When Aaron Kushner took over as publisher earlier this summer, he promised to fill the Orange County Register with content from new full-time film and dining reviewers and a Los Angeles Dodgers beat reporter. Now the Boston bean counter is talking about filling even more newsroom desks abandoned in recent years due to layoffs, early retirements and voluntary departures as the daily struggled with online competition and dwindling ad revenues and circulation. He also pricks up the ears of a certain alternative newsweekly with promises of a new Orange County weekly.
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Kushner mentions all this in a recent memo to Register staffers that also boasts of recruiting bodies for the business section, an investigative team, the auto beat, the copy desk, the graphics department, data reporting, coverage of Sacramento and a beefed-up newsroom internship program.
All of which, of course, flies in the face of what's happened and still happening at newspaper ghost towns around the country.
Orange County Register Reporter on New Owner's Print-First Strategy to Reshape Paper: “Lunacy”
So did anyone take the new publisher aside and say, “Uh . . . Kushy . . . did we ever mention to you our short-lived weekly Squeeze OC? Or the shorter-lived OC Post?” The side-of-the-building banners for those OC flops should still be in the Grand Avenue basement. Or maybe they were made into a broach, or rolled into handmade cigars by Mickadeit or burned to heat the newsroom.
Here's that memo (hat tip to Jim Romenesko):
Dear Colleagues,
Thank you for taking the time to attend our associate Town Hall.
[Freedom President] Eric [Spitz] and I are very excited about the future
of the Register, and we hope you left the meeting with a clearer
understanding of our priorities and the specific actions we are taking
to create more value for our subscribers and our community.As discussed, our executive team is actively evaluating every
opportunity to increase the resources we can devote to adding value for
our subscribers. Thank you for your patience as we consolidate IT under
Mike Hunsche so we have a unified team, and as we realign our
advertising operations under Mike Burns to similar effect. …We already have 23 new positions approved for hiring in our Content
group, in addition to a significantly expanded internship program. Ken
Brusic is leading our recruiting efforts with our strong deputy editors
and team leaders. We are the Orange County Register and are looking for
talent with our level of skill, commitment and teamwork. If you have
friends and colleagues who you believe can help us grow please share the
opportunity with them.We have a number of areas we have not yet finished evaluating for
growth but among those already approved for hiring are the business
section, investigative team, auto, restaurant and movie criticism,
sports, copy editing, graphics, data reporting and Sacramento reporting.Finally, we talked about some of the new content initiatives we have
approved for launch including adding a weekly magazine in addition to
our monthly Coast and creating a full daily business section to cover
the Orange County community. I can't wait to see them take form as
vibrant parts of the Register.Thank you again for the inspiring and engaging work you do every day.
We look forward to growing the Orange County Register together!-Best, Aaron
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.