Terry Horne writes on the Orange County paper's blog that he's sorry so many readers are unhappy with recent changes in format and coverage, but "The Register is under economic duress."

Those of you who are in business can understand what that means. Less than 15 percent of revenue of a newspaper comes from subscriptions. More than 85 percent comes from advertising. Large newspapers all across the country have been challenged by Internet competition for advertising. We have also been hit with huge declines in employment and real estate advertising for the past year — in the tens of millions of dollars range for the Register....

Please don’t credit our decisions to greed. The family ownership has agreed to accept dramatically lower performance, both last year and in our projected 2008 business year. They have refused to force management to take some of the more drastic cost-cutting steps taken by many publically owned newspaper companies.

He uses the variant spelling of publicly. Via Romenesko