The Register was founded by a consortium as the Santa Ana Daily Register in 1905. It was sold to J. P. Baumgartner in 1906 and to J. Frank Burke in 1927. In 1935 it was bought by Raymond C. Hoiles, who renamed it the Santa Ana Register. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hoiles was one of the few newspaper publishers in the country to oppose the forced relocation of Japanese and Japanese Americans to camps away from the West Coast.[4] Hoiles reorganized his holdings as Freedom Newspapers, Inc. In 1950, the name was changed to Freedom Communications. The paper dropped "Santa Ana" from its title in 1952.
In 1956, the newspaper was a prominent supporter of a vociferous campaign by anti-communists against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, claiming that it was part of a Communist plot to establish concentration camps in Alaska. Circulation rose with the burgeoning population of Orange County and after the Register added a morning edition in 1959.
In 1970, Hoiles's sons, Clarence and Harry, became co-publishers until 1979, when R.David Threshie, Clarence's son-in-law, was named to the position.
1980s
Faced with an aggressive push into the county by the Los Angeles Times under publisher Otis Chandler, Threshie brought in 30-year-old N. Christian Anderson III as editor. Political positions were restricted to the editorial page. In 1981, the paper began publishing in full color.[citation needed]
In 1985, the paper assumed the name The Orange County Register. In the same year it won its first Pulitzer Prize, for its photographic coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It won additional Pulitzers in 1989 for beat reporting by Edward Humes on U.S. military problems with night-vision goggles and in 1996 for an investigation into Ricardo Asch's fertility clinics.[5]
1990s
In 1990, the newspaper launched the 24-hour OCN news channel with news and feature stories about Orange County. It closed in 2001.[6]
In 1992, Orange County Register Communications launched Excélsior, a Spanish-language weekly. In 2010 Excélsior had a circulation of 51,000.[7] It covers Orange County's growing Hispanic community, which now numbers over a million. Julio Saenz is the editor and general manager.
In 1994, Anderson was named publisher of Freedom’s second largest newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette. Managing editor Tonnie Katz was named to replace Anderson as editor of the Register. In 1999, Threshie became chairman of the board of Freedom Communication and Anderson returned to the Register as publisher and chief executive officer.
Ken Brusic was named vice president of content and executive editor in April 2002.
2000s: Schism and bankruptcy
In 2003, a family schism led to the sale of a majority interest in Freedom Communications to investors led by the Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners. Through a stock arrangement, the Hoiles family descendants retained control of the board. The private equity firms received a management fee off the company’s gross revenue.
In 2006, Orange County Register Communications launched the OC Post, a tabloid with shortened versions of Register stories as well as news articles from the Associated Press.
The Register had its first significant staff reductions in December 2006, with 40 newsroom employees taking buyouts, along with a small number of layoffs.
By April 2007, The Orange County Register had made additional staff cuts to help maintain shareholder profit, which had averaged more than 20 percent annually in the preceding five years.
Since the launch of the OC Post in 2006, OCRC[clarification needed] had cut the Register's editorial staff by 10 percent and had frozen pay raises to editorial staff, which had averaged 3 percent annually, for six months.[citation needed]
In September 2007, Terry Horne replaced N. Christian Anderson III as publisher. He came from the East Valley Tribune, a Freedom-owned suburban paper in the Phoenix area.
In June 2008, KTLA, The Los Angeles Times and Fox News reported that the Register had begun a one-month trial of outsourcing some layout and copy-editing work to India to save costs.[8] The trial was not deemed a success, and editing returned to Register
In spring of 2009, Freedom Communications instituted furloughs for all employees nationwide, followed by a permanent 5% pay cut starting in July 2009. News reports in August 2009 indicated that Freedom Communications planned to file for bankruptcy and turn control of its publications, including The Orange County Register, over to its lenders.[9]
In September 2009, a column written by sports columnist Mark Whicker caused controversy.[10] In the column,[11] Whicker wrote about various sporting events that had occurred over the preceding 18 years, and how they had been missed by Jaycee Dugard, a girl who had been kidnapped, raped, and forced to bear her kidnapper's children. Whicker ended his column with the line "Jaycee, you have left the yard." The column generated criticism in blogs such as Deadspin,[12] who called it "the single worst piece of journalism ever committed on this page", and The Huffington Post.
2010s
On July 25, 2012, The Orange County Register and six other papers were purchased by 2100 Trust LLC.[13] The papers continued to operate under the Freedom Communications name.[14] In December the Register changed its logo and branding, dropping "The" in favor of Orange County Register.[15]
A lawsuit was filed in October 2013 by the former owners of Freedom Communications against Aaron Kushner, principal of 2100 Trust, demanding that Kushner's company pay more than $17 million remaining on the sale. The Los Angeles Times wrote that Kushner, "a former greeting-card executive with no prior media experience," claimed that the prior owners had given him "inaccurate valuations for a host of crucial financial indicators" and that he faced "$62.3 million in unexpected financial liabilities as a result."[14] On August 19, 2013, the Long Beach Register was launched as an edition of The Orange County Register serving the Long Beach, California, community. It was focused solely on community news, including city government, public and private education, local sports coverage, business and entertainment as an intended competitor to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. In addition, on January 20, 2014, The Press-Enterprise became an edition of The Orange County Register while maintaining coverage of the Inland Empire.[16]
On April 16, 2014, The Orange County Register launched the Los Angeles Register, "more a print play than a digital one" serving Los Angeles County. It was the first time since the Herald-Examiner folded on November 1, 1989, that a main competitor to the Los Angeles Times was launched, this time intended to be "as local as one edition can be for the entire county."[17] Five months later, Kushner announced in a company memo that the Los Angeles Register was ending publication effective immediately. Kushner wrote that "pundits and local competitors" will be quick to call the effort a failure while he believes that "not taking bold steps toward growth" would have been the true failure.[18] The Long Beach Register became a Sunday-only publication in June 2014,[19] and ceased publication in December 2014.[20] In October the Los Angeles Times sued the Register for failing to pay more than $2 million to the Times for delivery services for the now-defunct Register newspapers in Los Angeles and Long Beach. In March 2014 the Los Angeles Superior Court granted the Times a $4.2 million writ of attachment to secure the ability of the Times to enforce a possible judgment in its favor.[21]
On March 10, 2015, Aaron Kushner and his partner, Eric Spitz, resigned from executive duties at the paper and Freedom Communications Inc. The company was rumored to be readying itself for a potential sale. Publisher Rich Mirman, a former Las Vegas casino executive who had invested in Freedom, was announced as the new president and chief executive.[22]
On February 12, 2016, Freedom Communications announced that The Orange County Register and the Press-Enterprise along with its websites, community weeklies and the two Spanish-Language weeklies Excelsior in Orange County and La Prensa in the Inland Empire, were being placed in a "stalking horse" auction after the company declared bankrupt at the end of 2015. Both Digital First Media and Tribune Publishing were the bidders. The auction started on March 21 and was completed on March 31, 2016. The U.S. Department of Justice blocked the sale of Freedom Communications to Tribune Publishing because it would create a newspaper monopoly in both Orange and Riverside Counties..On March 21, 2016, Digital First Media acquired both The Orange County Register and the Press-Enterprise for $52.3 million in a U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana. Los Angeles News Group was renamed Southern California News Group on March 31, 2016, once the sale of Freedom Communications to Digital First Media was completed. It has 11 paid regional dailies, and community weeklies serving the South Bay communities of Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes Peninsula, the Long Beach neighborhoods north and east of downtown and over 20 community weeklies in Orange County, as well as the Spanish-language weeklies Impacto USA and Unidos, now consolidated as Excelsior, which will have three editions for Los Angeles County, Orange County and Inland Empire.[23] On Sept. 21, 2016, it was announced that the Register would move its headquarters to 2190 Towne Centre Place, Anaheim, and vacate its longtime home at 625 N. Grand Avenue, Santa Ana.[24] The new headquarters opened April 24, 2017.[25]
The Alliance for Audited Media reported in 2017 that the Register's circulation had dropped to 80,000 on weekdays and 180,000 on Sundays.[26]
Editorial stances
The Register was notable for its generally libertarian-leaning editorial page.[27] It generally supported free markets and social liberties, though at least some on the editorial board said they would not call it libertarian.[28] Although it sometimes supported Republican politicians and positions, it was the largest newspaper in the country to have opposed the Iraq War from the beginning and opposed laws regulating issues such as prostitution and drug use. It was one of a handful of newspapers that opposed the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans during World War II.[29][30] It also opposed Proposition 8 in 2008, which proposed to define the word "marriage" in the California Constitution to mean between a man and a woman definitively.[31] After the Digital First purchase of Freedom Communications, the Register's editorial page was merged with that of the Los Angeles Daily News and Digital First's other papers in the region to form a single editorial board for the Southern California News Group on regional and national issues.[32]
Other publications
In addition to publishing The Orange County Register, Southern California News Group publishes OC Family magazine, Coast magazine–until shutting down that magazine in 2020,[33] and the following affiliated weeklies:[34]
On April 1, 2013, the Orange County Register began providing its online content through a metered paywall. Most online content required a subscription, with the exception of local weather, traffic, Associated Press or non-Register articles, and a few select local news articles.[40] As of October 2015, the website does not have a paywall and online content is free.[citation needed] As of May 2018, the paywall has been reinstated.[41]
Orange County is a county located in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in Southern California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 3,186,989, making it the third-most-populous county in California, the sixth-most-populous in the United States, and more populous than 19 American states and Washington, D.C. Although largely suburban, it is the second-most-densely-populated county in the state behind San Francisco County. The county's three most-populous cities are Anaheim, Santa Ana, and Irvine, each of which has a population exceeding 300,000. Santa Ana is also the county seat. Six cities in Orange County are on the Pacific coast: Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, Dana Point, and San Clemente.
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles area city of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper in the nation and the largest in the Western United States with a print circulation of 118,760. It has 500,000 online subscribers, the fifth-largest among U.S. newspapers. Owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong and published by California Times, the paper has won over 40 Pulitzer Prizes since its founding.
The Southern California News Group (SCNG), formerly the San Gabriel Valley News Group and the Los Angeles News Group, is an umbrella group of local daily newspapers published in the greater Los Angeles area of southern California by Digital First Media, which is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune is a paid daily newspaper located in Monrovia, California, that serves the central and eastern San Gabriel Valley. It operated at the West Covina location from 1955 to 2015. The Tribune is a member of Southern California News Group, a division of Digital First Media. It is also part of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, along with the Pasadena Star-News and the Whittier Daily News.
The Pasadena Star-News is a paid local daily newspaper for the greater Pasadena, California area. The Pasadena Star-News is a member of Southern California News Group, since 1996. It is also part of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, along with the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News.
Freedom Communications, Inc., was an American media conglomerate that operated daily and weekly newspapers, websites and mobile applications, as well as Coast Magazine and other specialty publications. Headquartered at 625 N. Grand Avenue in Santa Ana, California, it was owned by a private equity firm, 2100 Trust, established in 2010 by investor Aaron Kushner Freedom's flagship newspaper was the Orange County Register, based in Santa Ana.
KDOC-TV is a religious television station licensed to Anaheim, California, United States, serving the Los Angeles area as an owned-and-operated station of Tri-State Christian Television (TCT). The station maintains studios on East First Street in Santa Ana, and its transmitter is located atop Mount Wilson.
Corona del Mar High School (CdM) is a public school located in the Eastbluff neighborhood of Newport Beach, California, and belongs to the Newport-Mesa Unified School District. It is a combination of a middle school and a high school. The school was founded in 1962 and has an enrollment of approximately 2,100 students. The school covers an area of just over 1,700,000 square feet. According to US News, there are 92 full-time teachers.
Todd Spitzer is an American attorney and politician serving as the district attorney of Orange County, California. Spitzer successfully ran for Orange County district attorney in 2018 against incumbent Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer had previously served as a deputy district attorney from 1990 to 1996 and, under Rackauckas, as assistant district attorney from 2008 to 2010.
The Press-Enterprise is a paid daily newspaper published by Digital First Media that serves the Inland Empire in Southern California. Headquartered in downtown Riverside, California, it is the primary newspaper for Riverside County, with heavy penetration into neighboring San Bernardino County. The geographic circulation area of the newspaper spans from the border of Orange County to the west, east to the Coachella Valley, north to the San Bernardino Mountains, and south to the San Diego County line. The Press-Enterprise is a member of the Southern California News Group.
Scott Randall Baugh is an American attorney and politician. He is a member of the Republican Party. He served in the California State Assembly and served as the chair of the Republican Party in Orange County, California, from the early 2000s to 2015.
The Daily Pilot is a daily newspaper published by the Los Angeles Times to serve the communities of Sunset Beach, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Laguna Beach in Orange County, California.
The media of Los Angeles are influential and include some of the most important production facilities in the world. As part of the "Creative Capital of the World", it is a major global center for media and entertainment. In addition to being the home of Hollywood, the center of the American motion picture industry, the Los Angeles area is the second largest media market in North America. Many of the nation's media conglomerates either have their primary headquarters or their West Coast operations based in the region. Universal Music Group, one of the "Big Four" record labels, is also based in the Los Angeles area.
The Newport Beach Film Festival(NBFF) is an annual film festival in Newport Beach, California, typically held in late April. In 2022, it was announced that the festival have permanently changed its date to be held in October, as the festival began positioning itself for Oscar season.
OC Channel was an over-the-air, digital broadcast, television news network. The channel is broadcast on a digital sub channel of PBS member station KOCE in Huntington Beach, California. This service is no longer in operation as a secondary lineup of PBS programming is currently carried on channel 50.2, as of May 2017.
The first season of The O.C. commenced airing in the United States on August 5, 2003, concluded on May 5, 2004, and consisted of 27 episodes. It tells the story of "the Cohen and Cooper families, and Ryan Atwood, a troubled teen from the wrong side of the tracks" who is thrust into the wealthy, harbor-front community of Newport Beach, Orange County, California and "will forever change the lives of the residents".
L. K. Samuels, also known as Lawrence Samuels, is an American author, classical liberal, and libertarian activist. He is best known as the editor and contributing author of Facets of Liberty: A Libertarian Primer and In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action. He coined the phrase "social chaology", which refers to the studies of complex, holistic, and self-organizing nature of society in relationship to the linear, predatory and "planned chaos" predispositions of government.
OC Weekly was a free alternative weekly paper distributed in Orange County and Long Beach, California. It was founded in September 1995 by Will Swaim, who acted as editor and publisher until 2007.
MNG Enterprises, Inc., doing business as Digital First Media and MediaNews Group, is a Denver, Colorado, United States–based newspaper publisher owned by Alden Global Capital. As of May 2021, it owns over 100 newspapers and 200 assorted other publications.
The North County News Tribune, formerly the Fullerton News Tribune was once the oldest continuously published independent daily newspaper in Orange County, California. Since a 1992 sale to Freedom Newspapers, its operations have been folded into the Orange County Register. The Register is currently a property of Digital First Media.
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time from 1953–1963 and the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting from 1964–1984
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