Lee Succeeds Oglesby as Times O.C. President

Steven U. Lee, president of The Times’ Inland Valley/San Gabriel Valley region, Friday was named president of the newspaper’s Orange County edition.

Lee, 37, a marketing expert who lives with his family in Irvine, oversaw The Times’ creation and marketing in the past year of a section for readers in eastern Los Angeles County and western San Bernardino and Riverside counties. He will continue to supervise those operations until a successor is found.

He succeeds Roger Oglesby, 51, who on Friday was named editor and publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In a letter to the staff, Oglesby said that he has long dreamed of heading his own newspaper.

Lee joined the Los Angeles Times in January 1998 as vice president of consumer marketing and planning, leaving a job as vice president of marketing for Frito-Lay Inc.’s International-Asia Pacific division. Previously he held executive positions at H.J. Heinz Co., Kraft Foods and Taco Bell Corp.

Since The Times began six-day-a-week coverage of the Inland Valley region in a separate section last September, circulation in the area has risen by about 6% weekdays and 8% on Sunday.

“Steve is an exceptional executive with a successful record of directing a regional operation,” said Robert G. Magnuson, the Times’ senior vice president of regional editions.

“He also has a strong sense of the unique role that The Times plays in people’s lives. He brings the sharp focus, strategic outlook and marketing experience that we need to be successful in Orange County and increase the momentum that we have created.”

Magnuson said The Times’ circulation in Orange County is growing following last fall’s introduction of a new “supersection” of county news and Our Times pages with stories of community interest.

He said Lee’s challenge will be to attract more readers to this superior mix of national, international, regional and local news.

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As president, Lee will take charge of the overall strategic direction of the Orange County Edition’s business operations, including advertising, circulation and marketing.

“We now have to make sure that we reach everyone with our message and our service as well as with our journalism,” he said.

Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in South Korea, said he learned appreciation for a free press while growing up under a totalitarian government. He came to the United States as a seventh-grader and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in economics and history. He has a master’s degree in management from Northwestern University.

An Orange County resident since 1993, Lee joins the county edition at a time when The Times has changed its business strategy, concentrating on increasing sales to the region’s diverse ethnic populations and on retaining readers, while spending less energy on telemarketing programs that typically produce only short-lived subscription gains.

After the strategy shift, the Orange County edition’s circulation initially dropped by more than 4% in the six months that ended in Sept. 30 from the prior year, according to the latest statistics released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which monitors the publishing industry.

But circulation has been growing lately as awareness of the “supersection” and Our Times features grows, Magnuson said. He predicted that year-over-year figures will show increases when the ABC next releases its results in March.

Oglesby joined the Los Angeles Times in 1986 as an Orange County assistant city editor. He has held editorial, legal and executive positions at The Times and its parent company, Times Mirror Co.

He was editor and vice president of The Morning Call, a Times Mirror newspaper in Pennsylvania, for three years, before he rejoined The Times in Orange County in 1998.