Stories

As The Des Moines Register’s Tom Beaumont reports, Sen. John McCain said in Cedar Rapids today that he would fire Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, if he were president.
The only problem is that, while the president is empowered to appoint the SEC chairperson (with advice and consent from the Senate), he [...]

Barack Obama leads John McCain 52 percent to 40 percent in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register Iowa Poll released Sunday.

Steve Dinnen, Jeff Bash, Mike Malloy and Carl Benskin have joined the list of Des Moines Register employees whose jobs have been eliminated, bringing the total thus far to seven.

Sources inside The Des Moines Register have confirmed, and the local business journal has reported, that farm editor Jerry Perkins and features writer Ken Fuson have asked for and received buyouts, becoming the first of what will be 15 jobs to be eliminated today from within the paper’s newsroom.
Sources have also confirmed that Jane Norman, [...]

Jim Romenesko at the Poynter Institute has posted on his blog a memo giving the details to the 1,000 job cuts to be enacted company-wide at Gannett Co. Inc., parent company of The Des Moines Register and Iowa City Press Citizen.
Publishers are instructed to inform their staffs by today of the job cuts at their [...]

After a gentle prodding by Jim Hopkins over at The Gannett Blog (not to mention his publication of an internal memo), Gannett Co. Inc., which owns the Des Moines Register, has admitted publicly that it will be cutting 1,000 jobs, including 600 layoffs, across its newspaper operations.

From Gannett Blog, we learn that Des Moines Register Editor Carolyn Washburn reportedly sent this note in an email to newsroom employees:
I’m looking for some of you willing to be members of a new fun committee. OK, you can call yourselves whatever you want. But think popcorns Fridays, and the day the hotdog gun came, [...]

Davenport-based Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of the Quad City Times, the Sioux City Journal and the Waterloo Courier, announced today that its second-quarter profit fell 87.4 percent mostly on one-time impairment charges. The company’s net income is $2.8 million, or 6 cents per share, for the three months ended June 29, compared with $22.5 million, [...]

It seems like a surprise on the surface, but the Des Moines Register endorsed Ed Fallon Tuesday in the 3rd Congressional District, over incumbent Leonard Boswell.

Why alienate an incumbent who, according to all public polls, is likely to win re-nomination by a two to one margin? Let me help you think like journalists.

The Des Moines Register just published a commentary I wrote on the smoking debate in Iowa.
If Iowans are still reading Mark Twain these days, they may remember one of the American humorist’s more famous lines: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” In the discussion of smoking in contemporary America, that seems to be [...]