‘Dark cloud’ hangs over The Register

It’s been a month since Des Moines Register Editor Carolyn Washburn told a gathering of newsroom employees that layoffs were coming.

The Des Moines Register's headquarters at 8th Street and Locust Avenue in downtown Des Moines.

Expenses were up and revenues were down, and despite a great deal of effort to avoid turning to job cuts, Washburn said there was nothing more she could do.

Since then, the paper’s parent company, Gannett Co., announced that 1,000 jobs would be eliminated companywide, including 600 layoffs. Two weeks after Washburn’s announcement, Laura Hollingsworth, president and publisher of The Des Moines Register, delivered the news everyone had been dreading: 12 full-time and three part-time positions would be eliminated. Another 11 vacant positions would not be filled.

The first to go were Farm Editor and 30-year Register veteran Jerry Perkins and award-winning feature writer Ken Fuson, both of whom took buyouts. Next up were Jane Norman from The Register’s Washington bureau; S.P. Dinnen, a senior business writer; Jeff Bash; the paper’s multimedia graphics editor; Mike Malloy, a sports reporter; and community newspaper contributor, and Carl Benskin, who worked in the newsroom’s production department.

With friends and colleagues leaving, many inside the newsroom of “The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon” are feeling the strain, and morale has sunk to what some say is an all-time low.

“We’ve been through cuts before, but we run a pretty lean newsroom and have made money for Gannett,” said one veteran Register reporter. “Also, The Register has historically been a strong, award-winning paper with a national reputation. Those seemed to insulate us from the drastic cuts they did to some of the other papers they downsized. We thought that Gannett wouldn’t dare gut us so badly, that they wouldn’t want to be seen as destroying a great paper. Wrong assumption.”

Register executives did not respond to attempts to get comments for this story.

Most of the newsroom employees contacted for this story said they appreciated the fact that Washburn has been candid with them from the beginning about the challenges the paper faces. But the reality of the situation, as well as the way in which the layoffs were handled, has some upset.

“I’m glad they said something to us early on,” said a reporter who has been with the paper only a short time. “But when the memo came out on a Friday, we were left with the weekend to wonder if we had jobs on Monday when we came back. This dark cloud was hanging over our heads, and really, it hasn’t gone away.”

Another employee said he witnessed a young staffer led down to the Human Resources Department by their boss.

“The employee thought, this is it; I’m being fired,” he said.

But as it turns out, the staffer was simply being given a different job assignment, and when the employee asked why their boss didn’t say something beforehand, his response was reportedly, “I was told not to do that.”

In the memo to staff, Hollingsworth said that while there were no plans for further staff reductions at this time, she could not say definitively that the layoffs were over. One newsroom employee said most understand that it’s no longer a matter of whether more cuts will come, but when.

“People who have poured their lives into the newspaper for a couple of decades now are wondering when the axe will fall on them,” he said. “A decade or two back, they never would have wondered that, because they worked hard, never worrying whether they were putting in more hours than they were being paid for. Now they are wondering whether the next round of job cuts will come before Christmas or right after Christmas.”

Fuson, a 24-year Register veteran, said the atmosphere in the newsroom is just what most would expect.

“There’s a lot of sadness about colleagues who lost jobs, and plenty of fear and concern for the future,” he said, adding: “What I don’t see is any less commitment to the work. People here are working like crazy to adapt to this new age. I recently covered a story at the State Fair. A photographer was shooting the event with a video camera and a still camera – at the same time. I joked that he’ll have cymbals on his legs next year. I’m not sure how we could have done much better covering the Postville raid, the Parkersburg tornado and the spate of floods. I was as proud of our effort as anything I’ve ever seen here.”

When describing the mood inside the newsroom, several longtime employees brought up the closure of the afternoon Des Moines Tribune in 1982, a move that cost 60 journalists their jobs when the staffs of the Tribune and Register were merged.

“There’s always been a feeling that corporate cares more about profit margins and taking care of the top executives than editorial excellence and taking care of the rank and file, but the gloom and doom now is unprecedented in my time,” one newsroom veteran said. “I can only compare it to the cuts made when the Tribune folded. The way things are going, that period might turn out to be the good old days.”

Another employee described the newsroom as much quieter than it used to be.

“And it’s not like when the Tribune closed. That one blindsided us,” he said. “This time, everyone is aware of circulation problems and we have, I think, come to accept the realities of corporate America.”

While morale is certainly low, the newsroom is still committed to putting out a quality paper.

“People are busting their behinds to do good work,” one employee said. “It would be a lie to say morale is good this week, but I’ve seen it worse. The pendulum always seems to swing back, and I’m thinking it will again.”

In July Gannett reported a 36-percent plunge in second-quarter profits. The company earned $233 million in the second quarter, compared with $366 million in the same period a year ago. After announcing the job cuts, the stock immediately jumped 11 percent, but then just as quickly dropped back 10 percent.

Gannett does not break down earnings by individual paper, so the financial solvency of The Register is hard to quantify. But the paper’s circulation figures, like those of newspapers around the country, are pointing downward. Circulation has fallen virtually every year since 1994, when The Register’s daily circulation stood at 184,959 and Sunday at 318,542. By 2007 those numbers had fallen to 146,050 daily and 233,229 on Sundays.

Fuson, who has been quick to point out that it was his choice to take a buyout and that he wasn’t forced to leave, said the resilience of the newsroom in the face of a difficult time is inspiring.

“It’s not as bad as when the Tribune closed, but it’s close,” Fuson said. “At the same time, you’ve got people trying desperately to maintain and enhance the Register’s quality and role, not knowing what they’re job is going to look like, or even if they’ll have a job, in six months. It’s actually inspiring to see how much people here still care about the Register.”