Jeff Morrison is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and the publisher of the Between Two Rivers newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at betweentworivers.substack.com and iowahighwayends.net.

Forty-three Iowa school districts held bond referendums on November 4. According to unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office, eighteen passed, fifteen had a majority in favor but not the required 60 percent supermajority, and ten failed to reach 50 percent. The middle category has five districts of all sizes—Cedar Rapids, Easton Valley, Hinton, Independence, and Sergeant Bluff-Luton—receiving more than 58 percent but less than 60 percent support.

The 43 districts voted on a combined $1,435,950,000 in general obligation bonds. (That includes Atlantic’s $22.5 million bond for school construction, which passed, but not its $18.5 million sales tax revenue bond for a multipurpose facility, which failed.)

Jeff Morrison is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and the publisher of the Between Two Rivers newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at betweentworivers.substack.com and iowahighwayends.net.

COVID-19 whacked the Iowa newspaper industry hard.

Between March 13 and June 15, 2020, a combined 30 days’ worth of issues across sixteen Iowa communities vanished.

However, 2019 had seen its own share of print reductions. Over the past six years, national and local publishers have made difficult decisions to reduce print pages or cease printing altogether. It didn’t matter whether they had newspapers nationwide or one paper in one town.

This timeline lays out the publishing changes that could be tracked down in Iowa newspapers between January 2019 and February 2025, either in decreasing frequency of multi-day papers or weeklies that were discontinued or merged. Dates were collected from news stories of the time, Advantage Preservation websites, and the Internet Archive. Some papers produce an “e-edition” that is like the print product, in the same format, on non-print days, and those are so noted. The online version of this newsletter may be updated for new information or unintentional omissions.