Mormon Media Makeover: Deseret News Slashes 43% of Editorial Staff

Image via Wikipedia
The Deseret News, Utah's oldest continually publishing daily newspaper, this week cut 57 full-time and 28 part-time staffers, which constitutes 43 percent of its workforce,  including Editor Joe Cannon and Publisher Jim Wall.


According to reports in Editor & Publisher, rival Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News itself, the News' newsroom staff will be consolidated with its sister news operations at KSL television and radio. The move goes beyond re-assigning beat coverage and shifting emphasis from print to digital news. 

The Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune jointly operate MediaOne of Utah (presumably, "Mutual of Utah" sounded too much like an insurance co.), which handles advertising, distribution and printing for both papers, which are editorially independent. The News will create a new editorial advisory board, and has identified its first member--Harvard Business School Prof. Clayton M. Christensen--with an eye toward expanding the paper's scope and influence nationally. Also, the paper will introduce Deseret Connect, a web of non-staff reporters and editors to complement the editorial staff remaining in the newsroom. Reporters will focus on six areas of coverage in the new multimedia enterprise: family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in the media, and faith in the community.


The Deseret News is a subsidiary of the Deseret Management Corp., a for-profit entity owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (that's the Mormons, folks).