that, or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency and decorum.  And the Dearthwatch — she is acomin’!

12/14, 1 p.m. … and, she is HERE!

Essentially, the past six weeks have been good for most blogs and bad for most print outlets.

After slipping from about 6,000 to about 10,000 and then rebounding to about 8,000, the Register  has given away almost a third of that recent gain.  The Weekly continues closing in on the Register’s new publication, the Riverside Press-Enterprise.  We’ll be eagerly watching how the LA Times does in the wake of the Register’s incursion.

Meanwhile, OJB continues to be just about the most stable site around.  The late editions are pretty stable as well, with NBC4 being the only one to have a really massive change since June.  I still think that those TV and radio sites, which can stock their websites full as a way of drawing in viewers and listeners, are the biggest long-term competition for print.  (Besides Voice of OC and us, of course.)

About Greg Diamond

Somewhat verbose attorney, semi-disabled and semi-retired, residing in northwest Brea. Occasionally ran for office against jerks who otherwise would have gonr unopposed. Got 45% of the vote against Bob Huff for State Senate in 2012; Josh Newman then won the seat in 2016. In 2014 became the first attorney to challenge OCDA Tony Rackauckas since 2002; Todd Spitzer then won that seat in 2018. Every time he's run against some rotten incumbent, the *next* person to challenge them wins! He's OK with that. Corrupt party hacks hate him. He's OK with that too. He does advise some local campaigns informally and (so far) without compensation. (If that last bit changes, he will declare the interest.) His daughter is a professional campaign treasurer. He doesn't usually know whom she and her firm represent. Whether they do so never influences his endorsements or coverage. (He does have his own strong opinions.) But when he does check campaign finance forms, he is often happily surprised to learn that good candidates he respects often DO hire her firm. (Maybe bad ones are scared off by his relationship with her, but they needn't be.)