By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Greg on FishbowlLA, 2007
In 2007, the Orange County Register was reshuffling its newsroom — and one promotion captured both a career and a paper in flux.
Then
FishbowlLA reported that Andrew Horan had been named A1 editor of the Orange County Register — the editor responsible for the front page. It was, as FishbowlLA put it, a mailroom-to-boardroom arc: Horan had started decades earlier as a young Laguna Beach reporter for the same paper.
The move came with a second hat. Horan would also remain managing editor of OC Post, the Register’s free daily spinoff, though he told FishbowlLA he would keep only strategic oversight there, with day-to-day duties shifting to other team leaders. The promotion followed the early retirement of the previous A1 editor, C.P. Smith, who had stepped away a year ahead of schedule as the paper announced staff layoffs.
Now
The context around that 2007 promotion proved more durable than the jobs themselves. OC Post, the free daily Horan helped run, was a product of the brief mid-2000s boom in free commuter papers; that experiment did not survive the advertising collapse of the late 2000s.
The Orange County Register entered an even rougher stretch. The paper passed through bankruptcy and multiple owners during the 2010s, endured repeated rounds of layoffs, and was eventually absorbed into a national newspaper chain. The kind of internal promotion FishbowlLA noted in 2007 — a long-tenured staffer rising to run the front page — became steadily rarer as the newsroom that made such careers possible shrank.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.