So remember how Orange County Register owner Aaron Kushner opened up the Los Angeles Register earlier this year, telling a skeptical Southern California that LA needed another daily newspaper? How Kushner moved around 70 reporters from the Orange County Register to the City of Devils? And how the paper's made a concerted effort to court conservative readers, putting out expensive ads on television and KFI-AM 640?
Welp, Kushner's efforts are succeeding–at least in his mind.
]
According to a confidential June/July circulation report obtained by the Weekly, the LA Reg was budgeted to publish about 5,000 papers Monday through Friday, with a budget to publish about 13,000 papers daily–12,923, to be exact. Total daily circulation? 6,321–only 38 percent of the expected figure, but more than the 5K expected. Sunday circ figures are similarly somewhat satisfactory: Projected to publish 12.5 thousand, with a budget for 36.6 thousand, but publishing almost 17,000. Um, yay?
The truth, of course, was that Kushner's grand LA experiment was DOA from the beginning, and his much-ballyhooed hires continue to jump ship–the latest was David Montero, who was getting a lot of plum assignments but nevertheless left for the rival Los Angeles Daily News, the very newspaper the LA Reg was supposed to take on. On the other hand, Kushner is beating his miniscule expectations, so will undoubtedly crow about these figures. So, um, yay?
Email: ga*******@oc******.com. Twitter: @gustavoarellano.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
