There's something a little sad—ironic is too obvious a word—in the apparent fact that Robin Hinch, the Register's famed obituary writer, is among the casualties of the paper's most recent round of self-immolation.

Today I received an anonymous tip from a source with ties to the Register's newsroom saying that Hinch—the subject of a Weekly feature story years ago and a former Freedom Communications Employee of the year—is departing the paper. Besides Hinch, the source said the following staffers were on their way out the door:

*Catherine Reiland, the paper's deputy editor for finance

*Neil Pinchin, a design editor

*Andy Horan, a Sunday editor who joined the revenue-draining OC Post as managing editor until it folded recently, returning to the Reg

*Travel editor Steve Plesa

*Sports editor Greg Gibson

*Daniel Anderson, a photographer and husband of Register columnist Yvette Cabrera

It's still unclear if Hinch and the others are being forced out or are taking buyouts that were announced in tandem with the staffing cutbacks, although one would have to assume that at least some of the departures are voluntary. It's too bad, as our profile of her noted, Hinch was one of the best obituary writers in the business; she actually took more time to get to know her dead subjects than most writers spend talking to live ones. And both Plesa and Gibson edited award-winning and highly readable sections of the paper.

Stay tuned for more names as they become known.

It's never fun being right about this kind of thing, but apparently the OC Register is laying off 80 to 90 employees, according to a post today on the newspaper's website.

Here's about half of the post (it's really short):

"... [Publisher Terry] Horne cited Orange County’s sluggish economy, especially in real estate, as affecting the company’s revenues from local retail, automotive and classified advertising for jobs. The company provided no financial details about the decline in advertising revenue.

This is the third round of layoffs in a year for Orange County Register Communications, the umbrella brand for the Register newspaper, web sites, magazines and other community publications. The company also completed a voluntary severance program to cut staff in 2006.

I kind of predicted this was happening in my previous blog posts about the Register's content-sharing agreement with Dean Singleton's MediaNews, quoting anonymous staffers at the paper saying they were worried layoffs could follow. You can find those stories at our OC Register Deathwatch archives.

Singleton was the first to follow the content-sharing deal with staff cuts, but folks—including one crazy Register staffer and serial blog commenter—who thought the Reg was safe and my reporting was speculative hype are now probably wondering if they should dust off their resumes.

For the record, despite the fact that my stories have been filed under the subject header OC Register Death Watch, neither my colleagues nor I here at the Weekly are happy about any of this.

Here's an idea: Instead of firing 90 people, fire Gordon Dillow. Then hire him back. Then fire him again 89 more times.

*EDITOR'S NOTE: Because of some still-unexplained rewriting of readers' comments, the comments feature for this post has been disabled. Messing with comments like that violates the spirit of free-flowing debate and community we've worked hard to cultivate on this blog. We're trying to figure out how it happened—and ensure that it doesn't happen again. —Ted B. Kissell

Seriously.

Not whether they should spell out in print or on their blog what each letter stands for, but JUST THE ACRONYM. Here, they call it MILK.

Seriously.

Make sure you read the first comment, which reveals that the Reggie's super-sensitive web censors won't even deem the word "pee" as an appropriate word for an allegedly family newsrag.

Read it all right here.

Most people know Dean Singleton as the owner of the Denver-based MediaNews, Inc., a man who loves to buy newspapers like the L.A. Daily News and Long Beach Press-Telegram so that he can slash salaries, bust unions, earn huge profits, and generally quicken the destruction of print journalism. (His effort to buy the OC Register a few years back failed, but now he's using their copy to allow him to lay off his own reporters).

But did you know that Singleton also happens to be chairman of the board of directors of the Associated Press. It was in that function that Singleton attended the AP's annual luncheon today in Washington D.C. The event's guest speaker: presidential hopeful and Democratic front-runner Barack Obama. That's Obama, not Osama, as some in Fox News and other right-wing circles would have you believe. But don't tell that to Singleton, who introduced Obama to the crowd and, after the speech, re-read questions from audience members into the microphone. One of those questions, in Singleton's translation, had to do with Iraq, Afghanistan and "Obama bin Laden."

So there you have it, folks. The man who is speeding the destruction of print journalism, the very industry that has made him a bazillionaire, is also a fucking moron.
Additional proof: the only other famous numbskull who made the same mistake is CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

Back in the days when the Orange County Register was known as the Santa Ana Register, the paper was infamous for twisting phrases to suit the editorial philosophies of owner/old coot R.C. Hoiles--public schools, in perhaps the most famous example, were referred to as "taxpayer-supporter" or "gun run."

The practice largely died once the Reg became a real newspaper, but a bizarre bit of its past philosophy arose today in a front-page story about a Placentia lesbian couple who had quadruplets.

The Orange County Register's ill-starred Squeeze OC, a faux alternative weekly that, in the words of Weekly managing editor Rich Kane "only retarded frat boys could love," just died its second death.

Back in August 2007, the magazine, which only lasted two years, went web-only. Now, as of today, Squeeze OC doesn't even have a website. Although the Register hasn't made any official announcement, we were clued into this breaking story by a former staffer who said we could find confirmation that the website was about to go dark by clicking on Magda Liszewska's "Stay Tuned" blog.

But when we tried to click to Squeeze OC's website, it wasn't there. Instead, we were greeted by a message that the website had moved to a new location. Check out www.squeezeoc.com and see for yourself--you'll be redirected to the Register's online entertainment section. We had to do a Google search to find Magda's Feb. 29 posting in which she told readers how to find her blog in the future.

"Just another reminder that the blog disappears from here soon since the
whole site is going down, but it’s not going away," Magda wrote. "Keep reading at
http://staytuned.blogspot.com. Coming soon, the review of “New Amsterdam”
and interview with its star. Stay tuned and thanks for reading."

And thank you, Squeeze OC, for all the memories. Like those fascinating stories about couples who fire paint balls at each other, handy guides to expensive cars for OC's spoiled brats, and this typically fawning puff piece about a local hack who sits next to me at work.

It's February 29th, the fifth Friday in February, and the Register has failed us again.

Journalism is supposed to be objective, but that doesn't mean it can't be good. Our daily rag doesn't seem to get that. Case in point: in yesterday's story regarding the FAA's grounding of the Great Park Balloon, here's what the Reg deemed quote-worthy:

“I think we are pretty confident that we operate a safe attraction out there but as with everything there’s always room for improvement. So we hope to take care of any outstanding issues so we can get back to normal operations as soon as possible,” Burgess said.

The visitor's center will remain open and the public is free to come tour the balloon and surrounding areas, [Great Park operations manager Rod] Cooper said.

“We are going to get it up and running as soon as we can,” said Great Park Interim CEO Sharon Landers. “We are definitely being very cautious.”

Yawn. Dull. BORING! Especially when the actual language of the complaint involved is absolutely bitchen. Balloon co-pilot Jonathan Bradford claimed the balloon operators displayed a "cavalier attitude" towards FAA regulations, cultivating a "culture of unsafe behavior." Chief Pilot Gary Stevens called Bradford an "inexperienced trainee" whose accusations were "ridiculous and unprovable."

Bad news, Gary. You ain't the judge of what's provable. Read on for more actual information on the complaint.

LA Daily News staff are bracing for a possible shakeup after, as media blog LA Observed reports, employee representatives have sent memos saying a meeting this very afternoon could produce some very bad news.

We expect there will probably be a staff meeting called Wednesday afternoon and that they will offer buyouts, but this is not certain. I wish I had some news to offer, because I hate this confusion and darkness as much as everyone, but all I can say is that as soon as we hear anything, we'll let you know. --Union representative Brent Hopkins

OCWeekly reporter Nick Schou, who's out for the week, broke the story early last week about a series of secretive meetings between the Orange County Register and Dean Singleton's MediaNews, Inc. regarding content sharing. The reason this is a big deal is that, since Singleton owns regional newspapers like the Long Beach Press-Telegram and the LA Daily News, the companies can save money by laying off reporters who work beats that both the Reg and Singleton-owned papers, already cover.

But take a deep breath, sigh, these are just secretive meetings. It's not like every secretive meeting actually comes to fruition. That's why it's a secret. You don't want a bunch of reporters getting the wrong idea and overreacting. It's just talk.

Oh wait, yesterday Schou wrote on our blog that the content sharing is already going on.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram didn't seem to like that they had to learn about the sharing agreement from outside media sources, namely the OC Weekly. According to LA Observed, this memo was released by disgruntled employees in Long Beach.

We are very disappointed that our own management team has not granted us the courtesy and respect to tell us about an agreement that has a strong potential to undermine our job security. We would appreciate the opportunity to understand how the plan will work, how they see it as an improvement to our Press-Telegram and to ask questions about the changes. After all, we are stakeholders in this newspaper too.

I'll answer this. The purpose is not to improve the Press-Telegram. The purpose is to resuscitate waning profits by cutting back on input costs, i.e. shitcanning reporters.

It's been just over a week since I wrote that the Orange County Register is in content-sharing talks with Dean Singleton's MediaNews Inc. and a week since Register publisher Terry Horne told one of his own reporters about his vision for saving the paper, including the formation of "a consortium with other companies, to be announced soon, that will share advertising and news content."

There's no evidence the reporter even asked Horne about my story about Singleton, which is pretty bizarre given that my sources at the paper say everyone is aware of it. I also received a nasty anonymous email from someone at the paper claiming I got my facts wrong. You can see that letter in our paper Thursday, as well as my response, which concerns evidence already emerging that the deal with Singleton--which my sources told me Horne had claimed was still being negotiated--is actually already in place.

Here's the evidence: Stories by Bill Plunkett, the Register's Anaheim Angels writer, are running in numerous Singleton newspapers, including the San Bernardino Sun, the Pasadena Star-News, and the Whittier Daily News. Meanwhile, Tony Jackson of Singleton's LA Daily News is appearing in the Register for Dodgers coverage. And more recently, there's this Feb. 22 story that ran in the San Mateo County Times--a Singleton paper--with a byline that says "By Kimberly Edds and Salvador Hernandez, MEDIANEWS STAFF."

What's so strange about that, you might ask?

Edds and Hernandez, if you haven't already figured it out, happen to be Register reporters.

As the former Register reporter who sent me that link remarked, the fact that Register bylines are already appearing in Singleton papers proves not only that the paper's management can't be trusted to tell the truth to its own staff, the paper can't even be trusted to report accurately on itself.

"Typical Register . . . to start something without telling readers or maybe even staff," he said. "Not sure how a newspaper expects to develop/maintain the trust of readers when the paper doesn’t even do a good job of reporting on itself."

Well, the good news is the Register finally took down those "Our marriage is great because of M.E.!" click-thru marriage education ads, which have recently tortured anyone attempting to access the paper online. Guess someone found them tasteless, considering.

The bad news?

In case you hadn't heard, on Saturday night Orlando Cho of Yorba Linda shot and killed his wife and three of his four children. The fourth child, 14-year-old Ian Mercado, is recovering from a gunshot wound to the torso. Read to the bottom for details on how to donate to Ian's cause.

The killings are described as the worst in Orange County's recent history - debatable. What's not debatable is that the Register is taking an impressive amount of flak over their so-called flawed coverage of the story.

From the very first comment once the story went on-line, readers expressed their indignation:

canyonrob wrote:

Why do CNN and the San Diego U-T both have larger, more detailed stories about this local event than the Register...and why is this not on the front page? If someone from another city was to come here looking for more information on this story, they'd be seriously disappointed. Great LOCAL coverage, Register...keep up the bad work!

bronsonator wrote:

I agrew with canyonrob. I wrote the editor at OCR (via email) with this at about 8:50 this morning: A murder – suicide leaving 5 dead in Brea happens at 11PM Saturday night. On Sunday morning, not only was it not in your paper (deadlines, I know), but it wasn’t even listed on your website under headlines OR local news at 9 am Sunday morning! Yet, Foxnews.com has it via the AP. Sucks to see the national boys have got my local paper scooped on a story in their own backyard. Makes me wonder why I’m still subscribing when I can learn all I want for free on FOX.

The OC Register's contest to determine the new host of their online feature "The Juice" has been narrowed down to ten contestants, and they're asking for your vote.

Most of the potential hosts look fairly generic, but one of them, as it turns out, has quite the colorful reputation, and we wonder if the Reg even bothered to check. Damen Royce is better known in pop culture circles as Man-Faye, a guy who goes to anime conventions dressed as the scantily clad female bounty hunter Faye Valentine from COWBOY BEBOP. He's been banned from Anime Expo, accused of indecent exposure due to the skimpiness of his costume, and become a poster boy for otaku cross-dressers, claiming that women who wear equivalent outfits never get hassled over them.

All of which makes him far more interesting than anyone currently working for the Reg. So I'd like to urge all our readers to go VOTE FOR MAN-FAYE, a.k.a. Damen. His audition tape is a little blah, but we're fairly certain he'll cut loose a bit more if they actually sign him up.

(Thanks to our friend David N. Scott at Pererro for the heads-up)

Last week, I reported that the Orange County Register is in secret talks with Dean Singleton, owner of the Denver-based MediaNews Inc. and an all-around Darth Vader of daily news--he bought and all but killed the Long Beach Press Telegram, just as one example--to share content and lay off writers. I also wrote that Register publisher Terry Horne plans to give away free issues and depend on ad sales to save his failing paper.

Horne wouldn't comment for my story, but confirmed the details in a press-release. . . Oops, I meant to say "article" that ran in his own paper today. "Terry Horne . . . is betting on free community newspapers, expanded Web offerings and a smaller Register newspaper to help the company weather falling ad revenue and declining circulation," Mary Ann Milbourn reported. "The three-pronged approach is an acknowledgment that the old newspaper business model – based on a one-size fits all newspaper – is no longer viable, Horne said in his first interview since becoming publisher in September."

You can read the rest of Milbourn's story--and get more details about those three prongs-- here.

Although Singleton isn't mentioned by name, Milbourn writes that among the changes on the horizon is "Joining a consortium with other companies, to be announced soon, that will share advertising and news content." Given that everyone at the Register already knows Horne is talking to Singleton, it's kind of weird that Milbourn's story is so vague on that point, but she did get the big scoop on Horne's bright idea for a website that will surely secure the paper's future as a premiere source of local news: www.orangecounty.com. The website, Horne says, will become a "destination portal" for folks all over the world who are interested in visiting Orange County or moving here.

So let's sum up. Since taking over the paper, Horne has laid off dozens of writers and editors, overseen the self-destruction of its ill-starred spin-offs, Squeeze OC and OC Post, and entered into a devilish deal with Dean Singleton that promises to allow even more layoffs and cost-cutting. But don't worry folks, he's got plans for a travel information website that will make everything okay.

According to Milbourn, Horne isn't worried. "The Register is incredibly well-positioned because we have more resources and people focused on Orange County than all the other newspaper organizations focused on Orange County combined," he told her. "We need to continue to be the expert on Orange County and find ways to leverage that competitive edge."

Tony Saavedra and Norberto Santana, Jr. at the Orange County Register had an interesting article today about how Orange County Sheriff's Deputies routinely use Tasers on handcuffed jail inmates.

Imagine that!

"Two videotapes obtained from lawyers suing the county for excessive force show deputies wrenching the arms of inmates and using Tasers on defendants already on their bellies or strapped to a chair," the story noted. The names of the inmates are Mathew Fleuret and Liza Muñoz, both of whom were arrested on relatively minor charges—Fleuret for being in a bar fight and Munoz for getting pulled over with Vicodin in her friend's purse—and are now suing the Sheriff's Department for violating their civil rights.

This hard-hitting Register story is exactly the type of muckracking journalism Register readers need and deserve. So just how did our dynamic duo of diggers get their big scoop? Here's my theory: Saavedra read the Jan. 23 LA Times story about Fleuret by Paul Pringle that ran on the front page of the California section, which actually broke the story of the incident and provided just the kind of gritty details from the video that must have made Saavedra curious enough to call Fleuret's lawyers and ask for the same tape.

Meanwhile, Santana, Jr. must have scratched his head and said something along the lines of, "Hmm, this sounds familiar, didn't I read about a similar incident involving a woman named Liza Muñoz, like a year ago in OC Weekly? Why don't I Google her name? Why, yes, here's that story. Why don't I call Muñoz' attorney and ask for the videotape? And let's not forget to not mention the Weekly story, since it came out last year, and call the video 'new.' Yay, that was fun—and easy!"

Nice work, fellas. While the Register ripping off OC Weekly is nothing new—I'm thinking of their coverage of ex-Huntington Beach Mayor Pam Houchen's illegal condo conversion scam, which was first reported by us and led to her indictment on bank and wire fraud charges and two-year prison sentence—at least the Register actually added to that story. Today's article contains absolutely no new information about either the Fleuret or Muñoz beating cases, but it still deserves credit as a work of art.

What with all that cutting and pasting, let's call it a collage.

This week, an anonymous source sent the Weekly a poem called "Scowl," which appears to be a riff on Allen Ginsberg's famous and similarly-titled manifesto of 1950s beatnik angst, "Howl." The poem also appears to be written by someone intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Orange County Register, which has laid off dozens of staffers this year, destroying itself-- to paraphrase the Vietnam war scorched earth strategy of sweep and destroy--in order to save itself.

The repeated references to "Blackstone," the investors group whose stock interests have driven the layoffs, takes the place of Ginsberg's vaguely biblical reference to the soulless demon "Molloch," the military industrial/consumerist society that Ginsberg depicts as devouring America's youth. The "Boogergate" scandal is an obvious reference to a recent KOCE program where a Register employee who had just received his layoff notice was caught picking his nose onscreen while his colleague was being interviewed, an event widely perceived as a fuck-you-very-much gesture but which the Register tried to pass off as an innocent cameo.

We don't know who wrote the poem, but it's proof that there is talent at the Reg, despite what often ends up on the printed page, and that spoken word is alive and well in Orange County.

Here's the poem:

It was all so beautiful: Register reporter on his way out sticks his finger up his nose in the face of The Man and is caught on camera, then noticed by LA Observed and broadcast throughout the blogosphere, his message forever preserved in cyberspace...

Too bad it's NOT TRUE. CP Smith was apparently accidentally caught in the momentous nose picking moment, according to OC Register editor Ken Brusic. It wasn't a statement. 'Twas just, well, bad manners.

This just in: C.P. Smith, an OC Reg A1 editor ( who is reportedly on his way out via buyout) got behind Register reporter John Gittelsohn as he was taped for a KOCE broadcast - and purposefully picked his nose for all to see.

This ticked off news director Michael Taylor, who issued a memo that somehow found its way to -gasp- LA Observed.

Read it after the cut.

In other Register news, the Times had a piece on the layoffs today.

We hate to brag--no, we don't--but we'll point out an error in today's Reg. Reporter Jennifer Muir says the HB police have decided to "stop planting unloaded weapons, fake drugs and other props in unsuspecting civilians' cars . . . two days after the the practice was detailed in [wait for it!] The Orange County Register." In the interests of full reporting, we'll note that the Register's original story appeared weeks after the same story in another fishwrap, your OC Weekly. See R. Scott Moxley's story "Training Day" here.

Last year, the parent company of the Orange County Register, Freedom Communications, launched this fishwrap to reach a younger demographic since the Reg's core readership was born around the Roosevelt administration (Teddy, not FDR). This followed in the wake of the paper's continuing advertising campaign featuring young, beautiful things. The hipster grab still isn't working, apparently, 'cause now the Reg announces yet another reach for the youngsters. The Orange County Post debuts August 21 and will offer shorter versions of Register articles--a Cliff Notes approach to the Cliff Notes of Southern California publishing. According to publisher N. Christian Anderson III, the Post comes because Reg focus groups demand it: "They are very, very busy – a lot of them have young families – but they are interested in the community and want information about their community. We are designing a product that gives them a single source of information."

A couple of questions: why does the Register keep cannibalizing itself? Register staffers hate Squeeze OC for depriving its mother paper of resources--how will they react to another welfare paper in the family? I can read the entire Register from "The Morning Read to In the Bleachers in about 15 minutes (and that's if I don't read Mickadeit--if I do, add an extra minute)--how long will it take to read the Post? Finally: the Register has long dumped hundreds of copies on unsuspecting area schools in an effort to promote literacy--is the Post designed so Freedom Communication can monopolize the Elmo's World crowd?