Though each Iowan seems to have his or her own ideas for how money should be cut from the budget, few blame the Democrats for overspending on their key priorities over the past few years.

In all, majorities support Democrats’ expansion of health insurance coverage for children, spending on public schools, repairing roads and bridges, raising teacher pay, and developing renewable energy. A plurality supports expanded free preschool.

On most budget items, pluralities of Iowans agree with the idea of cutting everything by an equal amount, except when it comes to health insurance for low-income residents and the Iowa State Patrol, which majorities say should be spared from cuts. This seems to conform to Gov. Chet Culver’s decision to make an across-the-board budget cut now and use the beginning of the legislative session next year to restore some funding for key priorities.

That said, Iowans have mixed feelings about the decisions that have been made to cut the state budget. Though only 19 percent of respondents said they were “Very Confident” or “Mostly Confident” about the budget-cutting decisions, 44 percent were “Just Somewhat Confident.” 35 percent were not confident.

(Incidentally, it seems strange that this question had three positive responses and just one negative response. These responses may fit people’s opinions best, but they also can also be confusing to interpret. The Register story itself seems to add up “Somewhat Confident” and “Not Confident” to demonstrate a disapproving majority, but “Somewhat Confident” doesn’t sound very disapproving to me. It was the closest thing to a middle ground that pollsters offered, and it implies slight approval, not disapproval.)

You can read the Register’s write-up of the poll here.

Obradovich, 44, has been the Register’s political editor since 2003, and she was a state government reporter and statehouse bureau chief before that.

Notably, though Obradovich’s CV certainly qualifies her for the new title, this announcement should also help her employer save some cash. The Register, which has been forced to trim its budget by struggling parent company Gannett Co., has likely avoided the need to hire any additional (high-profile) staff.

Obradovich replaces longtime columnist David Yepsen, who was a fixture of Iowa’s political landscape for decades before he left earlier this year to take a job at Southern Illinois University.

In another possible sign of cutbacks, a press release notes that the new Obradovich column will be found in the paper “every week,” which sounds to me like “once per week.” When Yepsen was political columnist, his work was published several times per week.

The paper’s press release appears below:

The Des Moines Register today announces Kathie Obradovich as the new political columnist.

Generations of Iowans have trusted the Register’s political commentary to help set the agenda, define issues and hold public officials accountable. For decades, presidential candidates have courted the Register’s attention and national reporters have sought its tips and insight into candidates’ characters and qualifications. Obradovich will not only carry on this tradition but add her own unique voice. “My passion is helping Iowans to engage with their government to make a difference,” said Obradovich, political columnist for The Des Moines Register.

Obradovich has served since 2003 as the Register’s political editor, directing coverage of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, the Iowa Statehouse and Congress. She has been the lead editor of the award-winning Iowa Poll, developing questionnaires and coordinating reporting of the results.

Obradovich has covered Iowa government and politics for over 20 years, including a decade as a reporter and bureau chief at the Iowa Statehouse. She’s an Iowa native and Iowa State University graduate, with strong family roots in the state.

“Kathie earned this role by covering politics and government in Iowa for 20 years. She has shaped the coverage of elections, Iowa Caucuses and legislative sessions, sometimes under her own byline and sometimes behind the scenes. Born and raised in Iowa and with those years of perspective, she is uniquely suited to carry on the responsibility of the four Des Moines Register political columnists who preceded her.” said Carolyn Washburn, Vice President and Editor of The Des Moines Register.

Obradovich’s first column will appear on Sunday, June 28. You can find her columns every week in The Des Moines Register[...]

In case you were wondering, it sounds like his new office is quite nice:

A row of trees and the bright blue sky are visible through the glass windows, and the room itself offers a spacious environment complete with shelving, and quite pleasing for Yepsen, the table itself. The office — his office, as of April 1 — offers a much different environment than the newsroom of the Des Moines Register, where Yepsen worked for more than 34 years.

The world has become saturated with new media, but it is the oldest of the old media, newspapers, that remain virtually the only enterprises that actually go out and dig up news. The other media tend to be mere conduits that pass on news, or echo chambers of commentary about news that was originally reported in newspapers.

But beneath Doak’s rather simplistic taxonomy of news organizations lies a deeper, surprisingly harsh critique of corporate media executives, laid out right in the pages of a newspaper owned by Gannett Co. Inc.

I have no solution, but I do have an observation. Newspaper corporations have been paying their CEOs millions of dollars a year. These corporate chieftains have only one job, really – to develop the new business model and guide their operating units through the transition to a new era of success.

The CEOs simply haven’t earned their pay. Amid bankruptcies, closings and shrinking news staffs, the industry is no closer to a successful new model than it was five years ago.

If the big newspaper corporations can’t reinvent their product, perhaps it’s time to break them up. Let each community newspaper seek its own path, rather than following cookie-cutter dictates from their corporate owners.

Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received a bonus of $875,000 in 2008, according to Gannett Blog, and his total compensation was valued at $3.1 million by the Associated Press.

During 2008, Gannett’s stock price plummeted by nearly 80 percent, and the company was forced to adopt significant cost-cutting measures, including layoffs, in its newsrooms “information centers” across the country.

Des Moines Register Political columnist David Yepsen staked his credibility on the claim that “The fix is in” — that the state’s sale of the lottery was “a done deal” — last Thursday.  That’s because “Powerful people such as Gov. Chet Culver, Iowa House Speaker Pat Murphy and Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal are saying nice things about the idea.”  (Or maybe it’s because Civic Skinny said so.)

Never mind the fact that, at least as of last Thursday, there were too many unanswered questions in the capitol to assess whether the idea has legs at all.  Never mind the fact that “saying nice things” entailed speaking noncommittally, in generalities, after being pressed by Des Moines Register reporters on the subject.  Never mind that Jason Clayworth, the paper’s own captiol reporter, said “I don’t believe it has serious consideration this session” in a web video debate with Yepsen on Friday (below).

Even the announcement from the governor’s office Saturday that its proposed budget would not include selling the lottery failed to convince Yepsen to change the subject.  He wrote not one, but two columns about selling the lottery over the weekend.  The Register newsroom also pushed out two breaking news text message alerts to its list of mobile phone subscribers regarding Culver’s announcement that he was not going to sell the lottery, as if it was shocking, front page news.  (And then, in the Sunday Register, it was.)

The Register may see this as a victory for themselves.  They lambasted a proposal to sell the lottery that no elected official was willing to put his or her name behind, and Culver ultimately rejected it.  But not before GOP legislators were able to use Yepsen’s work as a springboard to launch their own media offensive.

This was a manufactured controversy from beginning to end.

(Of course, if the proposal becomes more serious even after Culver’s decision to exclude it from his budget, we’ll be watching it as closely as anyone.  We just prefer to wait for more hard information than our ink-stained colleagues before we unleash a series of critical articles and columns about a particular subject.)

“Newspaper ethics tend to do better about direct ripping off the competition,” Buttry writes. “Plagiarism is a career capital offense, so if we can’t advance a story or find the same sources to duplicate it, we reluctantly attribute.”

Buttry’s post is frank and honest, but he left one option off his list of common newspaper practices: skipping over a story entirely if there’s no way to write it without crediting another news organization.  That’s a pretty common one, too.

It may be true that in the world of traditional journalism, newspapers are better at citing original source material than broadcast media, but in my experience, most of them are bound by an arcane set of rules designed more to promote their commercial interests than to pursue the truth or inform their audience.

The news business is becoming less and less profitable all the time.  If there were any actual commercial benefit to avoiding citations of other news outlets, I would have a hard time faulting anyone for it.  But what good do they derive from it?

When the Des Moines Register cites the Cedar Rapids Gazette in print, do they lose subscribers?  Advertisers?  The two newspapers serve two distinct media markets, more than a hundred miles apart.

What if local TV newscasts cited the Register each time they cribbed a newspaper story?  They might sound funny having to cite the same source for nine out of the ten stories they feature, but it is unlikely that businesses are going to stop running television ads in favor of print ads, or that somebody will turn off the tube and curl up with a day-old copy of the newspaper to get their news.

I could ask the same hypothetical questions about whether there are legitimate reasons to avoid crediting nonprofit, online-only news outlets that regularly break news stories, but I’m done tilting at windmills for the day.

The Iowa Independent has been credited in print and on the airwaves by the Washington Post, the BBC, National Public Radio, and FoxNews (just to name a few), but to the best of my recollection, our name has never been uttered in the pages of the Register or in any local TV newscast.  If we ever do get local publicity (for which we are sincerely grateful), it is usually in the form of a novelty story about this new hobby called “blogging” — nothing that actually validates our work as journalists.

After a year and a half editing this site, I’ve made my peace with how the world works.  I can see the Iowa Independent’s footprint in the work of other local journalists even if casual readers, listeners, and viewers never will.

Which of the three topics do you think the photo applies to — sex, floods, or politics?

Yepsen is the first of three candidates interviewing for the position.

David Yepsen, a political columnist for the Des Moines Register, said the institute could be used as a means to explore national issues, like combating racial prejudice, studying women in politics, government spending and debt, health care in rural America and campaign finance reform.

Many of these topics have entered the public limelight lately because of President-elect Barack Obama’s victory and the prominence of U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

It was announced last month that Yepsen could leave the paper where he’s covered politics for three decades.

Obama, an Illinois senator, was the choice of 54 percent of likely voters, while McCain, an Arizona senator, was the choice of 37 percent.

The poll of 814 likely voters, taken Tuesday through Friday by Selzer & Co., came at the close of a key stretch of the fall campaign. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

The poll also found that six in 10 Obama supporters said they were 100 percent confident he is the best person for the job, compared to only half of McCain supporters.

Four years ago, three-quarters of President George W. Bush’s supporters expressed total confidence in the Republican, compared with about 60 percent for Democrat John Kerry. Bush narrowly carried Iowa during his re-election campaign.

In a poll released Oct. 31, 2004, The Register’s found Kerry and Bush virtually tied. Bush was eventually victorious by only 10,000 votes.

Below is a two-minute collection of exerpts of some of the more contentious moments. For more clips, go here. McCain received the paper’s endorsement before January’s caucuses.