Top editor of Des Moines Register dies

DES MOINES, Iowa, Aug. 27 (UPI) -- Kenneth MacDonald, an editor and publisher who helped guide the Des Moines (Iowa) Register for a half century, has died while recovering from a stroke. He was 98.

MacDonald died in West Des Moines, the Register reported Friday.

He was with the Register for 50 years, including 40 years as a top news executive, retiring in 1977.

Under MacDonald, 12 staff members won Pulitzer prizes, and at one point in the 1970s only one paper, the New York Times, owned more Pulitzers for national reporting than did the Register.

MacDonald was born and raised in Jefferson, where his father was a farmer-banker. While at the University of Iowa, he found himself involved in the student newspaper, the Daily Iowan. It was there that he became friends with Frank Eyerly, who later would be MacDonald's managing editor for nearly a quarter-century, and Richard Wilson, who was to become the Register's first full-time reporter in Washington and one of the paper's Pulitzer winners.

MacDonald is survived by a son, Stephen, of High Falls, N.Y. His wife, Helen, died in 2001. The burial, which had not been scheduled as of Thursday, will be private.