Loooking at Orange County’s Past Year Sheds Light on ’86 : Media

In publishing, small dailies continued to find the going tough as the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times hammered each other for subscribers and advertising dollars. In the war of county print giants, the Register had a daily circulation of 287,996, up 1.1% from 284,951, while The Times’ Orange County edition had a daily circulation of 177,017, up 3% from 171,942 a year earlier. The Times’ total daily circulation is 1,076,466.

Some of the gains at the county’s two largest newspapers apparently came at the expense of smaller dailies, whose circulation either fell or grew only slightly.

Chiefly because of slow retail sales this quarter, advertising, except for newspaper classified, is “softening for all media, especially network TV,” said Kevin Gruneich, an analyst with First Boston Corp. in New York.