I was a few weeks into my job as editor here when my brother called from our hometown of Chicago to find out how I was faring in Orange County.
“Tell me, Rick, is it easy and shallow and superficial?”
“Oh, yes, Paul,” I replied, playing along with the stereotype, “and God, I love it so.”
“Well,” answered Paul, getting in the last word, “water seeks its level.”
Nearly 10 years later, feeling more leveled with Orange County than ever, I’m stepping aside with this issue to become the Orange County Business Journal’s part-time executive editor. I’ll continue to write the OC Insider column and to help my successor, Michael Lyster, and managing editor Roger Bloom put out the paper each week.
But I also plan to branch into new activities, including freelance writing, consulting and teaching,diversifying my personal portfolio, if you will. I’d like to think I’m merely keeping up with the times by moving toward tasking, outsourcing and value-added pursuits.
So, while this is hardly time for farewell, it is an appropriate time for reflection, to look back on an assignment that almost precisely coincided with the eventful ’90s, to brag a bit about what we at the Orange County Business Journal accomplished in that span and to note Orange County’s emergence, through thick and thin, as an economic powerhouse.
I have plausibly argued that at the precise moment when the plane bringing me here landed at John Wayne Airport on Oct. 1, 1990, the California recession began.
For me, economic disasters were nothing new: I’d spent most of my career chronicling the decline of the Rust Belt from the vantage point of Akron, Ohio. But for Orange County, a recession was not something stored in the recent memory bank; so beset by job losses, business closings and falling home prices, OC and the rest of California went through a soul-searching and self-doubting that often verged on self-flagellation. Then, just as things were picking up, Bob Citron’s fund imploded, earning OC a worldwide black eye.
But it never once occurred to me to grab a one-way flight back east. Because OC was an undervalued asset in the early ’90s, and the OCBJ was even more so. Besides, I was fortunate to have, from the start, as friend, boss and partner, a brilliant businessman who shared that conviction.
When Richard Reisman and I took our jobs, one month apart, the OCBJ was one of the worst performers, financially and in terms of readership, of any major-market business journal. Paid circulation was less than 2,000 and people usually gave us a quizzical look when we introduced ourselves. Today, the OCBJ is by every key measure one of the top-performing papers of its kind. Paid circulation is more than 13,000 and faces light up at the mention of “the Business Journal.”
I’m proud to have been part of the team of talented, dedicated and hard-working professionals that was able to grow an enterprise,top-line and bottom-line,throughout the worst years of the ’90s and every year since, and to turn a relatively obscure publication into a “must read” for OC decision-makers. And I’m thankful for the dividends of that effort: the friends made, the people met and the enthusiastic acknowledgment of readers.
And it’s just been plain fun to have stayed ahead of the journalism pack in finding stories, identifying trends and bucking conventional wisdom.
The Business Journal was chronicling the abuses in, and devastating economic consequences of, California’s workers’ compensation system more than a year before state leaders got serious and enacted genuine reform. When the economy turned, we were the first to call it, on March 28, 1994, a bold but fact-based determination that raised many eyebrows at the time.
And over the years we have been the first publication to introduce OCers to emerging technology powerhouses, such as Kingston Technology and Broadcom Corp. (Broadcom, incidentally, was a Mike Lyster “discovery,” but he’ll have more to say on that in his own introductory message next week.)
I’m proud, too, for the lists and stories that have highlighted not only the county’s big companies and major industries, but those that have brought out the rich diversity of OC business,the minority-owned companies, family-owned companies and women-owned companies. Take this week’s page 1 profile of Pick Up Stix founder Charles Zhang; or take our Women in Business Awards, now an institution, that drew 800 to the annual luncheon three weeks ago.
But I’m probably proudest of the staff’s week-in-week-out labor in the trenches, covering companies, revealing the big real estate deals, reporting on breakthroughs at UCI, following the twists and turns in the El Toro controversy, etc.
OC is an exciting place to write about, and the rest of the world is finally catching on.
Last week, for example, Orange County placed No. 7 on Forbes magazine’s list of the best places to do business, up from No. 11 on last year’s inaugural list. And among the six places out-ranking OC, only one, Atlanta, has more jobs. (San Jose placed 29th.) Moreover, OC ranked second among the 200 metropolitan areas in number of distinct tech-industry clusters, a tribute to its economic diversity.
Indeed, I like to say that OC’s biggest export is style,a mix of creativity, energy and entrepreneurial risk-taking that transcends any particular industry segment. OC is a style center for software and surfwear and eyewear, for chips and cars, for medical instruments and financial instruments.
I plan to keep covering this evolving scene, while I get more conversant in techno-speak (Mike, Ken, help!), more accustomed to working in open-neck shirts, and used to having “executive” in my title. That last one will probably be the hardest adjustment.
John S. Knight, the legendary newspaperman (and one of my early bosses) was in his illustrious career a publisher, a president and a chairman. Yet, he concluded, “There is no higher or better title than editor.”
Mike, take it from me, JSK was right.
