Add the Orange County Register to the list of California newspaper fighting for their survival. According to the Wall Street Journal, the equity owners of the paper will file for bankruptcy protection this week.
Some of the San Francisco Chronicle’s most talented journalists left the paper last Friday, including Tyche Hendricks, the paper’s star immigration reporter. (Hendricks book on the U.S.-Mexico border, based in part of her reporting for the paper, will be published by UC Press — but her writing on immigration going forward will hopefully find wide circulation elsewhere.) But the bleeding of journalistic talent at the Chronicle has not stopped — employees there are bracing for even more layoffs.
And one newspaper will disappear altogether — the Bulletin, the student newspaper at California State Dominguez Hill. As a result of state budget cuts, and to save the annual $76,000 costs, administrators have pulled the plug on the Bulletin — making Dominguez Hills the only CSU campus without a student newspaper.
Credit goes to the Los Angeles Times for writing this media obituary to this little known member of the Fourth Estate in California.
The Times’s parent company has itself filed for bankruptcy protection. Let’s hope the Times will never have to write its own obituary. As important as the Bulletin is to student journalism, California will manage without it. The value of the Times to California: priceless.
