Laura Hollingsworth, president and publisher of The Des Moines Register, told employees in a memo last week that the cuts were coming, though the size and scope was still unknown. Robert Dickey, president of Gannett U.S. Community Publishing, said most layoffs would be finalized by Thursday as part of a companywide staff reduction of 1,400 employees. In 2008, the Register eliminated 70 positions.

Gannett’s other Iowa paper, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, announced Wednesday that it was laying off four employees. There will also be changes to the paper’s circulation staff due to a new agreement with the Cedar Rapids Gazette to print and distribute the Press-Citizen.

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 round of furloughs was announced.

“This is not news to us,” one employee said.

In a memo to staff, Gannett CEO Craig Dubow said the company would begin the second quarter “without any real relief in sight from this unprecedented economic downturn and its challenge to our company.”

The company had to decide between more layoffs (more than 2,000 employees were let go in 2008) and more furloughs (every employee was mandated to take a one week unpaid furlough during the first quarter of 2009).

“We chose, for most employees, a furlough program consisting of at least one week of unpaid leave to be taken in April, May or June,” Dubow said.

For Gannett newspapers like The Register, salaried employees must take one full week at one time while hourly employee must take five days over the course of the three-month quarter. Employees who earn over $90,000 will take a second week of unpaid leave.

UPDATE: The Des Moines Register becomes one of the first Gannett papers to report on the latest round of company-wide furloughs and adds one new detail: the 1,000 full- and part-time employees at The Des Moines Register, the Iowa City Press-Citizen and the Register’s weekly papers will have their wages frozen for at least one year.

Dubow made the comments at the UBS Investment Bank 36th Annual Global Media Conference in New York City. Any future layoffs would be determined by the health of the economy next year.

“We are always going to size to the revenue that is there,” Dubow said, adding that decisions will be made market-by-market. “We’re going to have to see where and how the economy reacts next year.”

The company recently cut 10 percent from its newspaper payroll, including 82 jobs in Iowa.

On the one hand, the editorial board compares the freshman Congressman with his veteran predecessor, who Loebsack unseated in 2006:

He doesn’t have the record of bucking his party so dramatically as Leach did over decades. But neither did Leach after only his first term. Loebsack hasn’t yet found an easy balance between his expertise as a political science professor and the partisan, sound-byte communications by which laws are made and votes explained. But it took Leach a long time to earn the right to be longwinded. And Loebsack has yet to earn the powerful committee positions that Leach both gained and lost over the course of his career.

On the other hand, the board defended Loebsack’s two-year record in Congress and criticisms lobbed against him by his critics:

But neither does Loebsack deserve the “Do Nothing Dave” caricature that his critics continue to draw around him. He has been working to ensure that his party leadership and the Bush administration understand how this summer’s floods have been “the most significant natural disaster in memory.” To this end, he has toured the district with national officials and pressed for disaster assistance as his top priority in Congress.

Regarding Loebsack’s opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the board had praise for her campaign and future in politics, but had some misgivings about her use of ideological rhetoric:

Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ unique background as a soldier and a medical doctor places her in a good position to challenge Loebsack on issues of health care, national defense and economic development. But ironically it’s Miller-Meeks’ discussions of health care — especially her repeated use of loaded language like “Canadian-style socialized medicine” — that comes across as more ideological than experience-based. We think she has a strong future in the Iowa Republican Party, but she hasn’t made the case for why she would be more effective in her first term than Loebsack has been in his.