When The Des Moines Register isn’t firing its high-profile staffers, they’re quitting. David Yepsen, the Register‘s senior political columnist, is expected to leave to become the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, the paper reported. (The New York Times‘ political blog The Caucus sounds pretty convinced that that he is leaving journalism.)

It’s hard to blame Mr. Yepsen for leaving. The Iowa Public Television Iowa Press regular is 58; his employer, Gannett, is forcing the employees it hasn’t laid off to take unpaid furloughs; and, if you haven’t noticed, the journalism trade isn’t exactly a cheery place right now, what with 2,118 newspaper layoffs since the beginning of the year.

Sure, it’s a loss to the state and the craft: Mr. Yepsen had access to the Big Boys and Girls every four years when people cared what Iowans thought about politics and the intelligence and care to not abuse it. It’s sad to see a prominent journalist and native son of Iowa (Mr. Yepson was born in Jefferson) give up on both the trade and the state. (Update: Steve Buttry, editor of The Gazette and a former Register editor, has some kind things to say about Mr. Yepsen, too)

But here’s the thing: when Mr. Yepsen and hundreds of other smart, skilled reporters leaving journalism, they create openings for other smart, skilled journalists who want to help redefine journalism. And the people and institutions that will take those places are starting to crop up.

Yes, it’s a scary, terrifying, exciting time in the world of journalism, folks.

Sure the economy is in bad shape, and newspapers have been shedding jobs everywhere, but these were the first obvious newspaper layoffs in Iowa. Gannett has widely been blamed for turning the Register, a Pulitzer-winning, local-family-owned paper with state and national relevance, into one of the chain’s local newsletters that avoids controversy and regularly runs rewritten press releases.

On his blog, Rogue Columnist, Jon Talton argues that Gannett has been helping to bring this crisis on for years and, as a corporation, pushed American newspaper journalism to the brink it is at now.

Gannett also poisoned Wall Street for all publicly held newspaper companies. Its margins were far above, say, Knight Ridder. Never mind that Gannett didn’t really produce the same product. KR execs were obsessed with matching Gannett and terrified that The Street would punish them — again, the journalism suffered.

And while Gannett’s Information Center plan, for which the Register was a test site, helped the Des Moines organization improve its newsroom to the point where it was nationally recognized for its online journalism excellence, it didn’t do much for the chain’s actual journalism quality. And a Gannett executive Mr. Talton quotes agreed.

So besides the huge color weather map that now adorns the back of every newspaper’s A section, what has Gannett offered the newspaper industry that has been so good to it and its shareholders (to the tune of 40 percent profit margins even recently)? A business model that prevents news companys from caring about news quality instead of profits.