Stories

The Des Moines Register lost nearly 18,000 daily subscribers and nearly 15,000 Sunday subscribers during the six-month period ending in September, according to preliminary figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The extent of the job cuts announced Thursday inside the newsroom of The Des Moines Register are becoming more clear, with more names emerging along with news that the paper has shuttered its Iowa City bureau.

The Des Moines Register announced Thursday afternoon that it was laying off 36 employees, or 6 percent of the company’s workforce.
Sources inside the Register tell the Iowa Independent the newsroom layoffs include director of photography Don Tormey, news editor Suzanne Behnke, designer Scott Lester, features writer Dawn Sagario, writer Mary Challender and writer Kathy Hickman. [...]

Employees at “The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon” are expected to find out today the extent of job cuts announced earlier this month by parent company Gannet Co. Inc.

Gannett Co. Inc., parent company of The Des Moines Register, will eliminate between 1,000 and 2,000 jobs in the coming weeks, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.

The Des Moines Register announced today that Kathie Obradovich will be the paper’s next political columnist.
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 [...]

Rumors are swirling about the possibility of another round of layoffs at Gannett Co. Inc., parent company of The Des Moines Register.
Jim Hopkins, who follows the company at GannettBlog, is reporting that two sources have confirmed the company’s principal executive and chief financial officer has ordered across-the-board layoffs. The layoffs are expected to take place [...]

Former Des Moines Register columnist and editor Richard Doak wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s paper that bemoans the slow decline of traditional print newspapers, arguing that other types of news outlets will never be an adequate substitute:
The world has become saturated with new media, but it is the oldest of the old media, newspapers, that [...]

Gannett Co. Inc, parent company of The Des Moines Register and Iowa City Press-Citizen, announced today that it would institute another round of employee furloughs during the second quarter of 2009.
Sources inside the Register’s newsroom confirmed that they were notified Monday morning, although most said they saw the news coming months ago when the first [...]

The Des Moines Register’s Web site ranks 7th in the entire Gannett Co. Inc. chain in page views, according to an internal document leaked to Jim Hopkins at Gannett Blog.