Looking Good in California

By James Kelly

No doubt about it, David Threshie once deserved your pity. When Threshie became publisher of the Orange County Register in 1979, he inherited a crotchety, shabbily written newspaper content to doze in the shadow of its bigcity neighbor, the Los Angeles Times. Its news columns were infected with the libertarian philosophy of its editorials (public schools were called "tax-supported schools"), and the biggest headlines were saved for crime and sex stories. A sympathetic nod should also have gone to Chris Anderson, whom Threshie picked as the paper's editor in 1980. A onetime disk jockey and former associate managing editor of the Seattle Times, Anderson, then 30, had never run a newspaper. Anderson, in fact, had not even heard of the Register.

Today save your pity for other hapless souls. Threshie and Anderson have transformed the Register into an aggressive, smartly designed daily that boasts what may be the best full-color reproduction in the country. The Register has also beaten back a determined raid into its area by the wealthier Times, which has vied to boost the readership of its Orange County edition (weekday circ. 164,000) with little success. The Register, by contrast, has upped its circulation since 1979 by 36%, to 274,000. The competition grew keener last spring, when the Register won a Pulitzer for its photographic coverage of the Los Angeles Olympics. "We're certainly feeling their heat," admits Los Angeles Times Publisher Tom Johnson. For Edgar Trotter, chairman of the communications department at California State University, Fullerton, the metamorphosis of the Register is "the single most exciting development that I've witnessed in journalism."

The Register, which is the flagship of the 32-paper Freedom Newspapers chain, owes its rebirth partly to its rival's success in Orange County. By the late 1970s, the Times had whittled the Register's lead from about 50,000 to 38,000 copies a day. Threshie, 54, who joined the company in 1962 after marrying a descendant of the chain's founder, battled the Times's incursion by plowing profits back into the paper at a rate never imagined by previous Register publishers. He quadrupled the newsroom budget, nearly tripled the news staff (to 260) and hiked salaries to attract better talent. Threshie invested $1.8 million in a computerized color graphics system that, he claims, is used by no other daily newspaper in the world. By 1981, a year before USA Today hit the stands, the Register was publishing in full color every day.

While Threshie limited the paper's disdain for excessive government interference to the editorial page, Editor Anderson cleaned up the paper's format by reducing the cluttered eight-column pages to six and laying out stories in easy-to-read rectangular units instead of the traditional vertical strips. Anderson also ran much more news about Orange County, an 800-sq.-mi. sprawl of 26 municipalities and scores of towns, with a population of more than 2 million.

When the more experienced reporters of the Times's 120-person Orange County staff compete head-to-head with the greener troops of the Register, the Times stories are usually better written and more analytical. Yet the Times cannot match the Register's coverage of virtually everything in Orange County that moves, talks or flashes bright colors. Anderson, a fiend for market studies, responded to reader surveys this fall by expanding the business pages and adding entertainment and fashion sections. "The Los Angeles Times has excellent foreign and national coverage, but its weakness is in local coverage," says Anderson. Observes Threshie: "We've identified the Register as the Orange County paper, and people have responded to that."

Narda Zacchino, editor of the Times's Orange County edition, has reacted to the challenge partly by wooing away some of her competitor's brightest stars with fatter paychecks. (Register salaries average $575 a week, compared with the Times's $775.) Even Zacchino acknowledges, however, that the Register's look is an advantage difficult to overcome. "If a reader sees the same stories on the front of the Times and the Register, he will probably buy the Register for the color," says Zacchino. The Register enjoys another advantage: its home-delivery price is $5.25 a week, while the Times costs $10.80.

Some detractors claim that the Register's local coverage, though extensive, is shallow and that its improvements are mostly technicolor dazzle. The young staff has abundant enthusiasm, but stories can be short on clarity and interpretation. A recent account, for example, explained what several zoning ordinances would not do but never explained the impact they would have. A more serious charge is made by Harry Hoiles, 69, a son of the company's founder and a former co-publisher of the Register who is embroiled in a battle to wrest control of the Freedom chain from other family members. He says that Threshie once killed an editorial criticizing the Santa Ana city council lest it anger the city's planning authorities. Threshie denies any impropriety.

While neither paper will offer a breakdown of revenues, the Register and the Times's Orange County edition each should make about $25 million in profits this year. Ad-rich weekday editions of both papers regularly run over 200 pages, while the Sunday issues could crush a Chihuahua. For human beings who crave a daily fix of newsprint, however, the competition between the Register and the Times is good news indeed. "I feel really lucky to be here," says Trotter. "It's a damn fine place to be a newspaper reader." --By James Kelly. Reported by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles

With reporting by Reported by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles