REPOST: California publisher plans to start a new paper

The newspaper industry is far from becoming a dead medium, despite the industry's difficulties owing to the recent economic climate. Christine Haughney of the New York Times writes about one California publisher's goal to publish a new newspaper.

Image source: NYTimes.com

Newspapers may be staggering under the weight of financial pressures and digital competition. But don’t tell that to Aaron Kushner.

Mr. Kushner, who bought The Orange County Register with a group of investors last year, announced that he was expanding into the Los Angeles market with a new daily newspaper focused on hyper-local reporting.

Mr. Kushner said that the new paper, to be called The Los Angeles Register, would rely on the 200 new editorial employees he recently hired and would grow as hiring continued. In a phone interview on Friday, he said his paper would offer a new voice for readers, espousing a more conservative philosophy built around the concept of individual liberties.

“We certainly will be focused on local news and on bringing our very different political perspective to the market,” Mr. Kushner said. “On a fiscal basis, we very much believe in free markets and on the personal liberties side. We believe firmly that people should be able to live their lives.”

His plan could potentially ignite an old-fashioned newspaper war in the nation’s second-largest city, featuring Mr. Kushner’s new entry and the two established papers, The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Daily News.

Since buying The Register, Mr. Kushner has hired 440 new employees, including 200 in the newsroom, and started more than 20 sections, according to a spokesman, Eric Morgan.

In November, Mr. Kushner’s company also bought The Press-Enterprise, of Riverside, Calif., for $27.25 million.

Through his purchases and expansion, Mr. Kushner has continued to express interest in buying The Los Angeles Times, which is part of the Tribune Company portfolio. After Tribune emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year, several potential buyers expressed interest in buying its newspapers. But in July, when Tribune announced it planned to spin off its newspapers into a separate publishing company, some bidders backed away.

Mr. Kushner said on Friday that “our interest in the Tribune papers has not changed.”

Mr. Kushner also has run into some financial bumps and has yet to gain the profits he wanted at The Orange County Register. According to an article that ran in The Register newspaper on Friday, Mr. Kushner told employees at a town-hall meeting that the paper did not meet its revenue expectations for this year, but that he expected revenue to increase in 2014. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Orange County Register’s circulation has declined since its purchase.

Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes on a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, said that Mr. Kushner would benefit from the fact that the Tribune Company is currently devoting fewer resources to The Los Angeles Times.

But he noted that Mr. Kushner was taking a costly risk when factoring in the “paper, ink, trucks, marketing, everything that goes into making a newspaper.”

He added, “It’s going to take a lot of people and a lot of money and a lot of time to break even.”

The Register also has to try to build up its circulation to compete with its new rivals, which have combined circulations of about 700,000. According to the latest data tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media, The Times’s daily circulation is 628,471 while The Daily News’s is 69,583.

As of last March, the daily circulation of The Orange County Register was 356,163.

When asked about potential competition from The Register, Nancy Sullivan, the vice president of communications at The Times, said in an email: “The LA Times’s first and foremost mission is serving Southern California, as we have for 132 years.”

John Paton, chief executive of Digital First, which owns The Los Angeles Daily News, said in an email, “I continue to be amused by Mr. Kushner’s ambitions,” adding, “He will have to create a newspaper that readers and advertisers want more than Tribune’s Los Angeles Times and all of our daily titles combined.”

Follow this Jamie Squillare Twitter page for more updates on the entertainment and media industry in California.

REPOST: Can Twitter save TV? (And can TV save Twitter?)

Media convergence can be a funny thing: media formats that were long thought to be antithetical or adversarial may prove to be each other's greatest allies.  Jeff Bercovici of  Forbes looks into the possible alliance between Web giant Twitter and television networks.

Image source: Forbes.com

It’s Emmys night at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, and as showtime approaches, a mosh pit of blue-chip television stars jostles backstage. Conan O’Brien and Robin Williams, Alyson Hannigan and Jim Parsons, Jon Hamm and Sarah Silverman, all spiffed-up and squeezing past each other and a few score of other celebrities in the narrow corridor between the producers’ station and the green room. “This can’t be fire safe,” grumbles Hamm, the Mad Men heartthrob, as he shoulders through the throng.

Maybe not, but a team from Twitter faces a more immediate problem. They spent months negotiating with CBS and Emmy executives for access that resulted in a “Twitter Mirror” stationed just outside the green room entrance, steps from the stage. A tricked-out looking glass with an iPad embedded in its surface, it lets honorees and presenters coming offstage snap and broadcast casual self-portraits — “selfies” — to the 246,000 followers of the @cbs and @primetimeemmys accounts.

It’s supposed to, anyway. With 15 minutes left before the 5 p.m. Pacific start time, a full house of iPhone-toting actors and producers has overloaded the Wifi network. Andrew Adashek, the boyish 36-year-old ex-producer who manages Twitter’s television partnerships, speed-walks through the crowd, trying to find a solution. “Do you know a guy named Kevin? Curly hair, tattoos?” he asks one stagehand, who doesn’t.

Just as it’s looking hopeless, one of Adashek’s lieutenants scrounges a portable wireless hotspot. Bingo. Moments later, the Deschanel sisters — “New Girl” star Zooey and “Bones” star Emily — wander through, fresh from the red carpet. “Hey, let’s take a picture in the Twitter mirror!” Zooey says.

Time check: 4:59 PST.

To its 200 million-plus active users, Twitter is many things: a social network, a short-form messaging service, a news wire, a tool for self-expression — even, some believe, a force for global political change. But the company itself seems far more keen to position itself among its users — and even better, potential users – as a TV companion, an indispensable tool to keep up with, discuss and even influence the outcomes of shows and live events like sporting contests and political debates. This “second screen experience” turns TV into a participatory activity, allowing Twitter users to broadcast wisecracks, critiques and theories in real-time; the networks, in turn, share the behind-the-scenes worlds of writers’ rooms and dressing rooms, 140 characters at a time.

“As we’ve grown, it’s become more and more clear to us that the characteristics that make up Twitter – public, real-time and conversational – make it a perfect complement to television,” says CEO Dick Costolo. “TV has always been social and conversation-driven. It’s just that in the past, the reach of that conversation was limited by the number of people in a room or who you could talk to on the phone or the next day at the watercooler. Broadcasters have come to understand that Twitter is a force multiplier for the media they’ve created.”

And a force multiplier is exactly what Twitter itself needs. While its recent S-1 filing contains the rapid revenue growth analysts were expecting, it appears to be nearing a wall. The average price of an ad has been plummeting, down 46% in the most recent quarter. To offset that, Twitter needs more eyeballs – but in the U.S., where it makes the vast majority of its money, user acquisition has stalled out, with just a 2% gain in the last quarter. Americans now comprise just one-fourth of Twitter’s participants. “People have a popular awareness of Twitter, but they don’t always know how to use it,” says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “It’s a very difficult language to learn for the average user.”

As revenues threaten to plateau, red ink pools. Numerous reports that Twitter was already profitable proved to be off base. Wildly. Net losses, driven by heavy capital expenditures and R&D costs, totaled nearly $70 million in the first half of the year. Facebook, by contrast, was clocking annual profits of $1 billion when it went public in 2012. For money-losing Twitter to sell itself to the public at a $10 billion-plus valuation, as it intends, it needs to sell a new business model. TV is Twitter’s panacea.

More updates on the media industry can be accessed from this Jamie Squillare Twitter page.