New Specialty Tabloid to Target ‘Feel-Right’ Crowd

An “alternative” arts-and-life-style newspaper aimed at Orange County’s young, unmarried professionals is tentatively scheduled to publish its first issue March 14.

The new Orange County Review, which hopes to achieve the same success the unaffiliated L.A. Weekly attained in Los Angeles County, is being developed by Newport Corporate Communications Group Inc., a Newport Beach-based consulting firm.

The tabloid’s sponsors said that 50,000 copies of the approximately 60-page publication will be distributed free at restaurants, clothing boutiques, tanning parlors, record stores and other establishments each week. The major circulation area will be in the coastal strip from Dana Point to Huntington Beach, where the county’s more affluent young adults tend to congregate.

Orange County Review’s editor says the weekly tabloid will exploit an untapped market in Orange County, where few other entertainment-specialty periodicals are published.

One of those is Restaurant Row, a monthly with 60,000 distribution in Long Beach and Orange County. The paper concentrates on dining. Ron Hodges, its owner and publisher, said he does not see the new weekly as a potential competitor. A second monthly, Orange County Entertainer, targets the tourist market and its 25,000 copies are distributed primarily at hotels.

“We think there is a big hole in the market in Orange County for (a publication geared to) a younger, upscale audience,” said Stephen Downard, who is in the process of acquiring a 50% ownership interest in Newport Corporate Communications in preparation for running the firm’s newly formed publications division. He said he will be editor-in-chief of the tabloid’s 12-member staff.

Resigning Freeborn Post

Downard said that he is resigning as chief financial officer with Los Angeles-based Freeborn Corp., a Southern California distributor of forklifts, in order to join Orange County Review. He declined to discuss financial arrangements for the proposed new paper. Newport Communication’s president and current owner, Matthew Hunter, plans to retain the remaining 50% of the company’s stock and will be publisher of the new tabloid, Downard said. Downard added that he and Hunter are “committing a sum well into the six figures to the development of the paper.”

Deborah Bergman, a news editor at the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service in Los Angeles, said she will resign to become to be the new publication’s executive editor. Cass D’Arlon, previously an advertising salesman with L.A. Weekly, said he has been recruited as Orange County Review’s advertising director.

Downard said the Orange County Review will be “modeled after successful various alternative publications throughout the country.” One example he cited is L.A. Weekly, which started as a 16-page paper in 1978 and has expanded into a 152-page tabloid with weekly circulation in Los Angeles County of 150,000.

Originally, sponsors of the new tabloid wanted to name it Orange County Weekly, but changed their plans on Friday after receiving a letter of protest from L.A. Weekly. Downard said the letter claimed L.A Weekly has incorporated a company of its own called Orange County Weekly.

L.A. Weekly publisher Mike Sigman said Friday that his company had “not ruled out” the possibility of starting its own publication in Orange County and wanted to reserve the right to use the Orange County Weekly name. Besides, he said, the Los Angeles publication had received calls from people who mistakenly believed it was launching the Orange County paper.

Ruled Against ‘Distraction’

Downard said that although Newport Communications believes it has a legal right to use the name Orange County Weekly, it decided to relent because “we feel it is a distraction for us to be involved in scrapping with L.A. Weekly and their attorneys.”

Downard said Orange County Review is designed to offer its readers an “encyclopedic” calendar of art and entertainment events in the county as well as social and political commentary, movie reviews, a restaurant section and stories about health and nutrition.

The paper, he said, will “tend to focus on the under-represented, sometimes counter-cultural segments of society” and will be less conservative in editorial content than the “establishment” newspapers. He observed that Orange County “is not the sleepy county of one mind that it once was.”

For revenue, D’Arlon said, the new tabloid will rely entirely on advertisers with products they want to sell to “the look-right, feel-right crowd.” He defined that audience as readers between 18 and 35 who are college educated, earn an average of $30,000 a year and spend a lot of their money on clothing, grooming and entertainment.

D’Arlon said that Newport Corporate Communications has test-marketed a predecessor monthly publication called Orange County This Month for the last seven months and that the results showed “there is a great demand for a weekly entertainment publication.” A major advantage of weekly publication, he said, is the ability to keep the event calendar current.