The Press: Iowa Formula

(See front cover)

When the Cowles family of Des Moines bought the Minneapolis Star last fortnight (TIME, June 24), they acquired the third and weakest newspaper in that community. To them that was no cause for discouragement. Their money-making Des Moines Register & Tribune, which today blankets Iowa like that State's own rich, black topsoil, was also third and weakest when Gardner Cowles Sr. picked it up 32 years ago.

Gardner Cowles was then 42, with six children and not much money. A small-town banker in Algona, in northern Iowa, he had taught school there, married one of the teachers, made a little money as a contractor in rural mail routes. For a while he edited a local weekly called the Advance. His great & good friend was the rival paper's editor. Harvey Ingham. In 1902 Editor Ingham went to Des Moines to edit the down-at-heel Register & Leader, persuaded his friend Cowles to buy the paper. Price: $300,000. What Mr. Cowles thought he was buying was a sheet with $160,000 debts, 33,000 circulation. When he discovered that the debts were $180,000, circulation less than 16,000, he was so disillusioned that he wanted to sell. Failing to find a buyer, he decided to go on, against the competition of the Capital and the Scripps-owned News.

Fetish. Deaf to the hoots of his advertising representatives. Publisher Cowles resolved to give out no circulation figures whatever until the Register had 25,000. Then & there he adopted a publishing formula which was to make him rich: He made Circulation a fetish. Hiring & firing one circulation manager after another, he finally took over the job himself. He found subscription accounts two, three, four years past due, weeded them out, put the paper on a cash-in-advance basis. On the theory that men & women are creatures of habit, he concentrated on the problem of getting the Register to them on time. Helped by his oldtime experience as an overland mail contractor. Publisher Cowles studied maps and railroad timetables, learned the location of every town and hamlet in Iowa, memorized the schedules of every train out of Des Moines. As the Register circulation machine began to work, a Register-habit grew steadily throughout the State. At the end of the first year the paper earned $9,000, has never failed to make money since. Circulation mounted to 25,000 in 1906, 50,000 in 1912.

In 1908 the Register gobbled the newly established Tribune. In 1924 Publisher Roy Wilson Howard (Scripps-Howard) visited Des Moines. asked Gardner Cowles ("G. C.") to call at his hotel. In an hour "G. C." had bought the Scripps-Howard News for $150,000. Three years later the Capital, owned by the late Senator Lafayette Young, gave up the battle and the Register & Tribune remained the only newspaper in Des Moines.