Daily Pilot Cuts Publication to 3 Days a Week
The Orange Coast Daily Pilot will become a three-day-a-week freebie, ending its 68-year career as a small but aggressive daily newspaper that informed its readers about goings-on close to home and around the world.
Publisher Jim Gressinger told readers about the changes in the Costa Mesa-based paper’s Thursday edition, saying that “from a business standpoint, the Pilot should not have been a daily newspaper for at least the past decade, in which it has continuously lost money.”
Beginning July 2, the Pilot will circulate only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and will be given away. The newly christened Newport Beach/Costa Mesa Pilot will stick to covering only local news.
The Pilot will stop circulating in Huntington Beach, largely because a sister paper--the weekly Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley Independent--already covers that city. No staff cuts, however, are anticipated. Gressinger said he expects the Pilot’s circulation to soar from the current figure of 16,000 to about 45,000.
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