Rem Rieder

USA TODAY

Aaron Kushner's ambitious and totally counter-intuitive expansion of his print journalism operations in Southern California has suffered a severe setback.

In a memo to the staff, the Orange County Register owner and publisher announced Tuesday that the paper is implementing two-week, company-wide furloughs in June and July; offering voluntary severance packages to newsroom staffers; and flying the white flag of surrender in the newspaper war it launched in Long Beach, Calif., just last summer.

Kushner's breathtaking bet on print has been one of the astonishing stories in journalism in the digital age in the last several years. He has always emphasized that he shouldn't be judged on short-term reversals, that he is playing the long game. But this clearly is a significant setback.

Particularly alarming is the call for two-week furloughs in a two-month period. There were plenty of furloughs at papers across the country in the depths of the newspaper recession. But these were generally phased in over a longer period of time, like a year.

This seemingly panicked approach is "unheard of," says top media analyst Ken Doctor. "It says, 'We're out of money.' That's not a signal you want to send readers and staffers."

In announcing the cost-saving measures, Kushner anticipated the reaction from the nay-sayers who have questioned his strategy, not to mention his sanity. "Critics will try to say that we have failed," he said. "To the contrary, the failure would be if we did not try at all, or if in our measured success, we did not adapt so that we could continue to invest in our growth."

I give Kusnher props for having the courage to do something so bold. I've written about many of his eye-popping moves. But there always was the question of how the numbers would add up. Print advertising is falling everywhere. Digital dollars are hard to come by, and the Register hardly has a robust digital strategy. Where would the money come from to pay for all of the new initiatives?

But give the man credit — what an array of initiatives it has been. Since acquiring the Register two years ago, Kushner has doubled the size of the staff and increased the heft of the paper; launched new local sections; acquired the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif.; started a brand new newspaper, the Long Beach Register, in a city that already had its own newspaper, the Press-Telegram; and, in perhaps his most staggering venture, inaugurated a new paper in Los Angeles, the domain of the entrenched Los Angeles Times.

Now, the Long Beach Register is dropping its head-to-head challenge to the Press-Telegram, which is operated by Digital First Media. The Long Beach Register will continue to come out on Sunday; the rest of week, it will be a section inside the Los Angeles Register.

While Doctor sees the furlough plan as a red flag, there have been yellow flags along the way. In January, the company announced layoffs at the Orange County Register and the Press-Enterprise. And when the Los Angeles Register launched in April, it was staffed not by new hires but by journalists from Orange County.

From the outset, Kushner's crusade was a long shot at best. After Tuesday's developments, the odds just got a lot longer.