The Insider hears that the OC Register’s plans for a new paper in Los Angeles County, where it’s already added a daily section in Long Beach, isn’t the only move on the horizon for Aaron Kushner’s operations. The Register’s headquarters in Santa Ana is set to go on the sales block, and the publisher—which owns the 5-story building—would prefer an outright sale over continuing on as a tenant of a new owner, according to sources close to the plan. No reliable word yet on an estimated price for the building, which will raise some cash for Kushner, who just added the Press-Enterprise to his holdings, paying $27.3 million for the Riverside daily. That deal closed late, and reliable sources said Kushner had a hard time getting financing in place. Tough to see how a sale of real estate in OC squares with Kushner’s expansion plans outside the Register’s home turf—but maybe he’s looking for something closer to the border of OC and LA …
Visit www.drweiss.com and check the blog entry titled “A Legend Dies—Personal Thoughts on Stopping Mandela’s Tears” for a fascinating story on how Newport Beach-based ophthalmic plastic surgeon Richard Weiss’ professional skills and personal passion intersected with the recently passed founder of post-apartheid South Africa. Enough to earn the good doctor a plug for his One World Sight Project, a nonprofit that aims to treat the “25 million people in the world needlessly blinded by cataracts” …
Quite a week for OC when it came to media exposure … Start with the front page of the Dec. 10 issue of the Los Angeles Times, which featured Irvine PD Chief Dave Maggard as the main subject in an old-school woodcut that illustrated a retrospective on last year’s manhunt for rogue ex-cop Christopher Dorner—a case that started here …
The December issue of National Geographic features a story on some big cats that have made themselves at home in various sections of Southern California, including the 241 toll road, “which is the most fatal highway for cougars south of Los Angeles,” according to the magazine, “despite numerous designated wildlife crossings”…
Joseph Wolfgram, chief technology officer at Hoag, led a story in the Dec. 15 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek in which he talked about how much the hospital operator saved by buying a $144,000 one-box set with software that allows it to switch from processing or storage to networking or other tasks …
Then there’s Aliso Viejo-based Johnny Rockets Group, which led a piece in the Dec. 11 Wall Street Journal on the business of hamburgers in Africa, where a one-time lawyer has established a beachhead for the restaurant chain in Nigeria …
Call it a Pan-Asian push in North OC, where Japanese discount store Daiso became the first business to open at Village Circle on Beach, a shopping center in what the Korean-language media refer to as “Koreatown” in Buena Park. Taiwanese bakery chain 85°C Bakery Cafe and Vietnamese restaurant Pho Pasteur have leased shops there. Korean grocer H Mart is on the way as an anchor tenant.
