Daily Pilot to Publish Just 3 Days a Week, Will Be Given Away

As expected, the Orange Coast Daily Pilot will become a three-day-a-week paper distributed free, ending its 68-year career as a small but spry daily newspaper that informed its readers about goings-on close to home and around the world.

Publisher Jim Gressinger told readers about the changes in the paper’s Thursday edition, saying that “from a business standpoint, the Pilot should not have been a daily newspaper for at least the past decade in which it has continuously lost money.”

Beginning July 2, the Pilot will circulate only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and will be given away to about 45,000 households. The newly christened Newport Beach/Costa Mesa Pilot will stick to covering only local news--service clubs, schools, shopping and amateur sports were a few examples the editors cited Thursday.

“The space freed from not reporting on Bush’s latest summit meeting or Los Angeles Lakers basketball (games) will allow us room to give you more news on local people, places and events,” Editor William Lobdell told readers.

The Pilot will stop circulating in Huntington Beach, largely because its sister paper--the weekly Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley Independent--already covers that city. No staffing cuts, however, are anticipated. Gressinger said he expects the Pilot’s circulation to soar from the current figure of 16,000.

“It’s a step down and a step backwards but it doesn’t mean they’re dead,” said New York media consultant Kendrick Noble. “I think it’s abandoning being a newspaper. It’s really becoming a shopper.”

The Pilot--which was owned by the parent corporation of the Los Angeles Times from late 1961 until 1983--chose its new publication schedule because “our newspaper is nicely profitable two days of the week now and could be so on a third day with a few modifications,” Gressinger told readers.

Noble said it’s rare for a daily newspaper to go to three-times-a-week circulation.

“Usually it’s the other way around, weeklies becoming dailies,” Noble said.