by Ira Lacher
Lacher, a former assistant sports editor at the Register, is an editor at Midwest Living.

While The Des Moines Register carries a city's name, it has always been a state paper. Many national leaders believe that the Register's esteemed Iowa Poll takes the pulse of middle America. Its three-person Washington bureau brings Iowans face to face with their congressional delegation just about every day and covers anything that affects the agribusiness industry. And the Register constantly dissects national and international stories for what it unself-consciously labels "the Iowa angle."

Along with the state fair, "We're one of the two things that unify Iowa," says reporter Ken Fuson, a native Iowan and ten-year Register veteran. But "the newspaper Iowa depends upon" (the slogan appears just below the flag on page one) is depending on less of Iowa these days.

Last year the Gannett-owned paper issued a "mission statement" asserting that its primary audience is not the entire state, as Gardner Cowles decreed when he bought it in 1903, but central Iowa. In February the Register announced it would no longer deliver the weekday paper in twenty-one western counties, (although some subscribers in sixteen of them could still get the paper by same-day mail).

Then, in March, the Register said it would close its Davenport bureau by July 1 (bureaus in Sioux City and Dubuque, on Iowa's western and eastern borders, respectively, were closed a few years ago), and raise the price of some of its editions that circulate beyond Des Moines by an unspecified amount. Publisher Charles C. Edwards, Jr., Cowles's great-grandson, said in a letter to staff members that further retrenchment was likely if circulation continued to fall, as it is expected to do. (When Gannett bought the paper for a reported $ 165 million in 1985, circulation was 255,000 daily, 385,000 Sunday. In March, the paper reported, those figures had fallen to 209,000 and 343,000.)

The prospect of turning away from nearly nine decades of tradition alarmed editor Geneva Overholser so much that she considered quitting. "I thought, Do I want to stay here and preside over this dismantling of a great newspaper?" she says. But after studying the options and listening to Edwards, Overholser enthusiastically endorsed the policy. In fact, she calls the problems associated with statewide circulation "an albatross" that has kept the Register from adequately covering its own backyard. "It's high time," she says, "that we cared more about whether we're writing well about [Des Moines suburbs] Urbandale and Clive than whether we're writing as well as we used to about Sioux City and Burlington."

"We're coming to grips with the fact that we're a different state now," says managing editor David Westphal. For one thing, there are fewer Iowans -- the state lost population during the '80s, and the exodus was most pronounced outside central Iowa. Advertising revenue from outlying counties eroded, while distribution costs, especially fuel, soared.

Interestingly, however, a committee of department heads had determined that, despite all these problems, the paper's statewide editions were not money-losers. But they are not significant money-makers either, apparently, and Edwards says it was time to make some "tough decisions," adding, "Clearly, the need is to be putting resources into our primary market." Those resources include a larger local news hole and five new editorial positions to help fill it. (Despite its reputation, the Register has never been a strong local paper. None of its fifteen Pulitzer Prizes was awarded for local reporting, for example, although its editors can point to the Pulitizer it won this year in the public service category. That prize grew out of a local story in which rape victim Nancy Ziegenmeyer allowed reporter Jane Schorer to use her name in telling the story of the crime and its aftermath.)

Both Overholser and Edwards have emphasized that Gannett did not mandate the Register's new philosophy. However, Edwards adds, "[Gannett] has the right to have a reasonable return on the $ 165 million they've spent."

Part of the price, it seems, is disappointment among some Register readers and journalists. "If the Register really is going to concentrate more on central Iowa local news, it will not be the great newspaper I looked forward to every day anyway, and I can probably live without it very well," wrote Rosalyn Smith of Sioux City, in a letter to the editor. Ken Fuson, who grew up dreaming of working for the Register, doesn't see the paper's absolute decline and fall on the horizon. But he wonders if the emphasis on profits will accelerate the process. "Newspapers are killing themselves," he says.

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