The Insider hears a Register redesign is in the works

The newspaper that helped to revolutionize the look of newspapers,more color, more photos, shorter stories,is at it again. The OC Register has a management team at work on a redesign of the paper slated for the first part of next year, the Insider is told. Staffers were shown prototypes last week. Before it spends on a makeover, though, the Register, like many dailies suddenly, is paring costs (see Susan Schaben’s story, this page) Video-game degree: The hottest course on the UCI campus? The digital arts minor in the School of the Arts. A total of 401 students were registered for this fall, and another 439 were put on the waiting list. Much of the interest is from computer and engineering students, said Dean Jill Beck, who added that many more students would sign up for the course if they thought they had a chance of getting in Since the Gray family led its buyout late last year, St. John Knits International has been calling itself a private company and so has everyone else. But is St. John really private? After all, the buyout was financed partly with $100 million in public bonds, the upshot of which is that you can still read about St. John’s quarterly results in the newspaper. Moreover, while the common stock is no longer registered with the SEC or listed on an exchange, 7% of it remains in public hands. So you can still type in a symbol,SJKI.OB,to call up the company’s stock charts and other info. Why didn’t the Grays eradicate all of the common? For accounting reasons. The deal was done under recap accounting, which avoids the booking of goodwill that would zap future earnings (instead, equity gets zapped); for a company to qualify for the special treatment, the SEC requires that a stub of its stock remain public. Why does St. John care about earnings or SEC rules at this point? Because, the Insider is told, the Grays’ investment partner Vestar may want to exit through an IPO someday. Incidentally, while the buyout price of 30 spurred a since-settled shareholders’ lawsuit, the now thinly traded stock hasn’t reached that level since, and last week was at 25 Trial lawyer and state Sen. Joe Dunn is one of the “100 new Democrats who are changing the face of American politics,” according to The New Democrat magazine The Insider is curious who the motorist is with the EDIT R license plate The OCBJ’s Heather O’Neill is now Heather Wilson. “As the ’80s and ’90s are over, I hope to be at the forefront of an anti-hyphenating generation,” says Mrs. Wilson. The lucky devil is Tony Wilson, sales manager for Surveyors Service Co. in Costa Mesa.