Orange County Register parent Freedom Communications recently made official what the Insider reported last month: It plans to start a daily newspaper in Long Beach. Less clear is what the move to compete with the Long Beach Press-Telegram—one of the nine dailies in MediaNews Group’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group—will mean to Freedom’s contract printing business. Six of LANG’s dailies are printed by the Register, and “our Long Beach Register launch does not affect our ongoing printing agreement,” according to Freedom spokesperson Eric Morgan. He also noted that the Register prints “the Whittier Daily News, Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Redlands Daily Facts, San Bernardino Sun and the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario—but not [the] Long Beach Press-Telegram.” Don’t know if that exception carries much weight with Ron Hasse, who was greeted with Freedom’s move into Long Beach less than a month after his promotion to publisher and president of LANG. “I won’t be commenting on any plans we may have in development with regard to the Orange County Register’s decision to enter the Long Beach market,” Hasse wrote in an email. “Sorry.” …
Add this to the White House-to-Congress-to-the-SEC-to-globe-trotting corporate consultant resume of Bingham Consulting LLC President Chris Cox: chairman of the Forum for Corporate Directors. Cox succeeds John Della Grotta, a partner in Paul Hastings, who will remain on the board …
Congrats to Charla Lenarth, newly hired CEO of the Orange Chamber of Commerce. She arrives from a similar post in Ontario. Best wishes to Heidi Larkin-Reed, who recently retired from the post at the Orange Chamber …
Jeff Benck tells reporter Chris Casacchia that his promotion to CEO of Costa Mesa-based Emulex last week carried a little extra meaning. The longtime OC exec was passed up for the same post six years ago by Aliso Viejo-based rival QLogic, where he served as president and COO before parting ways after a year on the job. The two companies are now competing in the emerging 10-gig Ethernet market, where Emulex has a big market share lead over QLogic, a fact not lost on Benck. “We don’t run into them nearly as much these days. We’ve pursued a very different path” (see related story, page 4) …
Peter Bourjos is out with a fractured wrist, but the Angels’ centerfielder has already made a mark this year with a strong start on hitting and stellar defense that justified skipper Mike Scioscia’s decision to put him in centerfield and switch All-Star Mike Trout to left. Looks like it hasn’t gone to the head of Bourjos, who apparently still picks up his own dry-cleaning and recently gave Beto, the counterman at Paradise Cleaners at the Harvard Place retail center in Irvine, a nice action shot of himself on patrol in the outfield.
