After 43 years, the Irvine World News is going daily. Well, five days a week.
Irvine is big enough for a daily newspaper, but we still need the community paper that at one time was tossed on the doorstep, or under the car, at every home in town. The paper I joined in 1976 came every Thursday and it connected residents and neighborhoods across the young community.
The Irvine World News was started in 1970 when neighborhoods were scattered – Turtle Rock south of I-405, Racquet Club north of I-5 and in between, College Park, The Ranch, Culverdale, University Park.
The isolated neighborhoods were connected only by the old farm roads Culver Drive and Jeffrey Road. The residents had in common no local grocery stores, no gas stations, no parks.
They wondered what was coming next. When would they get schools, trash pick-ups and more streets? They wondered how many more people were expected and when and where homes and businesses would be built.
So, The Irvine Co. started distributing a monthly newsletter to keep residents up to date on the growing world of Irvine.
Within a year, the company’s public relations staffers realized what they had on their hands needed to be more than a bulletin and they brought in newspaper people to put out a weekly paper.
“It’s amazing how quickly we lost control of the paper,” the newsletter’s founder, the late Gil Ferguson, once told me. He was vice president of the public relations department at The Irvine Co. in 1970.
What Ferguson was saying is, when publisher George McDonald and editor Jeanne Keevil were brought in, the Irvine World News was taken out of the corporate offices and placed in the hands of newspapering pros. The community deserved more than a public relations medium.
Ferguson went on to be elected assemblyman for the 70th District in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Like most local politicians past and present, he at times was not happy with how the Irvine World News was reporting his tenure in public office.
A community newspaper holds those in public service accountable, whether they serve in the Assembly, on the City Council or as a high school basketball coach.
McDonald and Keevil 40 years ago laid the groundwork for an enduring community newspaper that compiles the news about the people and events shaping Irvine – news that you won’t find compiled in any other single resource.
The Irvine World News came under different owners over the years, and changed its look from time-to-time, but its obligation remained the same – give readers an inclusive and accurate understanding of their community.
Shortly after Freedom Inc. added the local paper to the Orange County Register family in 2000, the page size was changed from the smaller tabloid format to the bigger broadsheet. A neighbor of mine, a longtime Irvine World News reader, scolded me because her community paper dropped the handy tabloid size. The bigger pages made it hard for her to hold open the paper, she said. The only response I could muster was a feeble, “Alice, I can’t help it if your arms are too short.”
On these pages, whatever the size, you gain insight on what’s going on in the community and how your day-to-day life is affected. “How do I get involved?” “Who’s in charge of streets at City Hall?” “What’s going on in town this weekend?”
I joined The Irvine World News in 1976, swelling the newsroom staff to three. A city council election campaign was under way, driving the paper to an unheard-of 52 pages because of the campaign ads and the extended news coverage of the candidates. We could have carried even more ads, except the advertising director demanded that political campaigns pay up front.
The Irvine World News in 1976 and for the next 20 years was the most effective way to reach local voters, who relied almost exclusively on the community paper for a neutral view of the campaigning. We had to be thorough and accurate to retain the readers’ confidence.
Mary Ann Gaido, Bill Vardoulis and Dave Sills were elected that year, joining John Burton and Gabrielle Pryor on the council. All five served long and well, and each one of them, I’m proud to say, at one time or another had a beef about how the paper was reporting their service. It’s not the paper’s job to make public officials comfortable.
I once asked the young people in a public relations class at Concordia University how many of them got their news of current events from TV. Almost every hand in the class went up. A few said they got their news on the Internet, and one cited the car radio as his single source. One or two said they read a newspaper regularly.
I then asked where they got news of what’s going on in their hometowns. Almost all said they relied on the community newspaper.
A hometown paper endures because it tells the community’s stories, reinforcing its values and expectations. And, yes, you’ll read about crime and scandal and ineptitude in the community. The bad comes with the good in a responsible community paper.
News of road work planned on Culver Drive is more important to Irvine World News readers than bullet trains connecting us with San Francisco or Las Vegas.
Readers pore over the paper looking for familiar names and faces of who made Eagle Scout, the honor roll, the varsity team, the school play, the science fair.
Seeing your child’s name and smiling face in the local paper is special. You can’t tape a Facebook posting to the refrigerator.
Forty-three years ago, residents in the new community were taping Irvine World News clippings to the refrigerator. Forty-three years later, I’m guessing you’re going to need a bigger refrigerator.
– Don Dennis joined the Irvine World News as a reporter in 1976. He was named associate editor in 1984 and editor in 1993 and retired in 2010. He and his wife, Linda, raised two sons, Darren and Andy, in Irvine.
