As anyone paying attention to the publishing industry knows, dwindling advertising revenues are pushing content from the pricey-printed page to the less-costly virtual page.
It turns out the city of Costa Mesa is not immune to the online migration.
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Due to budget cuts, the city will no longer send its
printed “Community News” brochure to residents, choosing instead to post the newsletter online at www.ci.costa-mesa.ca.us, according to a statement from City Hall.
Issues are published three times a year, and residents can sign up on the site to receive email notifications when the next one is up.
City Manager Allan Roeder sent a letter to the Daily Pilot last month stating that Costa Mesa officials and residents must come together to make “hard choices” thanks to the third straight year of declining revenues.
“With a $16.4 million shortfall to be addressed and already having
reduced reserves to a prudent level, cutting department budgets for
three years running, creating as many vacancies as possible through
early retirement incentives, salary and benefit reductions, and a host
of other cost cutting efforts, the city now faces the additional
prospect of reducing services, laying off personnel and increasing
revenues,” wrote Roeder, who is among the deans of Orange County government administrators. “In my professional judgment, it will take all of the above and
likely additional steps to provide a balanced budget as required by
state law.”
Welcome to the club, bub.
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.