“You’re right. I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in … 60 years.”— Charles Foster Kane
That’s the movies. In real life, it doesn’t quite work that way.
Even billionaires can’t keep pouring money into a publication just because, as Orson Welles’ most famous character also said, “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”
But, after a few rocky years, it wound up working better. Because an energetic young man with experience in the worlds of capitalism and philanthropy figured out how to save a newspaper.
I’m not sure how much fun it was for him.
Now The Tribune’s savior has walked away, having earned a rest and the thanks of everyone who knows how important a real newspaper is to any community. Without his efforts — his industry, not just his money — you probably wouldn’t be reading this newspaper now.
The Salt Lake Tribune was on the verge of collapse eight years ago when local businessman Paul Huntsman managed a deal, not just with its Wall Street hedge fund owners but also with The Tribune’s partner/competition, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The LDS-owned Deseret News and The Tribune were in a joint operating agreement (JOA). That’s an exemption to anti-trust laws that helps preserve two competing newsrooms and editorial pages in one town by letting them collaborate on printing, advertising and distribution.
The DNews had to agree if The Tribune was to be sold to a new owner. Efforts by some locals — including Paul Huntsman’s father, industrialist and philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr. — to buy the paper away from the vultures at Alden Global Capital were reportedly frustrated by a lack of cooperation from the News.
Many of us assumed that the LDS Church wanted The Tribune dead. That it wanted the Utah market to itself, both as a business and as a voice.
Well, maybe some folks on North Temple did want us out of the way. But not all of them.
And Paul, a member of the church and a networker supreme, kept knocking on doors until he found folks at LDS HQ who realized that the survival of both newspapers was good for, well, both newspapers. And for Utah.
Even with their sign-off, though, Huntsman found that a deal Alden and the LDS leadership had made some time before loomed as a poison pill.
Alden had sold its interest in the new printing plant the two newspapers owned to the News for a huge boodle of cash that was immediately siphoned off to Wall Street and never helped The Tribune. That deal also absurdly inflated the share of the joint operation’s profits that went to the News, leaving The Tribune incredibly cash poor just as the newspaper industry generally started circling the drain.
Huntsman the investor found that even sinking millions of his own dollars into The Tribune wasn’t cutting it.
That led to a 2018 layoff of more than a third of the newspaper’s 90 employees and shifting from a seven-days-a-week print schedule to Sundays only, with most of the focus going where our audience is — online. (We’ve since added back a midweek print edition.)
So Huntsman the philanthropist stepped up. It’s something he knows about, what with his family being behind Huntsman Cancer Institute, among other projects. He did the huge amount of research, and spent the money, necessary to shift The Tribune to a tax-exempt nonprofit. It would go forward with donations, large and small, local and national, from people and institutions who wanted the newspaper to thrive.
He also let the JOA lapse, so we wouldn’t have to share what revenue we did have with anyone.
More than some other billionaire-rescued newspapers — The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times — the nonprofit Tribune is now healthy and sustainable. Staff is being restored. In-depth, investigative journalism is thriving. We remain “Utah’s Independent Voice,” watchdogging official Utah like no one else and carrying a wide range of opinion columns and letters.
Paul Huntsman never made a dime on The Tribune. He was sometimes frustrated by what he saw as excessive wokeness in our reporting and opining and wished we’d be more aggressive in our coverage of what he saw as government corruption, especially during the COVID pandemic.
But our benefactor has also learned a lot about journalism. He has recently started another newspaper in Coronado, California, and his appetite for filing Freedom of Information Act requests has been properly whetted.
Thank you, Paul. And keep at it.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, has probably seen “Citizen Kane” five times.
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