Wednesday, October 18, 2006 OC POSTAL: REG RAG BOOTED FROM IRVINE!

Well, the gated community in Irvine that I live in, anyway. Here's the
backstory:

Just before the weekend of Sept. 23-24, zillions of Orange County households
received a glossy, oversized cardboarded missive in the mail from the
marketing geniuses at the OC Register, announcing the recent launch of their
new faster-format daily tab, the OC Post. I got one--the card blurted that
I was "one of a select group of readers" who'd be getting a free five-week
trial subscription to the Post, their latest misguided attempt at
revenue-boosting. Except I couldn't have been that select, since not only
did my Mom, who lives in Fullerton, get a postcard, but so did Eric, who I
live with--so pretty much EVERYBODY in OC got one.

Said we were to get free copies of the Post for the next five weeks starting
Monday, Sept. 25 (we didn't actually start getting ours till the
27th--that's the Reg: Late with the freelance checks back when I scribbled
for them in the '90s, and still late a decade on).

Disturbing/funny, though, were what the Post postcard promised, among them,
"NO FLUFF: News, sports and entertainment listings served up lean." Gee, if
I was a proper Reggie staff writer, I know that would certainly make me feel
like my job is important. Nice to know that marketing thinks a 15-inch story
is "fluff." But on the flipside, to get across their idea of a
faster-to-peruse pub (with the fluff excised, natch), they had a graf with
words that were supposed to look like they had been removed by an editor's
red pen (ain't that old-fashioned). Yet it also creepily looked like a
censored/redacted CIA doc, which had Eric--who knows a thing or three about
marketing--wondering "It looks like they're gonna censor the news more than
anything else."

Agreed, hon! Here's a couple shots of the card:

The Post rag itself is garbage, full of screaming New York Post-styled ARE
YOUR KIDS SAFE? headlines (yes, that was actually one; today's cover
screamer, designed to tease an article about spiders, is simply "EEK!" – the
OC Post LOVES them exclamation points almost as much as I like putting
things in parenthesis) designed to shock you into putting your 25 cents
(yeah -- unlike the Reggie's other pantsload pub Squeeze OC, they actually
want you to PAY for this shit) into a coin slot. And all the stories lack
bylines, which also probably makes the Reg staffers who penned the original
pieces the Post articles have been cut from feel fantastic about their work
being shredded into bite-size nuggets (unless of course they prefer not to
have their names turded-up by appearing in this lame excuse for reportage).
Morale there on Grand Avenue can't possibly get any worse, what with the Reg
in such financial straits--$20 mil short in ad revenue, I read, weirdly, the
same week that we started getting these unwelcome, unwanted Posts tossed at
us not enough staffers take the buyouts, it's layoff city.

But here's where things get personal: These Register/Post assholes are
cluttering up my 'hood with copies that are dumped in front of everyone's
garage door and never picked up. Sure, some people are just pigs, but others
are away at their vacation homes or other properties (or they are home, they're just dead

Guess other people were getting pretty pissed off at seeing the clutter as well, not to mention having to stoop over every morning and deposit the Post in their recycle bin without even taking it out of the plastic wrap, because by the end of last week, the Reg rag had disappeared from our neighborhood---haven't seen an issue in front of our garage since the 13th. And this free promo was supposed to go till the week ending Oct. 27th. Somehow, I don't feel as if I'm missing out on muchS.

OCT. 23 UPDATE: Desperation sinks in! Now the Reg telemarketing douches are
starting to cold-call people and offer free trial subscriptions, which probably should've been the way to go all along instead of junking up people's driveways. Tragically, my Mom fell for this scam, but she tells me she just wanted the free newsprint because it'll help when she paints the baseboards in the bathroom. . . .