Newspapers Raise Awareness

Former Des Moines Register president, Michael Gartner, describing his conversation with former US Ambassador to Cambodia Kenneth M. Quinn about the situation in refugee camps in Southeast Asia in 1979.

And so he said, “What could the paper do?” And I said, “This is one of the functions of the editorial page of the newspaper is to raise awareness of an issue, to propose solutions, and sometimes to participate in those solutions.” And so during the course of the discussion we said, “You know, what do we need? Well, we need money, we need people, we need information, we need awareness.” And so I think I said, “Well, we will run a coupon every day on the editorial page which people can participate.” And I doubt that it ever had been done before probably at any newspaper.