The Orange County Register and its affiliated publications will lay off between 80 and 90 employees, 5 percent of its workforce, because of continued decline in advertising revenues, President and Publisher Terry Horne said today.
Horne cited Orange County’s sluggish economy, especially in real estate, as affecting the company’s revenues from local retail, automotive and classified advertising for jobs. The company provided no financial details about the decline in advertising revenue.
This is the third round of layoffs in a year for Orange County Register Communications, the umbrella brand for the Register newspaper, web sites, magazines and other community publications. The company also completed a voluntary severance program to cut staff in 2006.
The Register has sought to minimize staff reductions by making other cuts. In February the OC Post, a countywide, six-day-a-week tabloid, became a three-day-a-week, Irvine-only publication after being merged with the Irvine World News. In January, the Register newspaper’s business coverage was merged inside the main news section six days a week and the Business Monday tabloid was eliminated.
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Hey, great job to the Register…you guys effectively wrote yourselves right out of a job. You created so much hype of the “sky is falling” that you are now in the soup line…ha ha ha, I love it! Most people that know finances know that this situation was not nearly as bad as the media portrayed it. I said it here first, you may not like the mortgage industry but you depended on it for your jobs…now your gonzo. Hey, I’m sure all those out of work teachers will picket the Register for you cuz, hey…you were there for them when the teachers got their pink slips. I love it, so…do you hate the mortgage industry now guys? Where do you think all that money came from? Add dollars, marketing dollars now its all gone baby gone.
Please tell me Steven Greenhut is one of those who gets the axe
I’m sorry to hear that. Newspapers are the foundation of our democracy. And the OC Register is an important bulkwark against the very liberal papers that seem to own the West and East coasts.
I just hope the Register makes the tough decisions it takes to stay in business, and that those impacted by those decisions find satisfying work quickly.
Good luck to you!
thats terrible jobs will be lost, but they should cut the oc register staff who cant spell or bother to click the Spell check button when publishing these news articles…
I can’t help but wonder if advertising has fallen off as a protect to the raciest and demeaning comments on so many of the blogs?
The Drudge Report had a link today to a story about declining newspaper circulation all over the country. According to the story, The Orange County Register has seen a decline in circulation of 11.9% in the last six months.
11.9% drop in readers in six months, on top of several years of previous declines.
The only two newspapers in America to see an increase was The Wall Street Journal up 0.4% and USA Today up 0.2%.
Where will the newspapers be in five years? In ten years?
Why buy the paper when you can view it online? It’s ridiculous how much newspapers charge for a subscription, and then the paper is filled with more and more stacked ads and less news. I realize that advertising pays the bills and the salaries, not circulation, but there are far too many ads in the paper and not enough news. I read the paper for the news, not the ads.
And while I’m thinking about it, get rid of the junk ads and crap on the website. They slow down the pageloading so much at times that I just skip reading the Register altogether.
Maybe it because the OC Post is such a huge success !!,
Too bad though too, just like the teachers getting laid off the and all the administrators keeping their jobs, it’s going to be joe lunch box and suzie secretary losing their jobs, not the ones who caused all the problems, what about Lansner ? or Mickadeit ?
to news is our backbone……the ocr is loosing because they are not a good change from the liberals from the east and west. More often than not I would obtain sustantially more in depth reporting from the Latimes or SFGATE. Its the content they choose….bimbos get a week in print v real moms get a day, R/E section at best is tabloid and read other papers and its not. And for me most of all Latimes, sfgate, Ny times do very indepth and long term stories about how vets are being treated like crap and the OCR, a mere glancing blow of a story. No they are going down hill because us readers actually like to read.
I have a theory that newspapers are declining so rapidly becuase they make the anti-spam passwords on their online blogs so difficult to read and type out, but that’s just me.
While I don’t really buy into the argument that the editorial board and senior staff of the Register was responsible for the real estate collapse and mortgage crisis, you could make a decent argument for that thesis by pointing out that the Miami Herald has also lost 11% of its readership in the last six months. Miami is another metro area experiencing double digit declines in home prices and skyrocketing foreclosure rates.
It is about time you did some housecleaning. Your paper has turned to trash with all your liberalism and biased opinions. It would have helped if you kept things truthful but you chose to mislead the public and are very pro illegal immigration. Last I knew, entering this country illegally is against the law, but you endorse it . I expected something American, not Latino.
Hey Hey… Why not start with Ken Brusic - he doesn’t care how many people he hurts - The world could do without the likes of people like him.
I am only surprised that it took this long for the paper’s demise to become apparent. The Register may be able to win back some of its declining subscriber base (myself included) if they limited the Register to it’s current socioeconomic demographic in Santa Ana and started a new daily newspaper to appeal to the rest of OC. Until that happens, they can expect further declines in circulation.
Newspapers are losing readership because they have become propaganda publishments. The citizens of this country have woken up to their open borders, anti-american, liberal bents and have stopped reading.
The news in general used to be a tool of information regarding society, government, and pertinent and relevent topics. It simply is not anymore.
Well that’s just too bad! Hopefully you’re axing the idiot who “forgot” to retract the story of the cat who got tazed at Theo Lacey. I’m sure you conveniently “forgot” to print a retraction after the investigation found that the cat jumped out and was tazed accidentally as some deputies were running a drill. Hmmm… he must have been to busy “witch-hunting” to get that one….
We cancelled our paper subscription months ago, and have begged the telemarketers to stop calling multiple times per week to get us back. I glance at a couple of articles on line. BUT it is the quality of your articles (lack of…?), subjects on which you chose to focus, and the horrible reporting (incorrect or second hand info stated as fact, bad writing style, bad grammar) that finally pushed our decision. Family in Santa Barbara was getting better coverage on OUR local events than what you provide. I hope K Edds is on the list to release. Maybe she can get a job with the po po.
Maybe they shouldn’t cater to right-wing nut jobs. I am amazed by the editorial page of this paper. Do people actually believe this crap? Plus, nobody knows how to write at the Register. I would employ a few remedial English teachers.
It’s not the op-ed pages that I worry about. Readers have a right to express their opinions that is what that forum was created for. It is the 50 pages (front page & local) that come before that concerns me. The bottom line is that people would prefer their news short, sweet, unbiased and to the point. Why not let the people decide how they want to feel about something instead of telling them what they are suppose to think based on some moron reporter’s beliefs.
Please don’t cut Pop Life. We love your coverage of local music artists, It is one of the few things sets you apart from all those other papers. Cut the local music reporting and you will be able to add us to your declining circulation.
I know some of the people who got laid off, and none was responsible for the demise of the paper. You keep cutting back, and the paper gets worse, and what do you expect? Of course more people start canceling. I find it odd that the “Innovations editor” got laid off. That tells me that the Register is done innovating. Now if it could get rid of the cruel people who work there.
Editor’s note: Actually, the Innovations editor was not laid off.
The attribute that made the Orange County Register a great paper over its long history was its principled mission to educate their readers about freedom and liberty. The majority of the people in Orange County were once serious about their citizenship and about trying to create a better place than what they found. The percentage of people who care about public virtue is dwindling while the percentage of people who live for worldly gratification is increasing. Unfortunately, the second group mentioned is not very enlightened about the original mission of the OC Register. It may be time to study the old model and once again work on educating the general public.
No surprise as, as a culture, we are moving to getting our information via the web but OCR needed the housecleaning low ad revenues or not. Bad reporting, bad writing, bad editing.
May I take this opportunity to announce that my great uncle on my Dad’s side of the family was the first editor of the Register? He was reportedly quite a guy, and drove Orange County’s first Dusenberg. It’s really my only claim to OC fame, except for my Dad and Uncle’s eagle scout troop being at Disneyland on opening day.
There, my 15 seconds of fame is over. Thank you.
As for the Register, it will be sad to see it go away sometime next decade. Unless they can remake themselves into an entirely different kind of news service, smaller newspapers like this will simply cease to exist in the next 10 years. You can’t lost 12% of our customers every six months and expect to be around in five years time.
I worked there 3 years. I watched that scandal with the PUBLISHER …lol who stated her credentials were from PERU that there 3rd party verif never bothered to check! I wantched the layoffs. I watched them push out the only RE MANAGER and she is now at the LA TIMES…..the overall demise was that the high priced EXECUTIVES lept there job and they laid off the lower end. What has changed? i got out just in time. IT IS A SINKING SHIP! I can only hope a former collegue of mine was able to weather the storm.
Is the GOP’s boy out — Mickadeit - Let’s Hope!!!!!!
Good to hear that the Innovations Editor was not laid off. I got some bad info.
If my understanding is correct on another layoff, a reporter WAS laid off — despite what the story said about protecting the reporting staff — from the sports staff.
And two sources have confirmed that the sports editor was laid off. How do you lay off the sports editor yet have someone lead the sports department??
Laying off the sports editor was no surprise. The powers-that-be look at sports coverage as nothing more than an afterthought. I stopped taking this newspaper seriously when they cut back on a lot of their coverage, claiming it was for financial reasons. Since when do you stop reporting news because of money? The news is still there and it needs to be reported.
There are many lousy Reporters at OC Register. They cut, paste, and post information while sitting in their desk. Not much as a Reporters.
Builders paid for the ad but the price based on subscribers. No subscriber no value. Once customers realized that these Reporters are not for them, Subscription dropped.
I work at The Seattle Times and I can GUARANTEE that the people recently laid off at The Reg are not the people who should have been laid off - Having suffered fools at The Reg for too many years (ok, so only about 6 years off and on) I know that the Upper Eschelon is RIDICULOUS.
Yes, the “journalists” are awful too…….can anyone please get to locating some Murrow DNA and cloning as many of that man as is viable? Stat!!
Oh — I should add that Robin Hinch, the award-winning obituary writer at the Register, was laid off. How is that protecting the reporting staff? How about laying off more of the managers and fewer of the worker bees?
No newspaper in history has ever cut its way to profitablity. People are hungry for news. Unfortunatly the Register gives us a front page of silly stuff trying to get us to look inside the paper. If we didn’t plan on looking inside why does the publisher think we subscribed in the first place. For sure, it’s not for the fifty or so ad inserts that come with the paper. Just give us good reporting via that best and most respected sources and readers will respond. The Register admits that its audience is greatest among the older generation yet they persist in using text so small that you need a magnifing glass to read (i.e. some of the Sunday comics). Sections disappear, features are cut back, secondary wire services have dissappeared. All we are getting is AP wire reports and a handful of staff written feature stories. The price remains that same. So what’s good about the Register… well, the delivery service is still excellent!!!
Fr. James
It`s all started converting into broadcast i belive… Published materials were always out there, but the world and the economy shows us how important is broadcasting in more localized environment.