Heist in Print: How Newspapers Sold Their Soul to Business Brigands

By Donald Kaul

It’s been a little more than 50 years since I first walked into the Des Moines Register newsroom to begin a career in journalism.

It was a beat-up scruffy place filled with beat-up scruffy people, almost all men. They worked in a big room lined with gray steel desks piled high with newspapers, stacks of books, notebooks, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. They wrote on manual, black typewriters. The phones, also black, had rotary dials.

This scene right out of The Front Page was a case of love at first sight. “This is my kind of place,” I told myself. And, as it turned out, I was right.

But the most important thing about that room was something you couldn’t see: an invisible wall that protected its inhabitants from interference from the business department. It meant that, if you had the facts on your side, you could annoy the rich and powerful of the city. The wall would protect you from retaliation.

The best newspapers in those days tended to be owned by long-time newspaper families. These owners viewed their papers as profit machines, certainly, but also as a public trust. These families supported the principle that news was news and business was business, and the two should not be confused.

It wasn’t a perfect arrangement. It would have been better, for example, to have had more women and people of color reporting and editing the news. But it worked pretty well for decades.

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