Rob Curley

The stories. The visuals. The headlines. Today’s front page totally illustrates what Ken Brusic told me on my very first day at the Register a year ago: “We are the nation’s largest community newspaper." 

This front page also shows another of the Register’s strategies: Not just being the "paper of record,” but in specifically being the “paper of interesting.”

The whole paper was strong and definitely filled with lots of interesting stuff today.

Really great health and business sections. Very good local section. Super informative and practical weekend guide section. And a cool sports story the revisits some of our famous Orange County Olympians, one year after they kicked tailfeathers in London.

How big was today’s Orange County Register?

Well, that depends a little on where you live in the county. The main paper was seven sections with 90 pages. But I live in Anaheim, so my edition of the Register also included this morning’s Anaheim Bulletin, one of our weekly papers, which was 24 pages.

So, I guess my local OC Register was either 90 pages or 114 pages, depending on how you count them.

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How does that compare with other newspapers this morning?

New York Times – 60 pages.

Wall Street Journal – 42 pages.

Washington Post – 48 pages, plus 28 tabloid-sized pages in the “Living Local” section that is delivered with the Thursday paper.

Detroit Free Press – 56 pages, plus 24 tabloid-sized pages in a weekend entertainment preview section. (The Freep is home delivered three days a week, and today’s paper is one of the home-delivery papers.)

Seattle Times – 30 pages.

Kansas City Star – 26 pages, plus 32 tabloid-sized pages in a weekend “Preview” section.

Los Angeles Times – 50 pages.

San Diego U-T – 42 pages, plus 36 tabloid-sized pages in the weekend entertainment section.

Long Beach Press-Telegram – 30 pages.

(Some of these page totals were from papers I counted, and others were given to me by friends throughout the newspaper industry.)

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:

http://insideocr.ocregister.com/2013/07/02/irvine-world-news-transitions-to-daily-starting-july-22/9363/

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’

More info here:

http://www.snd.org/training/graphicsgarage

Planning for this day’s coverage began almost a month ago. We tweaked our plans for the Supreme Court’s possible ruling on Prop 8 earlier in the week.

* A wide range of local stories.

* Thoughtful local columns.

* The Register’s great photography.

* Lots of different voices on the issue. On the top of every page of our coverage.

* Using more than just 20-inches of text to tell the story.

* Fantastic design.

* And my favorite headline of any paper in the country.

All part of a 76-page, six-section paper.

I know we charged a dollar for this paper. It wasn’t a dollar paper. It was more like a $2.50 or $3 paper.

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Here’s another installment from my e-mail interview with the California Newspaper Publishers Association from earlier this year:

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In the Orange County towns covered by your revamp, the clamor for original, local news “like they used to make when times were good” [my phrase – like it?] – what does that sound like? (I’m assuming you’ve asked local folks what they want, and they’ve answered…)

After having focused on digital delivery and audience growth for so long, one of the things I learned was what readers really want. And what I loved about that was more traditional newspaper folks would say crazy things like: “Well, if we give our readers what they want, we’ll only be publishing stories and photos of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.” That always cracked me up because when I looked at the real numbers and tried to honestly understand what local readers really spent time with, it was never Britney or Lindsay.

On the other hand, it also wasn’t the kind of boring stuff that fills many newspapers. 

With the Register’s new weekly newspapers, we’re trying to serve our readers’ needs. When you understand the narrative of a real reader’s life, you begin to realize that a whole lot of our industry’s woes have a whole lot less to do with the Internet and a whole lot more to do with newsrooms being just a bit disconnected with what people really want and need.

We run more public record information – business licenses, real estate transactions, arrest reports – in these weekly newspapers than any other print product I’ve ever seen. But we definitely aren’t trying to be the paper of record. We’re trying to be the paper of interesting.

As a good friend of mine once told me, so many papers fill their pages with things that they feel should be there – things that are CYA stories, things that are perceived as important by most newsroom folks, but maybe aren’t really all that interesting to most readers – rather than with things people might actually want to read. We don’t really have that problem with our weeklies.

It’s a given that we’re going to cover the news. But who is going to tell you where to get great cupcakes for your kid’s birthday party or what the best janitor in Orange County says is the most effective way to clean windows, or which local restaurants have those cool new Coke machines? We are. And we’re going to do it in way that makes you smile. Maybe even laugh.

People should smile when they read the newspaper. They’ve gotten too accustomed to shaking their head in disgust when they open our pages. I’m not saying that we have to publish lots of fluff, but we shouldn’t be afraid of being pleasant.

Our readers have been telling us for years that they want more good news in our papers, that they get burned out on the constant doom and gloom. Yet most newspapers have ignored that request. Why? Are we afraid we won’t be taken seriously by the industry if we tell the good news stories? We’re not afraid to tell the good news stories – our weeklies are full of them. And our readers tell us they love them.

From 1940 to 2010, combined US newspaper circulation was essentially flat while US household growth exploded. The Internet destroyed our business model, but the decline of newspaper readership has less to do with the Internet than it does newsrooms simply not knowing how to serve their readers. We aren’t going to make that mistake here.

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