The Orange County Register is expanding into Long Beach, starting a new, separate daily newspaper that will publish six days a week beginning Aug. 19.

Called the Long Beach Register, the newspaper will feature at least 10 pages of local news and sports and six pages centered around schools, including sports. On Saturday, subscribers will receive just the schools section, which will have prep sports.

For home delivery, the Long Beach paper will be wrapped around the Orange County Register and distributed in most of Long Beach as well as parts of Lakewood, Cerritos, Artesia and Signal Hill.

The new Long Beach daily will also be at 450 news racks and retail outlets throughout the area, either as a stand-alone or combined with the Orange County Register. For a short time, free copies will be available for sampling.

Subscribers also will have digital access at ocregister.com/longbeach (not live yet).

Aaron Kushner, publisher of the Orange County Register and chief executive of its parent, Freedom Communications Inc., said expansion into Long Beach was a natural move for the company, which is focused on how to build communities.

“In the case of Long Beach, it is a city where we really could add tremendous value,” he said.

Kushner played down potential competition with the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the dominant newspaper in the city. The Press-Telegram, owned by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, has retrenched in the last few years. The newspaper consolidated some staff with the Daily Breeze in Torrance, a sister publication, and often runs news from the other eight Los Angeles Newspaper Group newspapers based in Southern California.

“The challenge is less about any one other media outlet but rather all other media,” Kushner said, pointing to the many forms of media and entertainment that compete for people’s time.

No one from the Los Angeles Newspaper Group could be reached for comment.

The Long Beach Register will have several people on its 20-person staff who will be familiar to the city. Ian Lamont, publisher of the Press-Telegram from 2001 through 2004, will be publisher. Paul Eakins, who served as the Press-Telegram’s city editor and helped with the May launch of The Current, the Register’s five-day-a-week daily in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, will become editor of the Long Beach Register.

Media experts said the Register’s expansion is a rare move at a time when most newspapers are laying off staff, reducing total pages and, in some cases, cutting back on the number of days that they deliver to homes.

Michael Parks, former editor of the Los Angeles Times and now interim director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the Register’s plan for providing local news that readers may not be able to get anywhere else was drawing on an old-fashioned game plan.

“They are strengthening the community, which is very effective,” he said. “And they are creating a bond with readers.”

Ken Doctor is a Bay Area media analyst who once worked for Knight Ridder Inc., which previously owned the Press-Telegram. He called the new Long Beach Register an interesting move that will be a test of the two business models.

“The Press-Telegram, as it is today, is a general newspaper with national news, California news, all kinds of stuff and some local news,” he said. The Long Beach Register, he noted, will focus solely on Long Beach news.

“The question is, what is it Long Beach readers want to read?” Doctor said. “I think the readers want local.”

Still to be determined, he said, is whether the Register can sell enough subscriptions and advertising to make its plan financially viable.

Long Beach could be a major prize for the Register. With a population of about 462,000 in 2010, Long Beach was the 36th largest city in the country and the seventh-largest city in the state. Orange County’s biggest city is Anaheim, with 346,000 people.

The Orange County Register already delivers to most ZIP codes in Long Beach. The newspaper has about 2,600 seven-day subscribers in the city out of its total print circulation of 159,000. The Press-Telegram has an estimated 58,000 to 65,000 daily print subscribers in the city. The two newspapers, however, have never been in head-to-head competition.

The Register has had business ties with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group on other fronts. Since 2009, the Register has printed some of the group’s other Southern California newspapers, including the Whittier Daily News, Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Redlands Daily Facts, San Bernardino Sun and Ontario’s Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.

The Long Beach Register will be the third daily newspaper Freedom Communications has launched since Kushner and Eric Spitz, Freedom’s president and owner, and their 2100 Trust bought the company last July. In addition to The Current, the company announced that the twice-weekly Irvine World News will become a five-day daily on July 22.

Contact the writer: 714-796-3646 or mmilbourn@ocregister.com