Most Recent Posts

The Orange Country Register in suburban Los Angeles is expanding its newsroom. Not only that — the owners are emphasizing print, not digital.

In the past few weeks, longtime Register editor Ken Brusic has hired some two-dozen positions: critics to review food, TV and cars, a society columnist and investigative reporters. He's still looking for a movie critic, a magazine writer and many more reporters.

"We haven't seen this kind of hiring since the early '90s," he says. That was before the digital age, when newspapers were still hugely profitable.

At the Register's headquarters, it sounds like a different era. The Register's presses whir nearly 24 hours a day.

They're printing more color, more pages: double the editorial section, two weekly high school sports sections and a new daily business section.

Brusic doesn't think people stopped subscribing to newspapers because they didn't want to read them. He thinks it's because publishers made too many cutbacks.

"They've been offering less and attempting, in some cases, to charge more for it. And people are smart. People won't put up for that sort of thing," he says. "So we're now offering more."

The Financial Puzzle

Brusic has been at the Register for more than two decades, much of which was marked by big layoffs.

Three years ago, the paper went into bankruptcy, but the changing economics of the industry were only part of the problem. The owners had saddled the paper with hundreds of millions in debt, and then cashed out.

The Two-Way

Murdoch's News Corp. Shuts Down 'The Daily'

The advantages to making products in the U.S. are starting to stack up — and companies are taking notice. Among them are Apple, which announced Thursday it plans to start producing some of its Mac computers here instead of in China, and General Electric, which is making big investments at home.

It's not just a matter of publicity, either. As the December issue of The Atlantic reports, companies are seeing real economic advantages to "insourcing," a reversal of the outsourcing trends that sent U.S. manufacturing overseas.

A New Approach

General Electric opened Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky., in 1951, but lately it has been making some changes there. In August, the company announced an $800 million investment in jobs, products and the manufacturing process itself.

Back in 2008, Rich Calvaruso gathered his team at Appliance Park and told them they had to rethink the dishwasher. As a "Lean" leader, Calvaruso's job is to figure out how to make things more efficiently. So he asked a team of factory workers, designers and marketers to put their heads together. They managed to cut down the time it takes to build the dishwasher by one-third.

The dishwasher's orientation was the key. When it was set up a certain way, operators down the line could do their work without spending time manipulating the washer itself.

Even though it now takes fewer people to make that dishwasher, not a single person was laid off. Calvaruso tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered, that those employees were freed up to work in other parts of the company.

Hoodies Made At Home

When Bayard Winthrop founded American Giant, he set up manufacturing in San Francisco. The sweatshirt company focuses on the details and skips over the distributors. Winthrop tells host Guy Raz how making the clothing in America actually helps his bottom line.

As the National Hockey League lockout drags into its 86th day, which featured news that more games have been cancelled including the All-Star game, some of the league's biggest stars are getting plenty of action back in their home countries.

In Russia, major NHL players such as Alex Ovechkin and Yevgeny Malkin are giving a boost to the fledgling KHL—the Kontinental Hockey League.

Russian NHL players are scattered throughout the KHL teams that still carry names from the Soviet era when Russia dominated world hockey.

Ovechkin plays for Dynamo Moscow, the team that gave him his professional start. He's joined by his Washington Capitals teammate, Center Nicklas Backstrom.

They've made a happy man of Andrei Safronov, Dynamo's general manager: He calls Ovechkin "our hero," and says that he and Backstrom have been playing the kind of spectacular hockey that draws crowds.

On a recent night, Dynamo played a traditional rival, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl from an industrial city about 160 miles northeast of Moscow. Lokomotiv is bolstered by two more NHL players, goaltender Semyon Varlamov, who comes from the Colorado Avalanche, and Artem Anisimov, from the Columbus Blue Jackets.

This is a comeback season for Lokomotiv, still in mourning after an airplane crash in September of 2011 killed 37 team members, coaches and support staff. It's been a strong comeback, with Lokomotiv now in second place in the league's western conference, right behind Dynamo.

Ovechin seems to have mixed emotions about being back in Moscow.

Last month, he told Russia's RT English-language television that it was good to be home with loved ones and his old crowd, even though he's working as hard as ever:

"The only problem with what I have in Washington..." Ovechkin said, "I miss my friends and family, but again, you professional, and if you have a time to relax you have to use it."

More recently, he complained in an interview on his blog about what he sees as the lack of interest in hockey in Moscow. He said Dynamo has been playing to unfilled arenas, and said he's still hoping to get back to Washington in time to lead the Capitals to the Stanley Cup.

Fans in Russia say it's true their league is still building a fan base.

The Kontinental Hockey League was founded four years ago, out of the remnants of the Russian Super League. Most of its teams are Russian, but it includes clubs from Belarus, Ukraine and four other countries.

Many clubs have been struggling to amp up their attendance.

Fan Aleck Shakoff says the NHL stars lend some excitement to the season, but he said the league is gaining momentum, even without the outside talent.

"Maybe not this year, but maybe in a few years, of course we will be able to compete with NHL stars," he said. "Definitely. You'll see."

But Shakoff can't resist asking an American reporter the same question many Russian fans keep raising: "And what about lockout? What you think, what it will be completed?"

The latest collapse in NHL talks means that that some of the NHL players, including Ovechkin, will be part of a Russian all-star team at the Euro Hockey Tournament in Moscow this week.