BY BOB HOLT

NEWJESEYNEWSROOM.COM

As 2012 came to a close, Newsweek ended its near 80-year magazine run to go digital, but a newspaper from California is re-emphasizing the value of the printed edition.

The new boss of the Orange County Register says readers will pay for top quality news. He is sinking more money into the Register in hopes of earning a profit.

An Associated Press report in The Huffington Post says the paper is adding new and expanded sections covering business, automobiles and food, many more community news pages and even daily color comics. Seventy-five journalists have been added, and 25 more are on the way.

The Register is expected to have 40 percent more space than it did under previous ownership in three months.

Meanwhile, Newsweek looks to reemerge in late February as the all-digital Newsweek Global, according to MinOnline. The move was announced in October 2012. Editor-in-chief Tina Brown said that Newsweek’s competitors will need to use the digital medium in the future.

“We are ahead of the curve,” Brown wrote in The Daily Beast. “A magazine that will soon turn 80 will now be, when all the changes are unveiled in February, a vigorous young publication all over again, taking its readers to new and uncharted territory.”

But first-time newspaper CEO Aaron Kushner, 39, says the Register’s advertisers are cutting their online spending. "When you see very smart people like Kohl's or J.C. Penney who are actively reducing what they are doing digitally in order to do more in print, they're not doing it because it's trendy," Kushner said, according to NPR. "They're doing it because it works."

Orange County Register editor Ken Brusic said people quit subscribing to newspapers because publishers made too many cutbacks. He said, "They've been offering less and attempting to charge more for it. People won't put up for that sort of thing."