The Retrenching Register   

The Des Moines daily used to be a statewide newspaper, a unifying force for all of Iowa. Now it is hunkering down in the ``Golden Circle" around the city. Is this an astute business decision, a devastating blow to the state's public life--or both?

N O ONE IS ABSOLUTELY SURE WHO MINTED the Golden Circle, but it was the Des Moines Register that declared it the coin of the realm.

All that the paper wanted to be, all that it depended upon to flourish, was encompassed in that precious boundary about an hour in every direction around metropolitan Des Moines, Iowa.

You didn't have to wait for one of the Register's frequent demographic stories to learn the circle was gold because that's increasingly where the people of Iowa and their money were. Like it or not, and far more slowly than the rest of the country, Iowa was urbanizing. For the Register to pretend otherwise, as it had for a generation, was to invite financial disaster.

And so the newspaper that for so long had served as Iowa's unifying force decided to abandon its statewide role and concentrate on readers closer to home. It emphasized local coverage, scrapped money-losing daily delivery in 15 of the state's 99 counties and shuttered bureaus in Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Davenport and Sioux City.

Today, Des Moines news dominates the Register's front page as never before. News from the Washington bureau, once the pride of the Register, has all but disappeared from the newspaper. Iowa legislative stories, still the backbone of the paper, jockey for space on the front and on the inside with suburban news, which has become the single biggest priority of the new Register. Investigative reporting is mostly confined to often well-done, frequent but sometimes ponderous and overplanned multipart series with such targets as water quality and taxation.

To do battle for readers against the onslaught of television and the morning dailies inside and outside of the state from within the golden walls has been very good business indeed for the Register and for parent Gannett, says Publisher Barbara Henry.

While Register management will not disclose its profit margin, insiders say that focusing on greater Des Moines and raising coin box prices to 75 cents have helped make the Register among the most profitable papers in a chain that has enjoyed margins between 20 and 30 percent in the last three years.

The performance of the newspaper is being rewarded by Gannett with an investment of $51 million in new presses and a manufacturing plant that will, by the year 2000, bring unprecedented printing speed, zoning capability and graphics quality to the Register.

Those MAN Roland offset presses are being harnessed to drive a newspaper above whose masthead is the slogan ``The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon."

But the Register is now a paper that directs two thirds of its resources toward a golden circle of fewer than a dozen of the counties in Iowa, where 75 percent of its circulation resides, Henry says.

James Flansburg, a retired Register political reporter, editorial page editor and columnist, calls the paper's shrinking universe the biggest Iowa story of the last decade that will never be covered. In April, Flansburg spit in the face of all the good financial news at his former paper in a column he wrote for Iowa's Ames Tribune. The real story at the Register, he said, wasn't the bottom line but the mockery of the line above the mast.

``The Register may well be a business success and a social tragedy," Flansburg wrote in his periodic column, Letter From Des Moines. ``And a journalism failure. It gave up doing the one thing it knew how to do, covering the state, for the very thing that it didn't know how to do, cover the city and its suburbs.

``I regard the Register today the same as I regard my late father. I mourn him; I miss him. But I realize he's dead, and nothing is going to change that or reverse it."

Flansburg's anguish over the paper's retreat is echoed by another distinguished alumnus, James Risser, who won two Pulitzer Prizes at the Register. ``The state of Iowa is poorer because the Register is not following that statewide mission," says Risser, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford University. ``It was a premier paper, in terms of quality journalism. It brought a level of sophistication to the entire state as a result. It also played an important role in setting an agenda for what decision makers would be talking about."

Flansburg says he knew when he wrote the column that it was likely to have a powerful impact. He wrote at the risk of being dismissed as another bitter old man preoccupied with his fusty newspapering memories--a risk, he says, worth taking to get on the record his heartfelt belief that the newsroom tail should be free to wag the corporate dog to fulfill its duty not to stockholders but to democracy.

What he got from Publisher Henry, he expected--pity. The letter, however, had a reach much broader and deeper than even Flansburg could have anticipated. Former Register reporters and editors, perhaps the tightest and proudest alumni association in newspapers, circulated the letter by fax and mail, beginning a national discussion of the place the Register has occupied in American journalism.

For many who had left the paper it was irrefutable proof delivered by one of the best of the old pro reporters that the once-proud Register was yet another example of the corporate overrun of papers across the country.

That was the word spread by dozens of reporters and editors who have left the paper in the past two years--turnover that Henry says is not unusual for the industry, but which has included a startling amount of the best younger talent on the paper. Some left the business. Some left without jobs. The loss is all the more painful, says Ken Fuson, 41, now a feature writer at the Baltimore Sun, because it includes many people, like himself, who grew up in Iowa and lived to work for the Des Moines Register. Fuson's elegiac goodbye address last October told the newsroom that while he never wanted to leave he could no longer stay.

``It's probably good that the people like me, the kids who grew up in Iowa, leave because we remind the people who run the paper what the paper was and isn't anymore," Fuson says. ``It might be good for them, but I'm not sure it's good for Iowa. I want the people in Iowa to know the newsroom didn't abandon them, the newspaper did."

But while Flansburg might have thought his letter was a blow for reporters and readers, its desultory dismissal of the paper enraged even some sympathetic to his point of view. In an unexpected way, Flansburg exposed a pride in the newspaper among those who stayed, the depth of which had been trivialized by his criticism, longtime legislative reporter Jonathan Roos says.

``I think he greatly exaggerated the decline and fall of the Register," Roos says. ``It clearly doesn't enjoy the reputation it had 10 to 15 years ago, but I still think it is a very good newspaper. We are going through an identity crisis. There have been a lot of changes. Those who work here see this as a special institution evolving into something else, and they don't like it. It's as simple as that and as complex as that."

Simple in that almost everyone agrees the Des Moines Register is responding to the very changes that every newspaper in America is facing and in many of the same ways. Complex in that the changes appear to be a direct assault on the historic role of ``The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon."

M ICHAEL GARTNER, THE CO-OWNER of the Ames Tribune who coaxed Flansburg out of retirement to write his column, says the protection of the self-image of Iowa should be nothing less than a sacred trust for the only newspaper in the state with the reach and the resources to do the job. The clean air and clean politics, the work ethic and, above all, an uncommon literacy brought back to Iowa a Pulitzer Prize winner who, for five years, ran NBC News in New York.

``People see what's happening there [at the Register] as a case study, and I'll tell you why," Gartner says. ``Nowhere, with the exception, maybe, of Providence in Rhode Island, is there the sense of what the Register is as a unifying force in the state of Iowa. It was in its coverage of day-to-day life, the day-in, day-out rhythm of life, that the Register distinguished itself. And because of that, the homogenization of the Register, I think, is harder to accept."

In the often cynical world of newspapers it is at first surprising and, finally, touching to hear staffers past and present talk with pride of their responsibility to Iowa readers. Barbara Mack, a Des Moines lawyer and Iowa State University journalism professor who once was the Register's chief legal counsel, says folks will first tell you they are Iowans and then tell you what town they are from.

``It's a highly integrated culture, and so much of it, still today, is based on agriculture," Mack says. ``I've never driven a tractor in my life. I'm three generations removed from the farm, but I know damn well if hog prices are good or bad, and I can tell you the difference between a broadleaf and a grass."

Geneva Overholser, now ombudsman of the Washington Post, who in her six-and-a-half years as the Register's editor battled relentlessly for journalism over budget, says the paper captured the ``warp and woof" in its deep engagement with Iowa life. ``The Register is of and for Iowa," she says. ``It has loved Iowa with a critical kind of love. We all have love affairs with our newspapers, but I have never seen a love affair like this one."

The story of Mary Ann Lickteig, who left her City Side column in July without a job, is a story told by so many others who came to the Register that it is almost a clich* there. Born on a farm, Lickteig, 34, grew up reading and revering and hoping one day to work for the Register. That she grew up outside of Algona, about 140 miles northwest of Des Moines, only strengthened the bond. Algona was the home of Gardner Cowles, the patriarch of the newspaper and magazine family, who bought the Iowa State Register/ Leader in 1903 and in 1915 renamed it the Des Moines Register.

``I felt like I was somehow related to Gardner Cowles, I loved that paper so much growing up," Lickteig says. ``I'm an Iowan, first and foremost, and the Register represented the state of Iowa. If there was a bus plunge in Bangladesh and there was one Iowan on that bus, the Register cared."

Charles C. Edwards, Gardner Cowles' great-grandson and the last family member to serve as publisher of the Register, says that after the railroads made it possible for the paper to reach into every corner of Iowa, the family felt a kinship with and a responsibility to all of its readers. As late as the early 1980s, Edwards says, circulation decisions were still being made out of duty to readers rather than good fiscal sense.

Flansburg, who started at the Register in 1957, remembers when the paper and its afternoon sister, the Tribune, would have half a dozen reporters roaming Iowa's statehouse in Des Moines. (The Register now has three statehouse reporters.)

Some of its keenest reporting came from one- and two-person bureaus from Sioux City on the Nebraska border to Dubuque on the Mississippi River.

But perhaps nowhere was the commitment to the state more vividly displayed than in its reporting from the Washington bureau. Correspondents included Pulitzer Prize winners Risser and Clark Mollenhoff, and the bureau consistently produced reporting of the highest level.

``The bureau was expected to do two things: Cover agriculture and the Iowa delegation and do it better than anyone else," Flansburg says. ``And they did."

T HE STATEWIDE MISSION BEGAN colliding with demographic reality as far back as Mollenhoff's heyday. From historical highs in the early 1960s of 350,000 daily and more than 500,000 on Sunday, circulation ebbed in the outer reaches of Iowa. In spite of the tremendous pull of farming, white and blue collar Des Moines, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids and the cluster known as the Quad Cities on the Mississippi were growing while rural Iowa withered.

Daily circulation of the Register today is about 165,000, and Sunday circulation is about 279,000. Since 1989, circulation for the daily and the Sunday papers has dropped 21 percent.

Since 1985, when Gannett bought the paper, circulation outside the Golden Circle has dropped by almost 70,000 daily and 103,000 on Sunday, some due to cancellations and the rest due to the shrunken circulation area.

In 1982, in the face of steep circulation declines and the cost of running two newspapers, the Cowles family closed the Tribune. ``The thing people forget is that some of the biggest trauma occurred while the Cowles family owned this newspaper," Edwards says. ``The closing of the afternoon Tribune meant the layoff of several hundred people. Costs were going up, and revenues were going down. The trend started years before Gannett came to Des Moines."

Edwards is among many who credit Gannett with a rather benign role at the beginning of its ownership. Gannett named Edwards publisher and, rather than reach elsewhere in the chain, allowed a succession of top editors, including Jim Gannon and Overholser, to come from within the Register ranks (Overholser had gone to the New York Times between Register stints). As long as the newspaper met its profit goals, Edwards says, little changed at the Register's Locust Street headquarters.

And, to a person, staffers say almost nothing changed for them. Fuson, one of the paper's harshest critics, says that to the end he was encouraged to pursue the stories that interested him the most. Fuson is the only Gannett reporter to have won the company's in-house reporting excellence award three times.

Larry Fruhling, one of the most respected reporters on the paper, who took early retirement this year, continued to cherry pick the best stories in the Midwest, just like Register reporters had for generations.

John Carlson, who once anchored a Cedar Rapids bureau that no longer exists, recently wrote a two-part follow-up story to a series he had written three years ago on a family of hemophiliacs in Iowa who were dying of AIDS. The Sunday story ran 147 inches and the Monday follow more than 90. The paper, he says, has always given him room to write.

Carlson, a former Nieman Fellow who has had his choice of beats, who has done everything he has ever wanted to do at the newspaper, says he took issue with Flansburg's assessment that the Register is dead and the staff with it. The problem isn't what is in the Register, he says, but what isn't in the Register. Fuson's departure, says Carlson, sent a signal to the newsroom.

``He's a genuine big-leaguer, and he didn't feel this was the big leagues anymore," Carlson says. Is Fuson right? ``I don't know," Carlson says. ``I don't know anymore."

Although you would not know it at first, it is within Edwards that the conflict of what the Register was, is and should be rages most violently. It was Edwards who was credited with acting as a buffer between the staff and Gannett, who allowed Overholser to grab the point in challenging Gannett over budget constraints, and who, perhaps better than anyone associated with the newspaper, understood the tension between the old mission and the new.

The 1991 decision to withdraw same-day delivery to about 2,500 subscribers along Iowa's western border, most of whom canceled the newspaper, could very well have been made years earlier by the Cowles family, Edwards says. In the face of bitter complaints, this spring Henry reversed a decision made before her arrival to deliver a smaller state edition to about 5,000 subscribers, some of them no more than an hour from Des Moines.

``So much of that psyche, that pride, that ego was wrapped up in the pride of being a statewide newspaper that management made decisions that we would remain a statewide newspaper," Edwards says. ``There was a lot of emotion embedded in those decisions. All of that said, the economic underpinning for that was eroding. Some of the people in the newsroom knew exactly what was happening and chose to ignore it. Some just lived in a fantasy world."

Henry, who came to the Register in late March of 1996, wouldn't use that term, but she is clearly nettled that some in the newsroom simply will not accept a reality of newspapering in Iowa that is rather old news.

``If we were honest with ourselves, if we tried to be the paper this was in 1950 or 1970 or even 1980, then there wouldn't be 205 people working in this newsroom," she says. ``I find it interesting that in a business where we are reporting on the massive changes around us, some, not all, have shown such reluctance to accept change."

Henry, who has spent 23 years with Gannett, five of them as publisher of its Great Falls Tribune in Montana, armed herself with numbers to tell greater Des Moines how wrong some people were about the paper. The newshole, she says, is 10 percent larger than it was under Cowles. Despite the turnover, the newsroom staff has increased to 205 people from 190 when Cowles ran the paper. The newsroom budget has grown by about 4 percent every year, she says.

If anyone had doubts about Gannett's commitment to the paper, Henry says the new presses should put them to rest. ``I'll admit I've got a big job to do, to let people know exactly what the truth is," she says. ``There is a whole sea change of attitude that needs to take place, but when I tell people in the community what we've done, they're flabbergasted. We can't grow this newspaper if we draw a line in the sand and say there won't be any more change. The only thing that won't change is the need for change."

T HE CHANGES ALREADY in place are of the kind familiar to readers of metropolitan dailies all over the country--extensive coverage, prominently displayed, of the fast growing Des Moines suburbs, like West Des Moines; zoned weeklies, called Around Town; intensified coverage of Des Moines-area business.

The paper's reader advisory council and focus group surveys have told the paper pointedly to cover local news, Editor Dennis Ryerson says. The surveys suggest the paper is failing to reach young readers and women. Young families can be engaged by self-help stories and school stories, Ryerson says. Everyone wants demographic stories that tell them how they stack up against people around the state, he says. Stories on growth and development help tell readers where greater Des Moines is going, he adds.

``We need to use our talents at all levels, to challenge reporters to do their best work," Ryerson says. ``We need our best writer to do the weather story. They can make that story sing. There is a perception here that if you aren't covering state government or a statewide issue that it is not as worthy. As we change, I have to make it my responsibility to let people know they are not doing insignificant work."

The paper seems to get little credit for its commitment to big-issue projects. In the past seven months alone, the Register published multipart series on gambling, Sudanese refugee resettlement, taxation, school desegregation, groundwater, teen driving and sentencing for child killers, as well as Carlson's wrenching two-parter on the AIDS-ravaged family of hemophiliacs. Each series was generated by a different staff member.

Yet, in spite of a recent memo circulated by Henry that calls for harder-edged coverage, particularly in the suburbs, Ryerson concedes the prevailing emotion in the newsroom reflects the sense that the Register has ``somehow lost its soul." Ryerson's annoyance comes in part from the obsession observers outside the state seem to have with the mental well-being of the Register news staff.

``It interests me that when people write about change in the newsroom they don't write about Wichita or Denver or Tampa or Kansas City or Milwaukee," he says. ``This is happening all over the country. My job, I think, is to infuse this newspaper with the desire to embrace change."

The change has had an effect on newspapering in Iowa, some of it very good for readers outside of Des Moines, says Bill Monroe, executive director of the Iowa Newspaper Association. When Monroe joined the association 17 years ago only two or three newspapers in the state were morning dailies. Publishers adjusted to the Register's delivery to survive and wound up getting better, Monroe says.

``We have 92 percent penetration of newspapers in the state of Iowa," he adds. ``Show me another state that has that kind of penetration. Show me a place where Des Moines pulled out and it left a void. You can't. These other papers have gotten stronger and stronger."

The biggest beneficiaries have been the Cedar Rapids Gazette in the east, whose circulation has climbed steadily to almost 70,000 a day and about 84,000 on Sunday, and the Omaha World Herald, which has all but replaced the Register in west and northwest Iowa, selling about 25,000 newspapers a day in the state.

Somehow the message of having responsibility for all Iowans has been cast as terrifically old-fashioned and irrelevant, Larry Fruhling says. At 56 and with one of the top jobs in the newsroom, Fruhling says he could have stayed at the Register for several more years, but half of him got tired of working and the other half tired of seeming impertinent and believing he was otherwise.

Fruhling moved to Bellevue, just south of Dubuque, a Mississippi River town he stopped in once while doing a story. He is trying to build a freelance career around modest but steady work for a barge industry magazine called WorkBoat.

``I don't think there's anything wrong with covering the suburbs. I don't think there's anything wrong with a lot of what they're doing," Fruhling says. ``But if you look at the circulation, I don't think it's working. They are a creation of marketing, like little TV sets. The Register wants to be everybody's friend. At its peak, I think the Register was everybody's enemy."

Mary Ann Lickteig is quick to point out that she left the newspaper for personal reasons, and that the newspaper she left is still a very good one. But she has the same kind of questions about the direction of the Register as Flansburg and Fruhling. Why swear by readership surveys to chase readers the paper has never had after chasing off readers in every corner of the state that swore by the paper for years? And why, when some of the best and most loyal reporters on the staff made overtures to leave, did the editors do nothing to keep them?

``I still love the Des Moines Register, but I have more questions than answers," Lickteig says.

The answers for Fuson were no answers. Henry made no attempt to speak to him before he left for Baltimore, Fuson says. And while Ryerson told him he regretted his leaving, he was unable or unwilling to offer him anything to stay in Des Moines. Henry and Ryerson say that Fuson's departure was a loss made inevitable by his opposition to the mission of the newspaper.

Fuson is a rising star at a hot paper (see ``Rising Sun," October), but for all of its promise Fuson feels like an expatriate. Growing up in Granger, just northwest of Des Moines, Fuson saw in the Register a connection to the rest of Iowa and to the rest of the world. When he went to work for the paper at the age of 25 in 1981 Fuson says he ``felt like a kid picking up a bat for the 1927 Yankees." All he wanted to do was crank home runs for the fans.

``I could have stayed at the paper even with the reduced circulation if I believed we were serving Iowans," Fuson says. ``What I believe they care about is Rosslyn, Virginia [Gannett headquarters], and how much money they put on the armored truck and send to them. They needed to get rid of me because I'd much rather be tied to its past than its future."

The near future is tied to people like Jeff Zeleny, 24, whose reporting in just six months at the Polk County Courthouse has won wide respect throughout the paper. Zeleny is ambitious and unawed, with designs on a national writing post in Washington. The Register is a very good opportunity in a very uncertain business, Zeleny says.

Zeleny came to the Register after an internship with the Chicago Tribune, in spite of the word that it was no longer a good place to be a reporter. The word, he says, was unreliable; in his view the Register remains staffed with great talent that most days produces a fine newspaper. But whether or not the Register is a good place to stay as a reporter is another matter.

``A destination paper? What is that anymore?" Zeleny says. ``I'm not sure that many destination papers exist. That's not a sad statement; it's a fact. The business is changing, and maybe by the time I get to make the decision to stay the paper won't be what it is today."

Charlie Edwards thinks the Register, like other newspaper monopolies around the country, will make a great deal of money for many years to come. In fact, it was Gannett's adherence to the bottom line that helped wean him from his emotional attachment to newspapers. Edwards, 50, is a partner in Visionary Systems Ltd., a software development firm in Des Moines where the staffers are as excited as the Register newsroom used to be.

In 1986, Editor Jim Gannon came to Edwards with an idea to run a special section of photographs taken by staff photographer Dave Peterson of people who had been steamrolled by Iowa's farm crisis. Gannon convinced Edwards of the importance of the pictures to an entire state. Edwards knew the section would throw off the numbers he was expected to turn in to Gannett by about $50,000. But he went ahead with the project, and the paper won a Pulitzer Prize.

Gannett officials joked afterward, Edwards recalls, that they then knew the precise cost of winning a Pulitzer.

In the current sea of profit it is impossible to determine whether the retreat behind the walls of the Golden Circle will be the ruination or the salvation of the Des Moines Register, Edwards says. After stepping down as publisher he decided not to make a career of debating the issue.

``I taught [journalism] for a year at Drake University and decided not to do it again," Edwards says. ``I felt like a dinosaur bringing these issues of journalism and profit into the classroom. All these kids were here for was to get a job."

And if there are going to be jobs for them, there have to be profitable newspapers. The key is finding the formula for making money and producing excellent journalism at the same time.

``I would guess somewhere someone is going to find a way to make a hell of a lot of money out of the practice of good journalism," Register critic Flansburg says. ``It has happened before, and it will happen again. The Register made Iowa different than most other states, maybe all of the other states. Now it doesn't know what it wants to be. I hope it remembers what it needs to be."