Register trying to survive

Here's an interview with Orange County Register publisher Terry Horne (brought in last September) about how the newspaper will try to survive during this time when all newspapers are struggling. When he came he described the "perfect storm" of increasing importance of the Internet, which no newspaper really understands yet, losing employment classified ads to Monster.com and lots of merchandise classified to Craigslist. We used to get multiple full-page ads a week from several department stores, but they've consolidated and are advertising less. Car dealers still advertise but not as heavily. None of those are coming back.

We'll be zoning to attract local advertisers who couldn't afford the full run, and will roll out several free community tabloids. Plus we're thinking Web-first, lots of blogs, lots of stuff exclusively on the Web. We'll see how it works. We had a small layoff in January and there's a lot of gallows humor. It seems as if Romanesko is announcing layoffs at some newspaper or another almost every day.