Editor’s Note: Scott Hays is co-founder and executive producer of OC World, an award-winning nonprofit multimedia company that broadcasts to households from Santa Barbara to San Diego on the KLCS-PBS station. He has more than three decades of journalism experience, including serving as a reporter for publications in Costa Mesa, Fullerton, and Northern California. He’s written non-fiction books, produced his own radio show in Laguna Beach and co-produced “Inside OC” with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Reiff at PBS SoCal.

I grew up in Orange County, back when the Orange County Register was a small, hometown newspaper known as the Santa Ana Register, bearing the unmistakable imprint of the Hoiles family’s Libertarian philosophy.

Anaheim still had its own daily paper, and the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot was actually published daily. We also had a handful of local business and community magazines, a boldly liberal alternative weekly, and, yes, our own cable news stations: Orange County NewsChannel (OCN) and PBS affiliate KOCE.

Then came the great newspaper war during the 1980s through the mid-2000s: the Register versus the Los Angeles Times—a full-contact battle for readers, ad dollars, and journalistic dominance. It was intense, competitive and a golden era for local journalism. Reporters were chasing stories in every corner of the county. Every city, every issue, every angle—covered.

At its peak, the Orange County Register employed roughly 350 newsroom employees and printed roughly 350,000 newspapers daily, and filled most of its five-story, 175,000-square-foot headquarters at 625 North Grand in Santa Ana.

By contrast, the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County edition employed maybe 200 people and printed roughly 250,000 newspapers daily, operating out of its nearly 340,000-square-foot space on Sunflower Avenue in Costa Mesa.

Two newsrooms, two strategies, both once central to the region’s media identity.
Both buildings have long been sold, with military defense company Anduril now occupying the former LAT-OC edition campus.

Shrinking Newsrooms

It’s no secret: media across the country have been in a crisis for well over a decade. Shrinking newsrooms, corporate consolidations and a steady decline in advertising revenue have gutted the infrastructure of local reporting and storytelling.

Somewhere along this shifting media landscape between then and now, the ground gave way. The old pillars—legacy print publications—began to crumble under the weight of a new digital reality: a world driven by likes and clicks, Facebook scrolls, and TikTok trends. It wasn’t just the internet reshaping the industry; hedge funds were also acquiring newspapers to squeeze out better margins, but not necessarily to produce better journalism.

Today, U.S. daily newspaper circulations (print + digital) have fallen roughly 65% from 1990 to 2022, and U.S. daily newspaper advertising revenues have declined roughly 80%, according to a Pew Research Center report. Across the U.S. daily newspaper industry, employment has dropped by about 73% from 2005 to 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

In Orange County, OCN ceased operation in the early 2000s after continued financial struggles, the OC Weekly folded with the decline of alt-weekly newspapers, and the Register found itself in bankruptcy before being scooped up by Digital First Media News—a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, one of the biggest players in that very hedge-fund game.

The Los Angeles Times made headlines of its own in January when it cut roughly 20% of its newsroom staff in one of the most severe layoffs in its history. Even billionaires, it seems, can’t save legacy print as Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong announced plans to take his newspaper public within the next year. Its prospectus showed a loss of $48.1 million in 2024.

Nowadays, only 25% of Americans still engage with a daily print newspaper, down from 60% or more before the internet.

Although the Los Angeles Times still has a significant presence throughout Southern California, it no longer has a dedicated daily Orange County edition. Its local footprint is now a fraction of what it was during the peak of its circulation war with the Register in the 1990s and early 2000s.

As for the Register, its daily print circulation has dropped to “around 87,000,” and by some estimates its digital readership has fallen by 72% over the previous three years.

And ever since KOCE’s merger with its LA-based sister station KCET in 2018, public television has ceased to provide regular news and feature coverage of Orange County.

A New Digital Reality

The question begs itself: where are Orange County residents getting their local news?
Most Americans these days are now getting their information via digital platforms, especially video/social media feeds, and in particular YouTube, according to a 2025 Reuters Institute Report.

These aren’t just industry shifts. They’re also community shifts. Certainly, the impact has been felt here in Orange County—an affluent community of 3.2 million residents and third-largest county economy in the state—which has found itself in “news desert” territory, with only a handful of reporters, editors, producers and storytellers who still bust their hides trying to cover news and local issues and stories of significance.

In a region as diverse and complex as Orange County, the decline of these sort of platforms undermines the health of public media with diminished local coverage. Without these sorts of resources, we lose more than just information—we lose a space for thoughtful and respectful information-gathering that helps people stay informed and engaged.

With disruption, though, comes opportunity.

As Orange County evolves, so too will the media models and platforms rising to meet the region’s needs such as the digital publications covering Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, Stu News; the hyper-local news-reporting watchdogs like the Voice of OC; weekly business publications like the Orange County Business Journal; and innovative nonprofit multimedia programming like OC World—which will continue at their own pace along with niche print and radio.

I see residents in every community of Orange County looking for local stories and news about schools, crime, business, family and government—a golden opportunity for an astute entrepreneur to figure out the magic formula for a more sustainable business model. Yet, while the for-profit model has fueled many of Orange County’s most successful ventures in real estate and restaurants and business, sustaining meaningful local multimedia platforms may require vision and innovation.

For the moment, the real future of local media in Orange County will depend not only on skilled writers, reporters and storytellers but also on a community willing to invest in them through advertising, sponsorships, underwriting and grant opportunities. Without support from the community, local media will wither or simply disappear altogether.