Pilot home changes with Times

Deirdre Newman

If you haven’t heard yet, the Daily Pilot has flown the coop.

Its main office is now ensconced within the Orange County L.A.

Times building on Sunflower Avenue. The editorial department moved

into its new digs Friday, and advertising employees arrived today.

The move will be beneficial to the newspaper and its readers,

publisher Tom Johnson said.

“I’m very excited about the new building and excited because I

think it will allow us to invest more in the product and better serve

our readers,” Johnson said.

A satellite office will be set up in an easily accessed spot near

the shared border of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach for readers to drop

off classified advertising and letters to the editor and pick up

copies of the Pilot.

The building on West Bay Street housed the Pilot since 1955, when

Walter Burroughs moved the Globe-Herald there.

In 1959, the first edition of the Newport Harbor Pilot, the sister

paper of the Globe-Herald, was published.

The move to the Orange County L.A. Times building enables the

Pilot to maintain its autonomy while providing state-of-the-art

furniture and equipment to its employees, editor Tony Dodero said.

“The move is beneficial to employees because it provides services

and amenities that were not available in the old building,” Dodero

said.

One of the employees who has put her heart and soul into the move

is promotions director Lana Johnson. She has been bopping around the

office taking care of many of the gritty details behind moving, along

with administrative assistant Vilma Saenz and advertising director

Lisa Cosenza.

“Through the whole process, the moving team has been terrific to

work with,” Johnson said. “I think it will be a bigger and better

Times family.”

The move will bring the sales teams closer together, Cosenza said.

“Now all of our sales teams will sit together,” Cosenza said. “It

will make us more efficient and free up salespeople to go out and get

more sales.”

One of the paper’s longest-serving employees, sports editor Rich

Dunn, who started working for the Pilot as a stringer in 1981,

reminisced about the old building.

“It’s small and intimate and cozy,” Dunn said. “I thought the

building was an institution in the city of Costa Mesa, and that’s the

way the world is -- either change or get left behind.”