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OC Register spends, grows

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Rusty Shackleford, Jan 1, 2013.

  1. Rusty Shackleford

    Rusty Shackleford Active Member

  2. Glad Yahoo! is on the ball with running old news.
     
  3. Drip

    Drip Active Member

  4. MileHigh

    MileHigh Moderator Staff Member

    Well, it's an AP story, not Yahoo, and it was written today. Here's a longer profile on Kushner from last month.

    http://www.ocweekly.com/2012-12-13/news/aaron-kushner-the-orange-county-register-freedom-communications/

    And I, for one, hope it works out.
     
  5. steveu

    steveu Well-Known Member

    I'm on board with Mile. I used to read OCR's e-edition and I subscribed to it again. I was VERY impressed by what I came away with here... only time will tell if the strategy works, but imagine if it does.

    By raising circulation and papers sold, a large chunk of metro Los Angeles will have told ownership they prefer thicker papers. Papers that land with a thud on your doorstep, not papers that blow away in the wind when they are delivered. I have to wonder if a Los Angeles Times, out of Tribune's hands, would go back to the days of much bigger editions than they have now.
     
  6. Norrin Radd

    Norrin Radd New Member

    Would love to be optimistic here.

    Best-case scenario is probably that the Register succeeds, but that does not affect anyone else. It's a unique ownership situation.
     
  7. JPsT

    JPsT Member

    For now.
     
  8. MileHigh

    MileHigh Moderator Staff Member

    As in spending money, reinvesting in the product? Building up the product? As if anything the past 10 to 15 years worked wonders?

    Look, I have some skepticism too.* But what the hell. Is it any more of a gamble than what else has been done of late?

    * Full disclosure: I have been brought on board here. Less than a week in, so I'm not exactly reading the company script or know it by heart. So ... let's see what happens. It's different. It's out of the norm of what has come down the pipe in the print world since the Internet boom. It ... might actually work? There are no guarantees, as my last two stops at prominent places have proved, so the "gamble" isn't ginormous (in my eyes).
     
  9. steveu

    steveu Well-Known Member

    Right. At least someone is trying. Someone has the idea "hey, why don't we improve the print product?"

    Belo went down this road with the Dallas Morning News a few years back. There were some days when the DMN was embarrassingly thin, nothing like the thicker paper readers were used to in the Metroplex. While the S-T has remained somewhat thin, DMN added pages back to the paper. Of course they have a pretty strong balance between online and print, but still...

    Chicago did the same thing. When out from under the yoke of Zell and Michaels, people there listened to the complaints about the print edition being redesigned and shrunk. Some pages have been added back to the paper and it feels like the Tribune again.

    If I'm going to pay $1.00 or $1.50 for a paper, I want something in it. Don't give me 20-30 pages. You should be (if you're a bigger city edition) at least 40-50 on your slim days and 70-100 on your bigger-ad days. Give the readers something to look at and I think they'll come back.

    Good luck with this, Mile. I hope it works, if only to prove the naysayers wrong.
     
  10. gravehunter

    gravehunter Member

    Interesting to see what will happen here. A story ran within the last week or so that the OCR owner was looking at some of the Tribune papers, post-bankruptcy....of which the LATimes is one. If he buys the LATimes, would this mean consolidation of newsrooms in the LA area?
    Time will tell....
     
  11. With circulation up, have there been any sharp discounts to subscribing to account for the jump?
     
  12. Screwball

    Screwball Active Member

    The newsstand price has been lowered to 25 cents.
     
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