Orange County Register | OC Weekly | Jim Romenesko | LA Observed
Rob Curley is the new editor of the Orange County Register. He replaces Ken Brusic, who the Register says is “stepping down as part of a reorganization of the newspaper’s newsroom.”
Register business editor Donna Wares will be managing editor and will be in charge of the paper’s planned Los Angeles edition. The Register laid off 32 in its newsroom, Publisher Aaron Kushner told his paper.
Gustavo Arellano reports Brusic was reluctant to implement cuts Kushner wanted. Jim Romenesko passes along a comment from a tipster characterizing layoffs at the paper as a “blood bath.”
- Register journalists in 2012. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Curley came to the Register from the Las Vegas Sun. Prior to the Sun, Curley headed up a hyperlocal initiative at The Washington Post that closed in 2009. Before that, Curley worked at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World. “I’m a capitalist, and I respect people who want to make a ton of money, but, dude, I’m a journalist and I want to build cool things,” he told The New York Times in 2005.
On Wednesday, The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise had its second wave of layoffs since the Register’s parent company Freedom Communications bought the paper late last year, Mary Ann Milbourn reports.
In the Riverside newsroom, eight full-time and four part-time copy editor/designers were laid off as part of a restructuring that will centralize that work at the Register’s main office in Orange County. The newspaper’s leadership, however, said reporters will be added to the staff under a planned Press-Enterprise expansion so there will be no net loss of jobs in the newsroom.
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