As Orange County was turning into a dry news desert, people who read everything about Disney were not deprived of news. Disney amusement park stories accounted for some of the best-known stories on OC Register at some point three years ago. It happened between a Toontown brawl, a Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge experience with no crowd and discount tickets in the 2019 summer for annual Disneyland passholders.
How deep did the Disneyland obsession of OC Register go? OC Weekly’s Gabriel San Román surveyed OC Register stories worth three months to discover the answer to it.
When Galaxy’s Edge was about to open softly, OC Register published around 50 Disneyland stories in April 2019; a vast majority of those were not controversial. The hype around the new Disneyland location accounted for some of those stories. It tied the news, feature and crime stories on OC Register about Anaheim beyond the parks.
In May 2019, there were 72 articles on OC Register about Disney coverage, which was good for over two articles a day. As Galaxy’s Edge was set to open in May 2019 to parkgoers who had reservations, OC Register entered a state of great activity as it covered all imaginable angles. Stories about Galaxy’s Edge accounted for almost all the 72 articles on Disney that month, which easily surpassed coverage on the other things in Anaheim.
OC Register started to ease up on the Galaxy’s Edge attraction in June 2019 with headlines about the return of the Main Street Electrical Parade to Disneyland, Yoga Day at Disneyland, and so forth. Up to 45 OC Register stories on Disneyland were featured online in April 2019, with critical stories that highlighted the short-term controversy over the gift shop at the Main Street Cinema property. The number of articles on Galaxy’s Edge was dropped to 27, identical to that of OC Register’s Anaheim coverage.
Suffice to say, OC Register was in a Disneyland daze. As the number of OC Register staffers and pages was thin, Disney stories appeared more prominently. For a large part of the first quarter of 2019, OC Register had 10 write-ups on Knott’s Berry Farm.
