Tough questions for The Des Moines Register

Ralph Gross, a longtime resident of Des Moines, Iowa and a regular reader of its daily newspaper, The Des Moines Register, is extremely interested in the news and the way it is covered. For that reason, he became a member of the paper's Reader Advisory Board and quickly began questioning the paper's top editors, asking if they "had a plan in place to reestablish the preeminence of this newspaper." Gross served on the board for two years and maintains he kept getting evasive answers to some of his most pressing questions. Among them, why was there less coverage of local and state issues and investigative reporting? And more importantly, is "the paper's push for profits eroding its quality?"

With his questions unanswered and his frustration growing, Gross wrote an op-ed piece in which he expressed his views. The paper refused to run it. It instead appeared in a fall 2005 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.

The story was covered on yesterday's "Morning Edition" on NPR and the segment not only features Ralph Gross, but discusses the changes that have occurred since The Register's sale to Gannett in 1985 and the ever-present issue of declining newspaper readership.