Why The Iowa Mercury is staying rural

The HUB 712 is a business incubator in downtown Carroll. It is the home of The Iowa Mercury.

The suburbs of Des Moines are encroaching into rural Iowa at a breakneck pace.

It's headspinning, really.

What I see as I drive several times a week from Carroll in western Iowa to Des Moines is nothing short of a deconstruction of Iowa as I know it as the dizzying speed of growth continues in Grimes and Waukee — at the expense of rural Iowa.

It should be the biggest issue in rural Iowa: Why is so much of the wealth and economic health, the money, the people, optimism itself, being scooped from rural Iowa and segregated in the Des Moines sprawl and Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridors?

Our boots-and-blue jeans gal, Governor Kim Reynolds, (she described herself that way to me once) who wins elections on pure cultural connectivity, primitive ties, with no deliverables for us here in the countryside, has presided over this shift.

The Iowa Mercury, the Substack column approaching 2,000 subscribers, is developed right here in rural Iowa — and The Iowa Mercury is intent on staying on rural Iowa.

For 93 years our family published the Carroll Daily Times Herald (in the later years, the 2-day-a-week Carroll Times Herald).

A young Douglas Burns is being held by his Uncle James B. Wilson as his grandfather, James W. Wilson, watches the press begin to roll at the family newspaper in the mid-1970s.

After economics and other factors, a constellation of reasons, forced our family out, I started The Iowa Mercury to continue coverage of rural Iowa, with a focus, yes, on western Iowa, but a reach into more of rural Iowa, more of the full state.

The Iowa Mercury is based in the HUB 712, a former post office building in the heart of downtown Carroll. It's a business incubator with a drone operation and tele-mental-health company co-located here.

I'm located in the old postmaster's office — giving me the distinction of having been in the newspaper publisher's office behind my grandfather and uncle’s Army surplus desk, and now here, in this historic space.

I want to keep telling the stories of rural Iowa. I want to stay in rural Iowa.

Metro Democrats think I'm too conservative. My neighbors here in rural Iowa think I'm too liberal.

In fact, I'm an unpredictable moderate independent who in the span of minutes on any given day fields texts from Republicans and Democrats.

Most of all, I don't prejudge stories and I don't tie my ego up with my views. Yes, I have confidence in my ideas, but I maintain the ability to change my mind, and correct mistakes.

Mainly, I know the people and towns of rural Iowa, and I'd like to keep reporting and providing perspectives from here.

So please consider upgrading from a free subscriber to a paid one.

Or, if you are so inspired, donate more to help keep The Iowa Mercury right here in Carroll, Iowa.

About The Iowa Mercury

(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )