Register owner says paper's numbers short of expectations

Aaron Kushner has not provided financial results, but he told the OC Register's Mary Ann Milbourn that his strategy to push print might take a while to succeed. "The early indication on the advertising and subscription side is that, ultimately, we will achieve our expectations," he said in an interview. "I'm not sure it will totally be proven for a decade. This is a long-term investment." Kushner told the Register staff earlier this month that the company had fallen short of expectations in the second quarter, although his partner, Eric Spitz, said in the same interview that "we are growing when everyone else in the industry is declining. That's significant." No way to know what kind of growth Spitz is talking about (circulation numbers are next to impossible to decipher), but he did acknowledge that "we are not as profitable today as we will be when we grow." The Register has been beefing up the staff, adding news pages, and paying less attention to the Web than other papers - all based on the belief that its future rests on developing a loyal print audience. Spitz was sounding especially indifferent about digital:

Why is this industry spending 50-plus percent of its resources and the dominant share of its strategic thought focused on 10 percent of its revenue? I don't get it. It doesn't make sense from a financial perspective. I understand we are a digital society, and it looks like you've got to plan for the digital future, but size it according to the opportunity. So I'm not saying dig your head in the sand and we're not doing anything digitally. We're doing a lot of really cool digital stuff. But there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I've been in digital media since '96, '97, '98 planning media, designing media, using media, encouraging media. I don't need to go down that rathole. They are chasing digital ghosts for today's revenue stream.