The writing has been on the wall or, more accurately, on the digital screen for years.
On Jan. 1, Salt Lake City will become yet another American city without a daily print newspaper.
The Salt Lake Tribune will be online-only six days a week, with a print Sunday edition. The LDS Church-owned Deseret News will also move online daily, with a single weekly print edition and a monthly magazine.
According to University of North Carolina media analyst Penelope Muse Abernathy, in just the past three years more than 300 print newspapers have closed or — like The Tribune and Deseret News — converted to a mostly online format. What this means for Salt Lake City’s long history of print journalism is still unclear, particularly if former readers fail to make the digital turn.
In 1920, when with a population of only 118,000, Salt Lake City boasted five daily newspapers as well as dozens of lively weeklies, including the African American Broad Ax and a number of foreign language publications. But by 1952, when the afternoon Salt Lake Telegram folded, only The Tribune and Deseret News remained.
With the rise of the internet, social media and usually free online news aggregations, the demand for paper editions ebbed. Even before the Jan. 1 conversion to mostly digital, both surviving Salt Lake City dailies already had many more online readers than print subscribers.
But digitization still represents a potentially disruptive event for many of us — especially older people — who appreciate the tactile pleasure of a daily paper.
Long gone are the days when newspapers competed to record even the smallest events. A detailed article in the 1916 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, for example, reported that my grandmother wore a “bridal gown of white satin with trimmings of silver lace and pearls” when she married my grandfather as the Hawaiian Orchestra played the Lohengrin bridal chorus in Garfield, a copper mining suburb that, like the newspaper, no longer exists.
A 1950 article in the afternoon Salt Lake Telegram reported that my second-cousin Richard Tempest pitched a one-hitter in the Telegram-Parks Kids League, but still lost 8-5 because he gave up too many walks.
So much of that detail is gone. What remains, however, is still very important to maintaining an informed community. Despite severe cutbacks in staff, both the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune — arguably the best daily newspaper in the Mountain West — and the Deseret News — known for its outstanding environmental coverage — are excellent news providers and government watchdogs. The city is lucky to have them.
The changes will require all of us to reconsider our part in supporting and funding news institutions. The days of paying for a single subscription and adding a Christmas tip for the delivery kid are over. The business model built on print advertising has been shattered and the relative pennies made from online advertising will never bridge the gap.
The first step to keeping your local newspaper is the most obvious: subscribe. Buy an online subscription or a combination online-and-Sunday-print edition.
For those who can afford it, support also may mean contributing directly to your newspaper in the same way that you give to your public radio and public television broadcasters. In order to attract this kind of financial support, The Salt Lake Tribune this year took the extraordinary step of becoming a nonprofit corporation so that it can seek tax-deductible charitable donations.
In other cases, shoring up your local newspaper includes contributing to one of the nonprofit news organizations that provide resources, reporting, and content to help fill the gaps left by the decline in traditional newspaper revenue.
The Tribune benefits from collaborations with several of these nonprofits. The nonprofit Report for America, for example, pays half the salary of the excellent Tribune reporter Zak Podmore, who covers southeastern Utah from his base in San Juan County. The nonprofit Salt Lake-based Utah Investigative Journalism Project (I’m on its board of directors) regularly collaborates with The Tribune, Deseret News and other newspapers on investigative stories. The Tribune also participates in the nonprofit NewsMatch fundraising effort, and benefits from its membership the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Rone Tempest is a former national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who now lives in Salt Lake City.
