Rieder: Kushner's bold bet on print ends up as farce

Aaron Kushner's big bet on print journalism began as the audacity of hope. Now it has degenerated into farce.

After his 2100 Trust acquired the Orange County Register in 2012, Kushner went on a hiring and spending spree that made the paper the envy of editors across America. With print in decline and digital ascendant, Kushner proclaimed the special nature of the connection people can make with an actual, tangible newspaper. And he stressed the importance of a long-term strategy.

He acquired another newspaper and — does it get more counterintuitive than this? — launched two new ones, triggering two newspaper wars, always saying he was in it for the long haul. When he started up the Los Angeles Register in April, he said he had a "10-year-plus" business plan. Now the L.A. and Long Beach Registers are gone, and the Orange County flagship has suffered round after round of layoffs and buyouts.

And the hits just keep on coming.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times sued the Orange County Register, accusing the Register of failing to pay $2.46 million it owed the Times for delivering the paper.

Last week, after the Register had switched to another delivery company, many subscribers complained via phone and social media that they weren't getting their papers. Things got so bad that the Registerposted a notice on Facebook Sunday that subscribers could pick up their papers at its Santa Ana headquarters.

Talk about customer service.

And in an inevitable development, Kushner, a former greeting card executive with no prior newspaper experience, stepped down on Monday as CEO and publisher of the Register.

Moving in was a seasoned newspaper pro who would bring some stability to the reeling Register, right?

Er, no. The Regsiter's new publisher is one Richard Mirman, another newspaper neophyte. And a Vegas guy! Mirman's leading claim to fame: He headed up a team that developed the Total Rewards program at Harrah's, where Mirman served as senior vice president of business development and chief marketing officer.

Insert your own long-shot joke here.

Don't get me wrong. I take no pleasure in the collapse of Kushner's dreams. I admired his daring approach, his insistence that investing in newspapers rather than constantly cutting them back and weakening them would give them a better chance to prevail in the digital age.

But clearly he didn't have pockets deep enough to give the experiment a chance. You don't establish a newspaper on the Los Angeles Times' home turf in five months. You don't measure the impact of building a bigger, better product in Orange County in a year.

Kushner, who is staying on as principal owner and CEO of the Register's parent company, Freedom Communications, was right at the start. Building a business takes time. Of course, it's quite possible that the existential challenge facing print is simply too strong, and that all of Kushner's big spending wouldn't have made a difference. But now we'll never know.

Meanwhile, he has whipsawed the lives of a lot of talented journalists who eagerly enlisted in the cause.

Kushner is one of a number of intriguing new players who have come into journalism in the past several years. Three wealthy businessmen purchased newspapers, removing them from the tyranny of the quarterly statement: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at The Washington Post, Boston Red Sox owner John Henry at The Boston Globe, Minnesota Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor at Minneapolis' Star Tribune. EBay founder Pierre Omidyar announced he was launching a $250 million digital journalism venture. Investor to the stars Warren Buffett started snapping up medium-size newspapers.

But the against-the-grain Kushner was perhaps the most intriguing of all. It's a shame he didn't have the resources and the stamina to go the distance.