We come to bury the Register--not to praise it

Earlier this week, I read that our local newspaper, The Des Moines Register, would be raising its subscription fees—again.

Yep, again.

The increase, which will take effect on September 1, follow another price increase of 20 to 40 percent which took place last year.  Moreover, more advertising and newsroom staff layoffs were reported after the announcement was made about the subscription increases.

This week’s edition of Cityview Magazine has an excellent Civic Skinny column which contains some interesting if hard-to-understand excerpts from a memo to Register (er. Gannett) employees which talks about the needs for the latest price increase along with a warning that the Register’s customer service center (or should we say Gannett’s customer service center) will be receiving lots of phone calls from subscribers requesting that their subscriptions be cancelled—which wouldn’t be able to handle all of them, noted Cityview’s column.

I currently read the hard-print copy edition of the Register on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. With that subscription increase in mind, I might cut it back to only Sundays, depending on whether I can get the online version for less. Because I enjoy having a print version of a newspaper and I would miss it.

I imagine the Des Moines area will miss the print version of the Register if and when  its printing schedule is curtailed (as is the case with the New Orleans Times-Picayune) or if the print version ceases to exist altogether (as is the case with Newsweek magazine). After all, if you want to post a newspaper article on the classroom wall or a photo of your children on the kitchen which had appeared in the newspaper, you could just get a pair of scissors and cut them. You can do the same with the online version of your local newspaper, but it might look as if it were a photo being printed on paper—the ink and halftones which characterize newsprint or other publishing material would be gone.

The price increase for the newspaper is not the only one being reported. The company will be replacing its weekly TV supplement, which comes out on Sundays with a publication called TV Weekly. It will cost $39 per year to subscribe to this publication, for those who already subscribe to the Register. The fee for nonsubscribers in the Des Moines area is $51.48 per year.

Frankly I don’t think the TV supplement is worth reading anyway-even if I watched television on a regular basis, which I no longer do. It’s just a compilation of schedules of local and cable channels. I imagine it’s possible to find the same info online, through such papers as USA Today (also published by Gannett) or the companies which provide us with the hundreds of cable channels.

The TV supplement should have been overhauled a long time ago. For all practical purposes it is dead. I recall when the TV section had listings of programs with info on who was in them, what took place, articles about various shows, critical analyses and even radio listings! I realize that information is largely available on the internet, but not everyone has access to the internet.

The TV listings hail from the day when The Des Moines Register was literally locally-owned. It had its offices in a building at 8th and Locust in downtown Des Moines, Iowa (albeit in an unattractive printing plant attached to a tower whose façade was ripped off and replaced with siding in an order to make the building look “modern”). The Register published an evening paper, The Des Moines Tribune, along with a weekly general-interest magazine, Look, in the same league with the classic Life or Saturday Evening Post. It also was the first home of KRNT Radio, which later gave birth to KRNT television (later known as KCCI). The Des Moines Register and Tribune also syndicated such features as The Family Circus cartoon panel.

When my parents got bills from The Des Moines Register, the envelopes with those bills would carry a notice on the outside congratulating the one newspaper which has earned more Pulitzer Prizes than The Des Moines Register— a publication called The New York Times. That was classy and designated the high standards of The Des Moines Register. At the annual Sports & Vacation Show (sponsored by the Des Moines Register), and at other local events such as the Iowa State Fair, it was possible to pick up a plastic tote bag which read “Three Out of Five Iowans Read The Des Moines Register”. And The Des Moines Register started its cross-state bicycle ride 40 years ago this month. Moreover, Des Moines Register people were civic leaders involved in the revitalization of downtown, the establishment of the Des Moines airport (now Des Moines International Airport) and Drake University; two buildings at Drake—Cowles Library and Harvey Ingham Hall—are named after people involved with The Des Moines Register.

But for the past decades, the Register has been on a decline. I cannot pinpoint when that decline started, but I think it was when the Register tried to adopt an old-fashioned look and the Des Moines Tribune tried to adopt a hip look during the 1970s. Then a few years later, there were a variety of omens—two lads on paper routes disappeared (they have not been found), a columnist committed suicide and Frank Miller, a long-time cartoonist died of a heart attack. But the big fall during that time was when the Des Moines Tribune ceased publication in 1982.  Ads said that as a result the Des Moines Register would improve.

Not so.

A couple of years later, the Des Moines Register was sold to Gannett, a Washington DC area company which publishes USA Today (the notorious “McPaper”), the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Springfield (Missouri) News-Leader, Florida Today and the Arizona Republic among others. Since then, the newspaper has tried to portray itself as a local publication, as a voice of the people of the Des Moines area, but I doubt if anyone believes it. King Features Syndicate, owned by the Hearst Corporation, picked up many of the features syndicated by the Register & Tribune Syndicate (including The Family Circus). KCCI-TV was sold to a series of owners; eventually it would be owned by the Hearst Corporation.

Brian Duffy, the cartoonist who replaced Frank Miller, was laid off a few years back. (He subsequently got hired by Des Moines Cityview Magazine!!!) Many other staff writers have also been let go. There are fewer sections of the newspaper nowadays and fewer advertising supplements and coupons to cut out. The sections aimed at senior citizens and young mothers seem to have ceased publication.  The daily’s readership is now down to under 90,000 as I understand it—which was before the announced price increase. Meanwhile, the Register moved out of its building at 8th and Locust and into downsized-spaces a few blocks down the street.

Shortly after the announcement of the fee increase, a news report indicated that more advertising and newsroom staff would be laid off. While I don’t have any specifics as of this date (August 2, 2013), I believe that advertising still pays the bills at many a newspaper; those newspapers which have tried to survive on just subscriptions rarely do so.  Journalists and photographers who know how to capture a story, how to tell it—how to cover the news—without them, what do you have?

Advertising staff and news staff are the backbone of newspapers, even today! Advertising people bring in the ads for the readers to see—along with the dollars needed to keep the newspaper going. News staff write the stories and take the photos for the readers. Without them, you have no newspaper.

That price increase may be another nail in the coffin—or the last one. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that this price increase and the layoffs will be among the last. Hold onto your printed newspaper copies, everyone—they could be collectors’ items one of these days.