The Orange County Register

The Orange County Register
The December 7, 2005 front page of The Orange County Register
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	Freedom Communications
Publisher	Terry Horne
Editor	Ken Brusic
Founded	1905
Headquarters	625 North Grand Avenue Santa Ana, California 92701  United States
Circulation	302,110 Daily 367,627 Sunday[1]
Website: ocregister.com

The Orange County Register is a daily newspaper published in Santa Ana, California. The Register has the fourth largest paid daily circulation in California, behind only the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Diego Union-Tribune. The Register is the flagship publication of Freedom Communications, Inc., which publishes 28 daily newspapers, 23 weekly newspapers, Coast, SqueezeOC, and Orange County Home magazines, and several related Internet sites. The Register is notable for its generally conservative/libertarian-leaning editorial page. It often supports Republican politicians and positions, but it is also the largest newspaper in the country to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and opposes 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.^[2][3] In 1956, the newspaper was a prominent supporter of a vociferous campaign by anti-communists against the Alaska Mental Health Enabling Act, claiming that the Act was part of a communist plot to establish concentration camps in Alaska. 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. Finally, in 1935 it was bought by R.C. Hoiles, who renamed it the Santa Ana Register and reorganized his holdings as Freedom Newspapers, Inc. in 1950, later Freedom Communications. The paper was renamed The Register in 1952. Circulation rose with the burgeoning population of Orange County and after The Register added a morning edition in 1959. In 1970 Hoiles' son Clarence became co-publisher with his brother Harry until 1979, when R. David Threshie, Clarence's son-in-law, was named to the position. Faced with an aggressive push into the county by the Los Angeles Times under then publisher Otis Chandler, Threshie brought in 30-year-old editor N. Christian Anderson III to increase the professionalism of the paper. Political positions were restricted to the editorial page. In 1981, the paper began publishing in full color. In 1985, the paper was renamed yet again to The Orange County Register. In the same year it won its first Pulitzer Prize, for its photographic coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics in nearby Los Angeles. It won additional Pulitzers in 1989 for beat reporting by Edward Humes on U.S. military problems with night vision goggles and 1996 for an investigation into Ricardo Asch's fertility clinics. In 1999, Threshie became Chairman of the Board for Freedom Communications and N. Christian Anderson III assumed the position of publisher and CEO. Ken Brusic is the executive editor. In 2004, a family schism led to a 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. In 2006, Freedom Orange County Information launched the OC Post, a tabloid with shortened versions of Register stories as well as news articles from the Associated Press. The paper also had its first significant staff reductions in December 2006, with 40 newsroom employees taking a buyout, along with a small number of layoffs. Since its parent company, Freedom Orange County Information, launched the OC Post, a daily tabloid newspaper, in 2006, the Orange County Register as of April 2007 has made cuts to help maintain shareholder profit, which has averaged more than 20 percent annually in the past five years. Since the launch of the OC Post, FOCI has cut the Register's editorial staff by 10 percent, eliminated its 3 percent holiday bonuses to editorial staff, and postponed pay raises to editorial staff - which average 3 percent annually - for six months.

References

External links

• OCRegister.com (The Orange County Register official site)
• OCExcelsior.com (Spanish-language sister publication)
• Freedom Communications flagship profile of The Orange County Register