Stay tuned: Big changes at OC Register today *

Reports have been coming since last night about expected management changes and layoffs today in the Orange County newsroom. Sources are saying that editor Ken Brusic is being replaced by Rob Curley, with associated shifts down the line. Curley came to the Register in 2012 with a reputation for doing big things in New Media and community coverage.

I wouldn't classify this as the end of the Kushner experiment at the Register, but rather as an intermediate step to arm for the future. But that's a first impression. More to come.

OC Weekly has a piece up on the first layoffs.

From Brusic's 2012 announcement of Curley's hire:

Rob was most recently with the Las Vegas Sun as Chief Content Officer. During his time there, the Sun’s website was named the nation’s best local news site by various organizations for 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012. The Sun was also a 2011 DuPont award winner for broadcast journalism, becoming the first non-broadcast newsroom to win the award. To complete the multimedia sweep, the Sun received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was a 2010 Pulitzer finalist in Local Reporting.

Before joining the Las Vegas Sun, Rob was Vice President for Product Development at the Washington Post, worked for a Scripps paper in Naples, Florida, and redefined community newspaper engagement in Lawrence, Kansas.

He is a champion of great journalism, local news, fun technology and, luckily for us and our readers, all things Disney and baseball. So Rob will start working on our Disney and Angels coverage on all platforms, partnering with me, the deputy editors, Jim Radcliffe and Keith Sharon along with many others in the newsroom. The next step will be to capitalize on Rob’s planning skills to help make everything we do better.

We expect Rob’s enthusiasm to energize folks throughout the company and help us seize new opportunities to grow audience and revenue.

* Update: Here's what happened