Des Moines Register Editor Carolyn Washburn Is Great At Rearranging Desks

Via a longtime reader, this is from the Washington Post:

Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper chain, is radically changing the way its papers gather and present news by incorporating elements of reader-created "citizen journalism," mining online community discussions for stories and creating Internet databases of calendar listings and other non-news utilities...

At Gannett's Des Moines Register, for example, editor Carolyn Washburn has moved desks to re-organize her newsroom. She created a Data Desk to build reader-searchable databases on topics from restaurant listings to a recent mumps outbreak.

Moved desks.

Heh.

Typical Gannettoid response.

Here's a related piece from the Register's web site that went up last night:

The Des Moines Register has called itself “The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon" for more than 75 years. We have a tradition of innovation in the newspaper industry. We innovated in how we distributed the news...

Our reporters and columnists with special expertise are blogging several times a week to share their commentary as news happens and to allow you to talk with them and other readers who respond. We have about 40 bloggers at DesMoinesRegister.com and another 27 at dmjuice.com – a mix of staff and community members -- so there is a ton of conversation about a great array of topics...

We are not less committed to doing our own reporting. Our reporters will play their watchdog role in covering local government. They’ll cover institutions and people no one else in the community will consistently cover...

The Juice blogs sucked a year ago and they still sucked this past summer.

Even the regular columnists at the Register got lazy about keeping up their blogs.

Why, it wasn't that long ago when newspapers regarded bloggers as being "humorless, thin-skinned and have a grandiose sense of their own importance."

In fact, some newspaper columnists explained blogging to the masses in this way: "Perhaps you have not heard of blogs. The name derives from a combination of 'blather' and 'logorrhea.'"

Then came the warning from one newspaper reporter about how the public should "Know that if the information is coming from the mainstream media - the accredited reporters, broadcasters and photojournalists - they are following strict professional guidelines that the looser outlets don't require. The information has been verified, has been scrutinized by editors, has been fact-checked and proofed." and to ignore blogs.

The Des Moines Register continues to decide what is the news. If they don't want to cover anything except con artist David Oman's Earthpork press conferences and not offer any critical analysis of the project, so be it. Remember that it took the Register six days to mention Chet Culver's anti-Porkforest ad after a couple of other media outlets had covered it, and then it was only a quick paragraph or two in David Yepsen's column while he whined about mossback Iowa.

The Register occasionally does some excellent reporting, but overall the newspaper has been on the decline ever since the Cowles family sold it to Gannett in the 1980's. The last time the Register won a Pulitzer Prize was back in 1991 when Geneva Overholser was on a crusade to make it publicly acceptable for newspapers to out the names of rape victims. It also doesn't help that the Register's editorial board is comprised of all far-lefty and imported liberals and one moderate pseudo-RINO, an act of non-diversity that has turned a lot of Iowans off over the years.