Register to Cut Back Its Community Edition

In an apparent cost-cutting move, the Orange County Register next month will drastically slash the circulation of its weekly Community Edition, replacing more than half of it with a bundle of advertising material that will be mailed to non-subscribers.

The Register formally announced the change in its Sunday edition, confirming that it has scrapped its ambitious effort to directly mail Community Edition for free to 370,000 Orange County households. Instead, non-subscribers will receive a section of classified advertising and preprinted ads that also appear in the newspaper’s daily editions.

The Register’s 312,000 subscribers will receive a new standard-size section, Community News, inside their newspapers, rather than the discontinued tabloid called Community Edition.

The announcement ends some of the speculation by the tabloid’s news staff and advertisers over the Community Edition’s future.

When the Community Edition was introduced four years ago, it was intended to appeal to advertisers and subscribers by highlighting local news in 17 different editions. It was touted as a way for advertisers to divide the county into as many as 32 different advertising markets. By blanketing 687,000--or 80%--of Orange County households with the localized tabloid, Register executives reasoned that they could capture new subscribers while competing for lucrative classified and display advertising.

But in a special meeting with members of the Community Edition staff on April 26, N. Christian Anderson, the Register’s editor, said readers think of the tabloid’s free mailed copies as “junk mail,” according to a source who attended the meeting. Anderson also reportedly told staffers at that meeting that the changes were being considered because the tabloid did not attract enough advertising.

In a telephone interview Monday, Anderson referred questions about reasons for the cut-back to the Register’s publisher, R. David Threshie, who could not be reached. Dick Wallace, Register general manager, said there would be no layoffs. There are currently about 60 editorial employees of the Community Edition.

The Register now plans to offer Community News advertisers seven zones and to provide at least an equal number of localized news editions. The move will cut the Register’s production and mailing costs. Last week, the Santa Ana-based newspaper increased its monthly home delivery subscription rate to $6.50 from $5.50 and its Sunday newsstand rate to $1 from 75 cents.

Anderson said Community News will be printed on Wednesdays and distributed on Thursdays, starting June 4. Community Edition currently is printed on Saturdays and delivered on Thursdays.

The plan to mail bundles of ads to non-subscribers is similar to the Los Angeles Times’ Selective Market Coverage program, which uses third-class mail to send packages of preprinted ads to households that do not receive the newspaper. The Times has the capacity to send its packages to 2.5 million households throughout Southern California.

Whether advertisers will support the Register’s new direct mail program remains to be seen.

Several advertisers who use the Community Edition said Monday that they are considering whether to continue advertising with the Register’s revamped, direct mail program.

“It’s getting down in the dirt” with weekly advertising mailers, said Edward Barrett, manager of Lee’s Carpet Inc. in El Toro. “We want higher class people. The average job out of our store is $5,000 to $6,000. Anybody spending that kind of money won’t be reading” advertising mailers, he said.

Pete Craig, account supervisor with Irvine based-Marsh/Focus Media, said all-ad publications “mainly make it with consumer advertisers,” not the upscale buyers sought after by larger retailers.

The Register is the flagship of the Irvine-based Freedom Newspapers chain, which publishes 28 other daily newspapers and operates five television stations.