The days of “entrepreneurial expansion” at the Orange County Register have given way to more modest hopes for growth based on “ultra-local” coverage and baby boomers as a key readership group.
Rich Mirman, chief executive and president of Freedom Communications Holdings Inc. in Santa Ana, laid out his tempered growth strategy for the first time last week at a luncheon hosted by the Orange County Forum, a nonpartisan organization that invites community leaders to discuss current affairs.
“We are now in a phase that I like to call ‘refocusing on finance,’ ” said Mirman, who also serves as publisher of the Register and the Press-Enterprise in Riverside. Last month he took over top executive duties for Freedom from Aaron Kushner, who had been chief executive, and Eric Spitz, who resigned as president and remains chairman of the company.
The duo—who led a group that purchased Freedom in 2012—pushed a failed expansion into the Los Angeles and Long Beach markets. They also switched newspaper delivery from a longtime contract with the Los Angeles Times to ACI California LLC, a move that was followed by significant disruption in service.
“They were very enthusiastic, very committed, and very excited about the newspaper industry and really wanted to sort of shock the world,” Mirman said of his predecessors. “[They] felt very strongly … that contributing to quality and quantity of journalism is going to really change the way the newspapers are received, and they added lots and lots of new sections. They got a few things right, and they got a bunch of things wrong, and over the last couple of years, unfortunately, we as a company [weren’t] profitable.”
Righting the course will require refocusing on the Orange County market, he said, emphasizing the advantage the Register has in covering an area with little competition from traditional media outlets.
“There aren’t any TV stations, there aren’t any radio stations,” Mirman said. “This is available for us, and we should do everything we can to make sure that we optimize within that community space. And we do—that’s the good news.”
Mirman, who first became involved in Freedom as an investor, said the focus on baby boomers is supported by data that show that nearly 80% of newspaper readers nationwide are 50 or older, with 48% of that group being 65 years and older.
“You can polish this and put some perfume on and a little bit of makeup, but at the end of the day we have aging customers,” he said. The “vast majority of people that read newspapers across the country are over 50.”
‘Easy Problems First’
Mirman said getting young people to subscribe is important, but his first priority is keeping Freedom in black in the near future.
“Let’s make sure we solve the easy problems first, and the [easiest] problem is to make sure that the group of people who read our paper, which are those over 65, that we do a very good job of getting to those folks,” he said.
A key to keeping existing readers and attracting new ones is to “leverage the digital,” Mirman said, to present stories in ways that allow readers to find related data on the publications’ websites.
He talked about “Illusion of Safety” as an example, citing the Register’s recent series of stories about prostitutes murdered by men who wore GPS tracking devices that no one was monitoring. A map accompanied an online version of the story, enabling readers to see if criminals equipped with GPS devices live in their neighborhood.
Mirman said he also sees potential in expanding Latino-American readership.
Freedom’s purchase of the Press-Enterprise in 2013 gave it a foothold in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
Those markets, combined with the Register’s territory, give it access to the “second largest Latino population in the country,” he said.
The company will bring back two Spanish-language weekly newspapers, Excelsior in Orange County and La Prensa in Riverside and the Coachella Valley, that were consolidated a year ago into a zoned, regional publication called Unidos en el Sur de California.
“Unidos is a perfectly fine name; (it’s) just nobody has ever heard of it,” Mirman said. “So on May 1, we are going back, and we are going to relaunch two of these very powerful brands. … These are going to be real newspapers with quality content that cater to the Latino community.”
Community Publications
Freedom also plans to continue to build on the success of three weekly community newspapers that relaunched in a new format earlier this year: Tustin News, Aliso Viejo News, and Laguna Niguel News.
“We don’t have the cash to be able to roll out a lot of these weeklies in the communities very quickly, so we are starting with three, and they are all fabulously profitable,” Mirman said. “We are now in the next phase…rolling out the next two, in Fullerton and Orange.”
The free publications also offer advertising opportunities for small businesses that could not afford “multithousand-dollar,” full-page ads in the daily newspaper, he said.
Analyst Weighs In
Mirman’s approach differs from Kushner’s big push into community news with numerous daily sections that could not be sustained in the long run, but Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst who works for Outsell Inc., a global research and advisory firm in Burlingame, still had questions about overall execution of the local strategy.
“Newspaper space is costly,” Doctor said. “If he’s going to put [local news] in the main paper, fine, but is he going to cut back on national and state news to replace it? It’s not a bad idea, but the problem with that is the older readers that he’s talking about expect a full paper of national and international news, as well as local.”
He added that Mirman is not the only one focusing on baby boomers, and cited the Chicago Tribune, which last week announced plans to put more opinion pages in its daily and weekend editions, a move expected to be popular with older readers.
“It’s not a new idea. It’s a good idea, as long as it’s a part of an overall strategy,” Doctor said. “Newspapers can’t afford to do just one thing and essentially milk the market of older readers, without at the same time developing a new audience.”
He also said that “local coverage is a great idea journalistically, but it’s expensive to do, and it takes staff to do it well, and to do it in print is doubly expensive.”
