It\u2019s this type of unique attention that has long made Register reporters the envy of their peers. While national reporters parachuting into Dubuque or Boone have all the perks\u2014big expense accounts, cable news hits, invitations to screenings in New York and black-tie dinners in Washington\u2014rarely can they compete with the access given to the local journalists making half the salary with a fraction of the Twitter followers.<\/p>\n
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\u201cYou always got singled out for special treatment,\u201d recalls David Yepsen, the legendary Iowa journalist whose Register<\/i> career stretched from 1974 to 2009, including an 11-year run as the paper\u2019s chief politics reporter. \u201cThe smart campaigns knew to take care of the local press corps, which could easily get overlooked. There\u2019s a lot of 20-something staffers on these campaigns, they\u2019re very self-important and inexperienced, and they think it\u2019s more important to take care of NBC News.\u201d<\/p>\n
His favorite anecdote dates back to 1984, when the state party chairman tried explaining to a national correspondent why the campaigns paid so much attention to Yepsen. \u201cHe\u2019s a Cinderella story,\u201d the party boss said of the Register<\/i> reporter. \u201cThey fawn over him nonstop until the clock strikes caucus day, and then he turns into a pumpkin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, it\u2019s a great ride while it lasts, and many of Yepsen\u2019s successors have parlayed it into something more. Jeff Zeleny, a Register<\/i> alumnus who reported on the 2000 caucuses, later became a New York Times<\/i>\u2019 top political reporter before ultimately joining CNN, where he\u2019s now the senior White House correspondent. Tom Beaumont, who led the Register<\/i>\u2019s caucus coverage in 2004 and 2008, jumped to The Associated Press, where he\u2019s now a national correspondent. And Jennifer Jacobs, the chief politics reporter for the 2012 and 2016 cycles, now covers the White House for Bloomberg and regularly breaks news on the Trump beat.<\/p>\n\n
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After the Heartland Forum, Des Moines Register reporter Brianne Pfannenstiel interviewed Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan. \u201cYou always got singled out for special treatment,\u201d recalls David Yepsen about working a the Des Moines Register. \u201cThe smart campaigns knew to take care of the local press corps.” | KC McGinnis for Politico Magazine<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\nToday, these proverbial big shoes are being filled by Brianne Pfannenstiel, a 30–<\/b>year-old Kansas native who took over as chief politics reporter last June. It was a rapid ascent: At this point four years ago, she was struggling just to wrap her head around the scope of the caucuses. Pfannenstiel recalls walking into her first major presidential cattle call, an agriculture summit in the spring of 2015, and being overwhelmed\u2014not by the candidates and the staffers and the voters, but by \u201cthe horde of national reporters, the circus of media, descending on the state for what was a relatively small event \u2026 with a bunch of people who may or may not run for president.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pfannenstiel got used to the circus. After her initial assignment, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, flamed out that fall, she was transferred to the Trump beat. The excitement of covering the unlikely GOP front-runner, for some reporters, might have been dampened by the ban on gaining press access to his events. But Pfannenstiel was undeterred. She began registering for Trump rallies as a member of the public, waiting in lines for two or three hours to gain general admission. Pfannenstiel credits this experience\u2014the intimate \u201cfocus groups\u201d she held with Trump voters standing in those lines\u2014with guiding her reportage on his appeal to elements of the electorate that were not widely understood. It also improved her understanding of the distrust many conservatives feel for the mainstream media: The Register<\/i> might seem folksy to coastal commentators, but to conservative rural Iowans it\u2019s an arm of the militant left.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, even while covering a hostile campaign, Pfannenstiel says she experienced that \u201cspecial treatment\u201d Yepsen describes. Trump aides knew that she entered events via general admission and wrote about them from the cheap seats. Not only did they turn a blind eye, but one campaign official actually sneaked Pfannenstiel into a rally when he saw the line was too long for her to make it inside.<\/p>\n
In this sense, Pfannenstiel shares a common bond with her Register<\/i> ancestors, the privilege of representing the largest media platform in the state and offering candidates a direct line to its readers. And yet, almost everything else has changed: the nationalized state of campaigning, the tribalized consumption of information, the monetized disruption of media. That Trump won the presidency by largely stiff-arming the local press, in Iowa and elsewhere, suggests that social media posts and viral videos are influencing more voters than exclusive interviews and editorials. That Beto O\u2019Rourke launched his campaign on the cover of Vanity Fair<\/i>, rather than above the fold of the Des Moines Register<\/i>, suggests a bet on macro-momentum over micro-appeal. That Pfannenstiel was promoted to the biggest reporting gig in Iowa after her millennial-aged predecessor left journalism for a job in Democratic politics suggests that maybe, for a young journalist, being chief politics reporter for the Register<\/i> doesn\u2019t guarantee the blindingly bright future it once did.<\/p>\n\n
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\u201cWhat I tell them some of my old colleagues is, you can\u2019t worry about the specter of Denver. You just have to worry about your own job and the story you\u2019re working on,\u201d says David Yepsen, a journalist who worked at the Register from 1974 to 2009. \u201cNewspapers have folded, the mass media has been fractured into niches, and that\u2019s all a reporter there can do now: write good stuff and bust their ass.\u201d | KC McGinnis for Politico Magazine<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\nPfannenstiel concedes that her new role is punishing\u2014too many candidates, too few reporters, not enough hours in the day. But she\u2019s having too much fun to dwell on the downsides.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven those times when you\u2019re grumpy and have been on the road all day and nothing is going right, you still just pinch yourself and say, \u2018Wow, they pay me to do this,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAs some of our senior reporters have told me, it\u2019s like sitting in the front row of history.\u201d<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Carol Hunter is thinking about a different kind of history.<\/b><\/p>\n
Despite her journalistic bona fides and the confidence she clearly enjoys among her staff, it doesn\u2019t escape Hunter that people like her are considered prehistoric in today\u2019s media ecosystem\u2014fossils from a time before the internet, before smartphones, before push alerts and direct messages and live-streaming.<\/p>\n
She isn\u2019t going to run the Des Moines Register<\/i> forever. And while Hunter is openly obsessive about improving the paper\u2019s reporting today\u2014having authored lengthy autopsies of its 2012 and 2016 coverage, the lessons of which are being pounded into the newsroom\u2019s collective subconscious\u2014she is increasingly preoccupied with the long-term state of the publication.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of it might be being a farmer\u2019s daughter, but I think a lot about stewardship,\u201d Hunter says. \u201cMy father was a conservationist, and you always try to leave the land better than how you found it. I\u2019m a short-term steward. I want to leave the paper in better shape than when I came.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a funny thing, though: Sometimes even the most careful stewardship can\u2019t account for the changing times. Hunter\u2019s father nurtured his parcel in southeast Kansas, yielding decades\u2019 worth of corn, wheat and soybeans. But his children, baby boomers with dreams beyond the homestead, all went off to college and earned degrees. The legacy of his land reached its natural conclusion. The family farm was sold.<\/p>\n
Hunter realizes that her newspaper might be gobbled up by the Wall Street vultures; that it might be drastically downsized; that next time, she could be the one receiving a pink slip rather than giving it. But stewardship is limited to one\u2019s sphere of control\u2014and none of those things fall within hers.<\/p>\n
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As she steers the ship, Hunter believes the surest way to find smooth waters is by \u201cholding to the fundamentals\u2014that our work has to be accurate, it has to be clear and it has to be really compelling.\u201d She adds, \u201cI\u2019ve said for a long time, our competition isn\u2019t the television station in town. It\u2019s not POLITICO. It\u2019s time. Are we putting out something so compelling that people feel like they have to make it part of their day?\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a Catch-22, of course, because it\u2019s hard to be accurate with fewer editors, it\u2019s hard to be compelling with fewer reporters, and yet failures on this front contribute to declining revenue that prompt the cuts themselves. Not everyone seems to grasp the dilemma. Staffers at the Denver Post<\/i> led an insurrection against the MNG overlords on the merits of this very argument, penning editorials with the hedge fund\u2019s ink, pleading for a sale to other owners who might allow the newsroom a chance to escape its death spiral. These appeals were answered with more layoffs.<\/p>\n
Although Gannett is publicly resisting MNG\u2019s attempted annexation, there is a feeling among some in the company and many in the media industry that it\u2019s a fait accompli. Even with its deep, well-documented cuts to newsroom budgets, Gannett has struggled to make its papers profitable. Sooner or later, by some combination of fiduciary responsibility and corporate exasperation, it might see no choice but to sell some of its highest-profile properties to someone willing to make far deeper cuts.<\/b>(Gannett declined to comment on the impending acquisition; MNG did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cWhat I tell them some of my old colleagues is, you can\u2019t worry about the specter of Denver. You just have to worry about your own job and the story you\u2019re working on,\u201d Yepsen says. \u201cNewspapers have folded, the mass media has been fractured into niches, and that\u2019s all a reporter there can do now: write good stuff and bust their ass. Anybody left in American journalism today knows they could be out tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps not coincidentally, this outlook is shared by Tony Leys, the newspaper\u2019s closest thing to a grizzled old-timer.<\/p>\n
Leys is sanguine about the situation at hand\u2014\u201cI\u2019m not excited about them buying us,\u201d he shrugs\u2014in part because he\u2019s stopped paying attention. Instead, he\u2019s pouring himself into his twin beats and trying to savor the ride he\u2019s on, all while adopting a renewed commitment to mentoring younger colleagues. The politics editor, Stassen-Berger, holds regular \u201cboot camps\u201d for her reporters, training the political neophytes on how to cover the caucuses. Leys is somewhat less formal with his tutelage. He warns them about social media (\u201cTwitter rewards smart-asses, and this profession attracts smart-asses, myself included.\u201d). He advises them on best practices for reporting from rallies (tape rolling, notebook out, eyes on the crowd to gauge reactions and potential interviewees). He hands down the lessons, campaign lore and institutional knowledge he learned from the Register<\/i> veterans that came before him.<\/p>\n
This, Leys says, has proven just as rewarding as the reporting itself. \u201cSometimes I hear the old, retired journalists crabbing about \u2018the kids these days,\u2019 and I\u2019m like, you\u2019ve gotta be kidding me,\u201d he says, shaking his head. \u201cThese kids are running circles around what we did at their age. There\u2019s less hand-holding, there\u2019s fewer editors, they\u2019ve having to do a lot more than we did and cover a lot more ground. And a lot of them are doing a really great job.\u201d<\/p>\n
This gives Leys a certain peace about the future, whatever it might bring. When he arrived at the Des Moines Register<\/i> as an intern in 1988, freshly graduated from the University of Wisconsin, he wasn\u2019t sure how long it would last. Three decades later, he\u2019s still waiting to be told it\u2019s time to go.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis job is so interesting. It can be very hard, and it can be draining. But I love it,\u201d Leys says. \u201cSo, if the sidewalk opens and I lose this job\u2014which could happen\u2014I\u2019ll go find something else to do. And I\u2019ll be good at it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent at <\/i>Politico Magazine<\/span>.<\/p>\nPolitico Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Inside the Shrinking Newsroom of the Paper That Shapes the Primaries, Politico Magazine The 2020 presidential campaign in the US is in full swing–and has been since the day after the mid-term elections in November 2018. There’s a lot wrong with that. And a lot to it. We’ve commented a lot about this devolution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7083"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7091,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7083\/revisions\/7091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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