Stories

Technophobes, beware! The following post gets pretty deep into the weeds…
When the Iowa Independent launched version 2.0 more than a year ago, we were Iowa’s only major news site built on the open-source Wordpress blogging platform. Since then, other prominent news organizations have followed suit, including the (Cedar Rapids) Gazette and Radio Iowa.
Wordpress, which was [...]

Meredith Corp., which publishes more than 20 magazines and owns several television and online media properties, has announced plans to eliminate 100 jobs at its Des Moines headquarters.  The company also plans to shutter Country Home magazine, which has a circulation of about 1.2 million, the Des Moines Register reports.
The company also plans to eliminate [...]

Cedar Rapids Gazette Editor Steve Buttry published a blog post Sunday lamenting the fact that traditional news outlets often fail to credit one another for stories they pick up, repurpose, or in some cases simply regurgitate from other sources.  Buttry cites a tweet from Des Moines Register reporter Daniel P. Finney complaining that KCCI took [...]

It’s a sad chapter that local historians will be loath to record. Several newspapers that have served east-central Iowa communities since the late 1800s are coming to an end.
Marengo Publishing Corp. and Poweshiek Publishing, companies under Gannett’s large umbrella, have published three weekly advertisers, seven weekly newspapers and a monthly magazine for several years. The [...]

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 [...]

Liat Paul couldn’t believe her ears. On Aug. 10 as she watched a WHO-TV Sunday evening broadcast on Channel 13, sports reporter Chris Hassel recapped the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing by referring to the Chinese men’s basketball team as the U.S.’s first “eggroll on their plate.”

Born in a Thailand refugee camp in 1980, Kao Kalia Yang is one of almost 190,000 Hmong people living in the U.S.

The Minnesota author was in Iowa City on Monday to read from her new book, “The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.”

What if you could do one-stop shopping for all your global peace and security policy analysis needs?

Nuclear proliferation and disarmament; United Nations strategy and planning; Middle East and Asian security; emergent powers; U.S. security; all of it. Ready for download and available from one policy research think-tank that is nonpartisan and stresses a multilateral approach [...]

What’s in store at this year’s music and arts festival Mission Creek Midwest (MCM) (April 1-7)? Rest assured, the 3rd annual Iowa City fest will feature plenty of music. But what else? For starters, they’ve teamed up with the Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival and indie music mp3 website Daytrotter.

Air Force veteran and conscientious objector Jason Munford talked about his experience during a panel on Wednesday at the University of Iowa. He became a conscientious objector before being deployed to Iraq and shared some details from his struggle to become a military CO. Video interview below the fold.