Local News Station OCN, Troubled by Losses, to Be Sold to Connecticut Firm

IRVINE —  Plagued with heavy financial losses since it first went on the air 5 1/2 years ago, Orange County’s only cable news channel is being sold to a Connecticut-based company for an undisclosed sum.

Freedom Communications Inc., a privately held Irvine company, said Wednesday that it has reached a tentative agreement to sell Orange County NewsChannel (OCN) to Century Communications Corp.

Century, a national cable system operator, could not be reached Wednesday, but Freedom officials indicated that Century planned to continue the 24-hour programming as it has been operating since September 1990.

Among Century’s holdings are cable systems in La Habra and Brea; it will soon take over the cable service in Anaheim. Century does not have any broadcast programming operations.

Alan Bell, Freedom’s broadcast division president, said Freedom was unloading OCN because the losses were too much to bear.

Bell declined to put a figure on the losses, saying only, “They’re measurable, in the millions.”

OCN’s programming, produced in Santa Ana in the building of the Orange County Register, a Freedom-owned newspaper, is available to more than 500,000 households in Orange County through nine cable systems.

Bell said company surveys showed most everybody “viewed a bit of it every month,” though it was uncertain just how much and how frequently OCN was watched.

Bell blamed OCN’s losses on the recession. “This has been an innovative idea at a terrible time to test it,” he said.

But observers also questioned whether there was enough fresh news on the network, which includes a heavy dose of youth sports coverage and feature stories. Others wondered whether Freedom, at the onset, misjudged the market.

“There’s really a ton of news on cable TV,” said David Barford, who ran Comcast Cablevision’s operations in Orange County from 1988 to 1993. “Their expectations were probably off,” he said of OCN. “I’m not sure there is as huge a market demand for local news.”

Bell said Century would be buying the advertising base, the distribution system and the equipment, which includes television cameras and editing machines. OCN has fewer than 100 employees, and they were told of the sale Wednesday afternoon.

Lewis Robertson, OCN’s general manager, declined to comment on the employees’ reactions or their fate.

When Freedom launched OCN, it was only the second such local, all-news cable network in the country, the first being in Long Island. Analysts estimated Freedom poured $10 million into launching OCN, and the network melded contents and staffing of the Register newspaper to strengthen its programming.

Bell said Freedom expected to lose money initially, but to at least be able to break even by this point. In the last couple of years, he said, “the losses were coming down.”

Asked why Freedom was abandoning the programming when the losses were declining and the region was recovering, Bell said: “Everybody talks about the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’ve come as far as we can go.”