Press: Looking Good in California

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No doubt about it, David Threshie once deserved your pity. When Threshie became publisher of the Orange County Register in 1979, he inherited a crotchety, shabbily written newspaper content to doze in the shadow of its bigcity neighbor, the Los Angeles Times. Its news columns were infected with the libertarian philosophy of its editorials (public schools were called "tax-supported schools"), and the biggest headlines were saved for crime and sex stories. A sympathetic nod should also have gone to Chris Anderson, whom Threshie picked as the paper's editor in 1980. A onetime disk jockey and former associate managing editor of the Seattle Times, Anderson, then 30, had never run a newspaper. Anderson, in fact, had not even heard of the Register.

Today save your pity for other hapless souls. Threshie and Anderson have transformed the Register into an aggressive, smartly designed daily that boasts what may be the best full-color reproduction in the country. The Register has also beaten back a determined raid into its area by the wealthier Times, which has vied to boost the readership of its Orange County edition (weekday circ. 164,000) with little success. The Register, by contrast, has upped its circulation since 1979 by 36%, to 274,000. The competition grew keener last spring, when the Register won a Pulitzer for its photographic coverage of the Los Angeles Olympics. "We're certainly feeling their heat," admits Los Angeles Times Publisher Tom Johnson. For Edgar Trotter, chairman of the communications department at California State University, Fullerton, the metamorphosis of the Register is "the single most exciting development that I've witnessed in journalism."

The Register, which is the flagship of the 32-paper Freedom Newspapers chain, owes its rebirth partly to its rival's success in Orange County. By the late 1970s, the Times had whittled the Register's lead from about 50,000 to 38,000 copies a day. Threshie, 54, who joined the company in 1962 after marrying a descendant of the chain's founder, battled the Times's incursion by plowing profits back into the paper at a rate never imagined by previous Register publishers. He quadrupled the newsroom budget, nearly tripled the news staff (to 260) and hiked salaries to attract better talent. Threshie invested $1.8 million in a computerized color graphics system that, he claims, is used by no other daily newspaper in the world. By 1981, a year before USA Today hit the stands, the Register was publishing in full color every day.

While Threshie limited the paper's disdain for excessive government interference to the editorial page, Editor Anderson cleaned up the paper's format by reducing the cluttered eight-column pages to six and laying out stories in easy-to-read rectangular units instead of the traditional vertical strips. Anderson also ran much more news about Orange County, an 800-sq.-mi. sprawl of 26 municipalities and scores of towns, with a population of more than 2 million.