Back in 2002, former Weekly contributor (and eternal Weekling) Jim Washburn wrote an obituary on the Los Angeles Times' Orange County edition, a once-mighty beast that numbered over 200 editors and writers housed in a massive Costa Mesa complex during its heyday in the 1980s but by then was reduced to a sad shell of itself. Yet even those seem glory days compared to the sad state of today, where the huge office is more bereft of people than the Orange Juice Blog, the printing plant prints fewer and fewer copies with each circulation cycle, and the newsroom is reduced to cub reporters, reporters with no institutional knowledge of Orange County, and recent hire Anh Do.
But not for long. No: Times management isn't going to invest in OC ala the new Orange County Register, but rather give up completely by selling off the offices and plant, and moving its reporters elsewhere.
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And this is supposed to happen, according to sources, by the end of the year.
No word yet on who the Times is selling the plant and offices to, where the remaining reporters will report to, or what the hell is going on over there, but one thing is clear: if the Times does go through with the sale, I might have to get Washburn to revisit his piece–so it'll at least be win-win for Weekly readers!
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