LA Weekly Plans to Launch O.C. Edition

The LA Weekly, one of the most successful of Los Angeles’ alternative journalistic voices, plans to launch an edition for Orange County sometime this year, the publication’s president said this week.

The tabloid, known for an adversarial style that Forbes magazine once called “dishing up liberal politics to L.A. yuppies,” will formally announce its plans sometime after June 1, said the paper’s president, Gary Horowitz. He declined to offer more details, but said that a publisher and editor have been selected and that the Orange County version would be “totally separate” from LA Weekly.

“It’s a different place, that’s for sure,” Horowitz said.

While an OC Weekly might seem contradictory in conservative Orange County, there is no alternative publication that caters to the market on the scale of LA Weekly, which has a circulation of 172,500 and is published every Thursday. Its advertisers, ranging from designer clothiers to tanning salons to love brokers, reflect its appeal to an upscale audience of twentysomething readers and baby boomers sometimes described as “countercultural capitalists.”

“Orange County is probably the largest single population area without an alternative newspaper in the country,” said James Vowell, editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Reader, a competing paper with a circulation of about 80,000. “But I certainly would not want to start one now, in this market.”

Indeed, media analysts argue that the area is already saturated and that the advertising base is dwindling. The Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register both have suffered from declining ad revenue, especially in classified ads.

“There are so many weekly publications competing for the same ad dollars, they will have a tough go of it,” said Julia Sweeney, president of the Times’ Orange County Edition.

Still, The Times Orange County expanded its Thursday OC Live! entertainment guide in October. And the Register has started mailing a free weekly entertainment guide, Preview, to about 750,000 homes in the county, and recently expanded its Friday Show section.

LA Weekly, which is distributed on Orange County newsstands at $1 per copy but is free in most parts of Los Angeles, was launched in 1978 in a rented bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. At the time, alternative papers were blooming in urban areas, often appealing to the chic, somewhat bohemian culture of Melrose Avenue.

a But as its audience grew older and wealthier, so did the paper. Advertisers are attracted to its free distribution, not to mention its lower ad rates. And while other alternative papers have dissolved into throwaway entertainment guides, LA Weekly has maintained an investigative edge and traces of radical tone.

Just how much of a left-wing tone the paper would take in Orange County is uncertain. The 20 or so alternative papers in California run the political spectrum, and the San Diego Reader has a slightly conservative slant, Vowell said.

The LA Reader, which was also launched in 1978 by its parent, the Chicago Reader, had considered expanding to Orange County but decided to spend its resources on LA’s Westside, where both alternative papers draw the bulk of their audience, Vowell said.

“Where is the entertainment core of Orange County?” Vowell asked. “I’m not sure that it has a large enough one. If L.A. is spread out, then Orange County is spread out times 10.”