Daily Pilot to launch countywide publication
The Daily Pilot plans to launch a new weekly publication May 3 that will be included with all Sunday editions of the Los Angeles Times sold in Orange County, Pilot Publisher Russ Newton announced Friday.
The publication, dubbed Weekend, will include content from throughout Orange County, not just the Pilot’s traditional coverage area — Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Irvine. The Sunday Pilot, which is also inserted in The Times, will continue unchanged in its core market, where readers will receive both it and Weekend.
“Readers want a county section based in the area where they live and play, recreate and dine,” said Newton, who is also a senior vice president at The Times. “If we can deliver a section that hits that sweet spot, advertisers would also find that desirable. We’re trying to find a need that hasn’t been met in the marketplace.”
Times Community News, the division of The Times that publishes the Pilot and five other community newspapers, plans to print 116,500 copies of Weekend, which will be inserted into The Times before being delivered to subscribers, placed in newsstands and sold in retail outlets.
The section will include news, business and sports features, lifestyle, entertainment and food coverage, as well as a week in review digest of the week’s top O.C. news stories.
Newspaper leadership felt Weekend would occupy a niche missing from The Times’ portfolio in Orange County.
“Times readers already receive the best newspaper in the West, giving them foreign, national, state and regional perspectives,” said John Canalis, editor of Times Community News, South. “And many of these readers receive our hyper-local community weeklies in Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach, or they get the Daily Pilot. But missing in our lineup is that middle piece, something that’s just for and about the Orange County region as a whole. Weekend will be that product.”
Though the Southern California newspaper industry has largely retracted in the last decade, Canalis explained that the Daily Pilot has bucked the trend and that its overall financial health makes it possible to expand in print and digitally.
The Pilot will add two contract writers, one contract photographer and a few freelancers to help put out the new section. However, the entire 25-member staff that produces the Pilot, the Huntington Beach Independent and the Coastline Pilot will also contribute to Weekend.
The content will be posted online
at dailypilot.com/Weekend.