Well, it looks like the usual corporate ladder rearranging is happening today as the Des Moines Register hires Carolyn Washburn to be Editor.
As I mentioned before, the Register is a management training ground for newspaper editors within Gannett. You may think the Idaho Statesman is a Knight Ridder paper, but up until August of this year it was owned by Gannett. Gannett had owned the Idaho Statesman since 1971 and traded it in a swap with Knight Ridder at the beginning of August 2005. So Washburn is pure Gannett material through-and-through. The Statesman is a slightly smaller paper in terms of circulation (around 140,000 daily, 190,000 Sunday) than the Register. So this might be considered an step up for Washburn. Although, I believe the Rochester, NY paper where she was prior to the Statesman bigger circulation numbers than the Register.
This still leaves open my desire for more Iowans in the top leadership of the news side of the Register. With Carol Hunter as editorial page editor (a native of Kansas, but from all over) and the new editor Carolyn Washburn, we have no strong Iowa connections on at the helm of news (unless you count Dick Doak and Jerry Perkins).
In addition, newspapers need to start looking outside their own ranks if they want to tackle the problems they face (declining circulation, unhappy readers). People who’ve succeeded in the past in newspapers are part of the current problem. Please stop rewarding them with promotions.
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