The Orange County Register is set to sell its Santa Ana headquarters to developer Mike Harrah, reports the Orange County Business Journal. The newspaper put the building on the market late last year, and the sale is expected to close in the coming days.
As Kushner told his own newspaper when the building's availability was announced in December, “Along those lines, as have many newspapers, we will be marketing our Santa Ana real estate for either sale-leaseback or sale.”
No word yet if they'll be staying on Grand Street, but I've reached out for comment.
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A five-story, 175,000-square-foot behemoth, the building is expected to sell for roughly $27 million, according to the OCBJ.
That cash on hand should be nice, as Freedom, the Reg's parent company, currently owes $4 million in severance payments to former OC Reg execs and has allegedly missed some severance payments tied to earlier staff buyouts. Reg Minister of Information Eric Morgan told the OCBJ that the missed payments were only an issue with the paper's payments processing system, however.
Then of course, there's the rumor that Freedom is losing “millions and millions” of dollars, the shedding of dozens of reporters, editors, and sales staff, and the other reported issues on Grand Street.
The greatest business achievement the Reg has made recently? Slightly overshooting their own circulation goals for the LA Register, their maligned LA imprint where they moved approximately 70 reporters, including many of their cubs and young guns. That being said, as of their June/July circulation report, they're publishing about 6,300 papers on weekdays and 17,000 on Sunday. For perspective, before I worked at the Weekly, I was the editor of a small weekly newspaper up in Seattle. My paper published 16,000 copies per week, and I was the only full-time editorial staffer.
Stay tuned to our infernal blog for any more updates.
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