Owners of Orange County Register to Move Deeper into LA County

The co-owner and publisher of the Orange County Register said in remarks published today that  the company will move broadly into Los Angeles County early next year and publish a new seven-day-a-week newspaper called the Los Angeles Register.

"We will be delivering a Los Angeles Register to the entirety of Los Angeles County," Aaron Kushner told Orange County Register staff at a town hall meeting Thursday, the Orange County Register reported.

Kushner said specifics of the expansion are being worked out but that the new newspaper will be launched "soon" and emphasize local Los Angeles news just like the Orange County Register covers its communities.

"It will be a daily newspaper of not quite the heft of the Orange County Register," Kushner said, adding the publication will be larger in total pages than any of the existing newspapers in Los Angeles. In addition, he said, the Register would launch an unspecified number of Los Angeles community weeklies.

Kushner recently launched the Long Beach Register. The region is also currently served by the Los Angeles Times and the MediaNews Group, which publishes nine papers, including the Los Angeles Daily News in the San Fernando Valley, the Press-Telegram in Long Beach and Pasadena Star-News.

Kushner said the Los Angeles Register will use existing Orange County Register staff, noting he had added more than 200 people to its news staff in the past year, more than the size of most newsrooms in the country. Kushner said the Los Angeles edition will be staffed by journalists working in Los Angeles covering local news.

The announcement is the latest in a fast-paced expansion that began in July 2012 when Kushner's 2100 Trust LLC bought Freedom Communications Inc., owner of the Register, the Register reported.. Since then, Kushner and co-owner Eric Spitz have expanded community editions, added weekly, monthly and quarterly magazines and in August launched the six-day-a-week Long Beach Register.

Last month, Freedom Communications bought The Press-Enterprise in Riverside.

"We will have effectively three editions of the Register serving 15 million people in Orange County, Riverside County, San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County," Kushner said Thursday.

-- City  News Service