Newspapers

As we recently reported, U-T San Diego has shuttered one of the daily newspapers it acquired as part of the North County Times deal. Stranding in the process a dozen The Californian staff and many loyal Temecula area readers. However, all is not lost.

In a quick and very admirable bit of opportunistic thinking, Californian rival The Press-Enterprise has seized the print-media day. From columnist John Hunneman‘s item:

Instead of standing still, our bosses have brought five reporters, with a combined more than 60 years of experience covering news and sports in this region, on board from our former competitor.

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A pair of very powerful strands of history anchor the Orange County Register‘s re-launch today of the Santa Ana Register as a weekly community newspaper.

One is the fact this 108-year-old publication, rolled out in the fall of 1905 as the Santa Ana Daily Register when Orange County had only about 20,000 residents, marked the beginning of the newspaper that now contains it. The other is the idea that Santa Ana city editor Theresa Cisneros’ immigrant roots date back to the same location, a few decades later. From her front-page introduction:

In the 1920s, all four branches of my family tree fled central Mexico after the revolution, seeking better opportunities for their offspring. After traversing mountains and deserts, most of them settled in Santa Anita – a small Mexican enclave on the outskirts of Santa Ana…

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When we spoke last fall with WEHOville.com founder-publisher Henry Scott, he outlined his intention to follow the 2012 website with a companion print publication in 2013. That time has now officially arrived – with a twist.

Scott confirmed this morning that a free weekly print edition of WEHOville is planned for late summer, publishing every Thursday. He estimates that he will need three months to break even and is hoping local news consumers will help fund the expansion to the tune of $35,000 on Kickstarter:

Why print, you ask? Because many people still prefer to get their news that way. So we will reach a bigger audience with both print and online editions. In West Hollywood, with our embarrassingly small voter turnout, we need to engage as many residents as possible in the discussion of important civic issues.

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Marty Caswell, a producer and reporter for The Darren Smith Show on The Mighty 1090 Sportsradio in San Diego, shared a positive tweet yesterday about LA traffic. She’s in town for the university baseball Regionals:

But it’s her earlier tweets that are still reverberating within San Diego media circles. Caswell took issue with a May 24 U-T San Diego article criticizing a sister program and revealed on May 28 that the paper had banned its reporters from appearing on The Mighty 1090 altogether. It’s hard to say how long this will last, but Voice of San Diego columnist John Gennaro suggests that for now, fans and the paper’s sportswriters are the losers:

With the U-T’s sports section and The Mighty feuding with each other, the fans will get less exposure to experts and the sportswriters will get less exposure for their articles. That seems like a lose-lose situation for everyone.

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Approximately 300 union members, activists, and Los Angeles Times readers rallied downtown yesterday to protest the potential sale of the paper to right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

The protest was held at noon outside the downtown office of the investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, which holds the largest share of the Tribune Co. Musician Ry Cooder performed for the crowd, singing “I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister” with special anti-Koch lyrics added.

From the LA Times coverage:

The protesters targeted Oaktree because the firm manages pension investments on behalf of unionized government employees, including those in the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

“We don’t want that kind of thing going on with our money,” said Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “That’s like us selling you a car so you can run us over.”

The rumor of a Tribune Co. sale to Koch Industries has already inspired multiple online petitions and vocal opposition from unions and politicians.

The LA Weekly also covered the protest, and took some great photos.

Earlier this year, actress Angelina Jolie underwent a preventative double mastectomy after genetic testing revealed she had a high probability of developing breast cancer.

The actress candidly discussed the elective procedure in a column for today’s New York Times titled “My Medical Choice.” Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died of breast cancer in 2007 at the age of 56 after battling the disease for nearly a decade. The loss of her mother strongly influenced her decision to have the procedure.

Husband Brad Pitt was there “for every minute of the surgeries,” Jolie notes, and said the experience has brought the couple closer together.

Jolie’s role as a sex symbol lends the narrative a special resonance, given how devastating the procedure can be for women’s self-image. “I do not feel any less of a woman,” she writes. “I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.”

Jolie opted for reconstructive surgeries and implants following the mastectomies. “There have been many advances in this procedure in the last few years, and the results can be beautiful.”

Jolie says she was able to carry on with her work during the three months of medical procedures. She’ll next be appearing on the big screen as the title character in Disney’s Maleficent. The film is set for a summer release in 2014.

Whenever OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano sets Orange County Register savior Aaron Kushner  in his “Navel Gazing” sights, it feels a lot like a conversation between a pair of unlikely suburban neighbors. Check out my manicured lawn, says the one. I turned down my music for this, wonders the other?

This afternoon, Arellano has shared a letter sent by Register senior vp of sales and marketing Michael H. Burns to an unspecified group of newspaper advertisers. Gustavo says the recipients are of a kind that used to favor boxed drawings of a man in a Panama hat ogling a young woman:

Though Burns doesn’t name the business category affected, sources say the only such advertisers to receive the [termination] letters were in the adult section of the paper. The paper will enact its ban May 31.

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How do you entice more people to subscribe to a metro newspaper daily print edition? Well, one way that sounds pretty logical to FishbowlLA is to zero in on affluent zip codes and expand the local-section insert from once a week to every weekday.

That’s what the Orange County Register will do starting this Monday, May 6 for the regions of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. Instead of just Fridays, The Current section will now appear in local editions Monday through Friday. From the recent announcement:

“The essence of a truly indispensible community newspaper is its ability to be interesting first, then relevant, finding its way to important and ultimately becoming an essential part of people’s daily lives,” said Eric Spitz, owner and president at Freedom Communications. “The investments we’re making into The Current not only provide significantly more value to subscribers in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, but we hope it will redefine expectations of what a vibrant hometown newspaper should look like and accomplish in the communities it serves.”

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The latest figures released by non-profit the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) rank the LA Times as the fourth most read U.S. daily print newspaper and the Orange County Register at #14. But for SoCal media watchers, the biggest news is actually the publication sitting at #23.

After falling out of the Top 25 average daily print circulation rankings, U-T San Diego is back on the list with a circulation of 192,782, or an 8.7% increase from the same period last year. However, one area scholar cautions in a KPBS report that a recent acquisition likely accounts for a large part if not all of this circulation bump:

“It would be interesting to know where all of those increases come from,” said Dean Nelson, director of Point Loma Nazarene University’s journalism program. “Was it exclusively from the North County Times readership? Or, did the increase come from other parts of the region?”

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As A1 page editor for the Seattle Times, David Birdwell (pictured) had a hand in two separate recent Pulitzer Prize-winning efforts. The first, honored in the Breaking News category in 2010, involved the paper’s coverage of the shooting deaths of four Lakewood, WA police officers. The second series, cited in 2012 for Investigative Reporting, recognized the work of reporters Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong in exposing corruption associated with the prescription of methadone at state-subsidized health care facilities.

This all bodes extremely well for the second, additional page of the Orange County Register’s “Focus” news section launching next Monday (the first was added to the paper last fall). Wire editor Birdwell will work closely with visual specialist Charles Apple to creatively frame the burning issue(s) of the day. From this week’s announcement:

Birdwell will contribute story ideas and some of the state, national and international wire packages for this second Focus page. Graphics editor Cindy O’Dell and team leader Gene Harbrecht will be part of the collaborative process that will result in thoughtful, visually compelling pages.

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