Monday, July 22, 2013. 12 pages.
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Tuesday, July 23, 2013. 12 pages.
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Wednesday, July 24, 2013. 14 pages.
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Thursday, July 25, 2013. 32 pages.
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Friday, July 26, 2013. 18 pages.
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And here’s a look at today’s front page and jump page, Monday, July 29:
Today (Monday, July 22, 2013), the Irvine World News debuted as a daily newspaper, delivered to all Orange County Register subscribers who live in that community. It was a 12-page paper.
The staff, led by Team Leader Paul Danison and City Editor Jeff Rowe, did an amazing job!
Here’s what it looked like, cover to cover:
And here’s a closer look at the centerpiece:
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Here is the column I wrote for Page 5 of the first daily edition of the Irvine World News:
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Irvine bears the name of a ranch that spanned from the mountains to the sea. In that way alone, it symbolizes the wide-ranging geography that makes up Orange County.
But it’s more than a history note on its landscape that makes one of our county’s youngest cities important to what we are.
Irvine is the center of Orange County, both geographically and through its sense of community. It is one of our most diverse cities, and a place cherished for its educational system.
Year in and year out, it is named one of the safest and best places in the country to live. It is a world-class city, and world-class cities deserve best-of-class news coverage.
Today, Irvine gets its own daily newspaper. Paired with the Orange County Register, Irvine will enjoy complete, unparalleled coverage. It’s long overdue.
Irvine is a major-league city made up of wonderful residential neighborhoods, robust manufacturing, one of the best universities in the nation, lively retail areas, a high-tech sector and vast open spaces. It is a model for communities throughout the world. Your new Irvine World News will reflect these unique qualities.
We’re proud of what Irvine is, and love that we get to document its living history.
For more than 40 years, people have turned to the Irvine World News to tell them what was really happening in their hometown, whether it was weekly or three times a week. From City Hall to our houses of worship to our ball fields, the Irvine World News was there.
And we’ll still be there. It’s just that now we’re going to be in your home Monday through Friday. Combined with the Register, you will have seven days of essential and relevant news and information about your world and your community.
In the first issue of this newspaper from January of 1970, when it was just a monthly publication, its mission was explained like this:
“This newspaper is dedicated to telling you, if not the whole world, about all the news and events which affect you and those who are affected by you in this – the world of Irvine.”
That goal remains the same. But just as Irvine has grown, so have we.
A young city named after a massive ranch has become a great community filled with people and neighborhoods that deserve to be covered. Daily.
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But to see how it’s really done, please read the column by the Irvine World News’ former longtime editor Don Dennis, which you can find here:
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/news-517971-irvine-paper.html
This week, the Orange County Register will turn its twice-a-week newspaper for Irvine into a daily newspaper. Because of that, I thought it would be fun to show how the Irvine World News has looked through the years.
The Irvine World News debuted in January of 1970 as a monthly newspaper. It was owned by the Irvine Company. It looked like this:
In 2000, the Orange County Register purchased the Irvine World News from the Irvine Company. By June of 2002, the newspaper looked like this:
Here’s a look at the Irvine Worlds News as a broadsheet, circa June, 2004:
In 2008, the Irvine World News was converted to the tab style of the Register’s little brother, the OC Post:
And another:
Until November of 2012, our Irvine paper basically looked like this:
… which was basically the same way all of the Register’s weekly papers looked:
At the end of the 2012, we began redesigning each of our community newspapers as broadsheets.
This redesign wasn’t just cosmetic. Not only were we going to almost quadruple the amount of content in our weekly papers, we were going to approach our storytelling very differently.
The Irvine World News was at the center of these philosophical changes.
We tell stories using more than just 28-inches of text and a photo. We use graphics, timelines, Q&As, by-the-numbers, pros & cons, lots of lists and a healthy dose of serendipity. We also have a soft spot for huge photos and eye-catching illustrations.
More than anything, we always keep our readers front and center.
Here are several examples from the last half year or so of the Irvine World News:
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The inside pages of the revamped Irvine Worlds News also took these sorts of cues. Here are some examples of our opinion/voices pages and school pages, which definitely show how much respect and design love we give our reader-contributed content:
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The Irvine World News goes daily on Monday, July, 22, 2013. Here’s a link to the press release about the Register’s newest daily community newspaper:
Here’s a look at the first front page of our new daily newspaper for Irvine:
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After the first issue was published on Monday, I wrote the following blog entry about it, which shows what every page in that newspaper looked like:
http://curleyjayhawk.tumblr.com/post/56192170133/the-first-issue-of-the-irvine-world-news-as-a-daily
Here’s another installment from my e-mail interview with the California Newspaper Publishers Association from earlier this year:
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The digital concept, where content plays nice on desktop and mobile devices (and clocks zillions of eyeballs) doesn’t apply here. How much does that “emotional connection” of ink-on-paper in-hand fit this scenario? And can you contrast this type of more leisurely reading vs. mobile?
These weekly newspapers live within the ecosystem of the Orange County Register. That means the Register does regional sports like the Angels and big statewide political issues and all of the important national and international stories. The Register also does all of the breaking news, whether that’s a big local story or a much bigger national or state story.
To get our weekly papers, you literally have to be a subscriber to the Register. That meant we could focus on what weekly papers do really well and not worry about all of the other stuff. In some ways, we function much more like a really well-done and localized Sunday magazine that just happens to think your daughter placing first in a local piano competition is important.
I’ve always said that our content should really be media agnostic. I was wrong; that happens a lot.
The content we’re putting in these papers really is meant to work best on newsprint. When you see the stories we’re telling and how we’re telling them, it’s hard imagine someone getting anything even close to the same experience by taking their iPhone to the bathroom and trying to read them.
As I said in my note to our readers (when the Register’s weekly papers were relaunched), the irony in this approach might be that in a world filled with technology, where we can find out almost anything we want by simply reaching into our pockets and grabbing our mobile phone, a real community newspaper offers things that not even the most powerful Internet search engine can: a real understanding of what it is like to live and love in your hometown … in a form you can hang on your refrigerator.
Grab one of our weekly newspapers, pick any story, then go to Google and see if you can find that story some place else on the interwebs. You can’t. These papers are filled with stories that only we are telling. That’s by design. And we aren’t afraid to tell the local stories that readers love and that many news organizations quit telling decades ago.
Some folks say that people quit cutting out newspaper stories and putting them on their fridge because they started making refrigerator doors out of steel. I think it has a lot more to do with people not seeing things in their local newspaper that they would want to hang on their fridge.
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What can we share with other newspaper people that might inspire their own revivals? (Can you share a style guide, maybe, or a road map you’ve created for staff?)
As our new publisher Aaron Kushner says, our secret sauce really is to do everything we can to first be relevant and then be essential. This really is a reader-based initiative.
I’ve worked at so many newspapers where you will hear a reporter or an editor say something like: “Our readers are idiots.” Well, we don’t feel that way at all. We adore our readers.
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Our CNPA folks last saw you onstage a few years back at our San Francisco convention. Gotta ask about how this newspaper project compares to your gigs in Las Vegas and D.C. (Briefly compare and contrast the three situations.)
This really isn’t like anything I’ve ever done, though I’ve certainly been collecting lessons from the school of hard knocks through the entire time. And what I don’t remember from the scars, I remember via the Google searches. Five years ago, I couldn’t have done the job that Ken Brusic and Aaron have asked me to do here at the Orange County Register, but at this exact moment, I’m not sure there’s another editor in the country more up for this challenge.
Aaron likes to remind people that this isn’t an experiment. In experiments, you can fail. We aren’t going to fail.
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Part one of this interview: Making weekly newspapers matter in a metro market
Part two of this interview: Better understanding reader needs, and moving to become the ‘paper of interesting’ instead of just being the ‘paper of record’
Rob Curley 