It’s reasonable to have waited a year for the Register’s new ownership to rebuild their organization before offering an opinion on how they’re doing. And it’s important — really important — that this print dinosaur succeed in this mid-sized market as without them, the OC really would be void of a mainstream media outlet. The LA Times stopped taking Orange County seriously years ago, and for now they’re only concerned over who’s going to buy them (which won’t, unfortunately, be the Koch Brothers).
At least the Register seems more like a real newspaper now. They’ve got all the regular attributes — their display advertising is way up (they’ve been hiring plenty of sales types, and are still advertising heavily for them), and, anecdotally, the total number of pages is way up (70% they claimed here). The number of actual sections is up, and they’re proud of restoring the Business section to a normal size and regular distribution. Continue reading