Stories

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.

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 [...]

Deere & Co. officially announced Tuesday it will be laying off 700 of 1,000 workers at its Ottumwa plant.

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 [...]

A national Web site laying out the rights of workers both currently employed and recently laid off was launched last week.
The site, CanMyBossDoThat.com, is a project of Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), a Chicago-based organization which calls upon religious values in order to educate, organize and mobilize the religious community in the U.S. on issues and [...]

The changes are coming fast and furious at the “Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon.”
Des Moines Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth informed readers in a column published Friday that the paper will be shedding some pages and combining some sections in an attempt to cut costs.

Davenport-based Lee Enterprises Inc., which owns 49 daily newspapers including the Quad City Times, the Sioux City Journal and the Mason City Globe Gazette, announced yesterday that it was laying off 39 employees at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The news follows earlier reports that the company’s average share value has fallen below $1 per share over [...]