Even by the tumultuous standards of the newspaper industry, The Salt Lake Tribune has turned in a perils-of-Pauline decade. Paul Huntsman and his wealthy Utah family rescued the paper, buying it in 2016 at a time of great financial stress. Punishing operating losses continued, and Huntsman covered them, sometimes from his own pocket.
Before long, he had decided the Tribune should morph from for-profit to nonprofit status — to meet his family’s goals of keeping an independent voice in the market, with profits secondary if they could be achieved.
Deep staff cuts were needed at the end of 2018 — among them 34 newsroom positions, reducing the staff by more than a third. In late 2019, the Internal Revenue Service approved the Tribune’s switch to nonprofit status — just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, limiting the transition’s rollout, especially plans for community outreach meetings.
The years since have seen slow but steady improvement. Huntsman hired a strong executive editor, Lauren Gustus, who has since been promoted to CEO, as well. An 11-person board, all with local ties, owns and runs the outlet. Expansion is in the works.
Altogether, it makes the Tribune something of a billboard for converting to the nonprofit model — though the transition remains a complex, labor-intensive process that few newspapers have undertaken.
Big lingering questions remain. What is the best path to sustainability? How to make good on the mission of putting community service ahead of profit?
Gustus and her board have decided on a strategy that sounds a little out there. If a special campaign being conducted this year raises $1 million, the Tribune’s digital site will flip from paywall-protected to free. Since a key goal is to cover news from all parts of the community, Gustus told me, “Why limit access to those who can pay for it?”
“You’ve got to place your chips somewhere,” she said. For the Tribune, the choice has been to make content free and expand into the rest of Utah.
Revisiting the Tribune’s approach after a skeptical story of mine five years ago, I found many markers of progress. Here are some of them:
That bold gamble. Sure, making the site free is a big step, Gustus said, but “we needed to decide where to place our chips.” Going free and expanding out into the rest of Utah ended up as the path chosen.
With five months of the year gone, Gustus and chairman Tom Love said, they have raised just about 40% of the $1 million. But they have other strong prospects and think the goal is attainable. Besides, if the special fundraising spills into 2026, a switchover could be delayed without any great damage.
An editor as CEO. Gustus, in her early 40s, had already advanced to executive editor of McClatchy’s flagship Sacramento Bee and regional editor of its large group of Western newspapers when Huntsman hired her. Her predecessor had not worked out; Gustus did well enough as top editor to be promoted to CEO after two years.
That’s about as direct a way as possible to break down the wall between the news side and the business side’s need to make money.
Transition to a community board. It took Huntsman some time to fill out his board, committed to an all-local membership. He accepted that some would know journalism, others not. It has been especially helpful, Gustus and Love told me, to have in the group Randy Dryer, a media lawyer turned University of Utah professor, to help with legal matters.
With recently retired advertising executive Love installed, Huntsman removed himself in early 2024 from any association with the Tribune and returned to his day job managing the family’s investments. (He declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Sorting out two thorny business issues. As Huntsman took over, the Tribune was exiting a joint operating agreement with the Deseret News, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The increasingly rare JOA structure is meant to maintain two editorial voices in a market while combining business functions for efficiency. After the split, the Tribune had no advertising department of its own, starting nearly from scratch on a key revenue function and other business infrastructure.
Also, the Internal Revenue Service had been frustratingly vague through the years about approving nonprofit status for newspaper outlets. The Tribune hired attorney Meghan Biss, formerly an IRS executive, who cleared the way for the Tribune’s conversions and others who later chose to follow that path.
Radical transparency. Gustus writes a monthly editor’s letter to readers and publishes an annual report in July — written last year by Andy Larsen, a sports reporter and Salt Lake NewsGuild committee member. Last year’s edition previewed the coming push to make digital content free, formally confirmed at a banquet event in November.
The report has an abundance of financial information, including charts and graphs on revenue (about $15 million in 2023) and progress toward break-even. There is also a discussion of a changing income mix. It reveals the average salary of the Tribune’s 60 news staffers ($66,539).
This sort of disclosure is a best practice from the biggest of the nonprofits, like ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and durable smaller ones like VTDigger and MinnPost. It adds up to square shooting when asking potential donors/readers for contributions.
Revenue mix. The Tribune’s report also discusses the complicated mix of where money comes from and how that may change. Typically (but not always), bigger foundation grants taper off year-to-year and earned revenue rises.
Gustus told me last week that the 2025 split so far was 33% philanthropy and small donors, 26% advertising and sponsorships, 35% circulation and the rest miscellaneous.
Under the paywall-to-free plan, reader revenue will shrink as a percentage but not disappear entirely. Subscriptions to a twice-a-week print product are falling, but still contribute. The rates are a modest $312 per year, an amount not likely to run off that portion of the readership, as often do the $1,000-plus costs at many chain papers. A premium digital level will remain and be expanded with tiers. The big idea, though, is to convert subscribers to donors, making the case that the Tribune deserves voluntary support.
Striking a balance on Latter-day Saints coverage. Dating back to its founding in the 1870s, the Tribune’s hallmark has been independence from the church. Early on, the Tribune was vicious, attacking church founder Brigham Young in his obituary as “illiterate” and “singularly illogical.” The tone is more civil now. The town splits roughly 50-50 Mormon and not. The Tribune remains the secular paper covering the church extensively and candidly — and taking on tough investigative projects now and then.
A notable example, which won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 2017, exposed mistreatment of sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University, who often faced grilling on whether they had violated an honor code. The yearslong project spanned the periods before and after the Huntsman acquisition. “It was expensive to do,” senior managing editor Sheila McCann recalled. “Credit to Paul, he supported it and paid for it.”
The overall approach to covering the church, Gustus said, is “not too little, not too much.”
While the church has $56 billion in assets, competition with the Deseret News is no longer much of a factor. The News is only one of many Latter-day Saints media brands and, in recent years, the church’s focus has been on expanding its reach to a national and international Mormon audience.
Robust opinion content. The Tribune is throwing itself behind an industry trend to rebalance opinion content with a tilt to many more pieces from readers. The Voices effort is a big enough priority to have its own editor, Sara Weber. Gustus said the hope is to get past overreliance on the usual suspects among contributors, like politicians, academics and agency heads. So the Tribune will provide a lot of writing help if needed, she continued, for someone like “a coal miner who had lost his legs in an accident.” Video is another option if that’s the easiest way for a contributor to have their say.
The Voices effort doesn’t mean the Tribune has dropped its institutional editorials, as many other newspaper outlets have. Longtime editorial page editor and writer George Pyle is semi-retired but produces one or two unsigned editorials a week. Another longtimer is editorial cartoonist Pat Begley, still going strong at a time when many much bigger papers have shed their own editorial cartoons in favor of collections from the shrinking number left elsewhere.
Check the Tribune site’s opinions section any day and you should see its small staff serving up a lot of inviting work.
Growing statewide with partnerships. Gustus said reaching out to the rest of Utah is a work in progress, but the Tribune is already building its presence aggressively. It has launched a pair of news collaboratives, whose work has included an exposé of the state’s “troubled teen” industry, a joint project with PBS. It acquired (for free) The Times-Independent, serving the tiny community of Moab 234 miles away in Eastern Utah near Arches National Park, then converted it to a nonprofit and made both its site and a weekly print version free. The Tribune is beginning to build relationships with university journalism programs, in part to tap into student talent for content.
All this, Gustus said, is to promote “a free flow of information” through the state as well as make the Tribune’s coverage of Salt Lake City free.
Replenishing foundation support — success breeds more success. As nonprofit outlets have proliferated, a frequent pinch that occurs when startup grants expire and are not renewed has become a common and continuous problem. Fortunately, another factor often kicks in — foundations like to direct money to outlets with a strong track record where they can most expect impact.
So it was a coup of sorts when the Tribune was included last year in the first cohort of the Knight Growth Challenge Fund. The program aims to facilitate geographic expansion for stable and successful outlets. Knight is splitting $5.4 million, supplemented by consulting from the top-of-the-line Blue Engine Group led by veteran executive Tim Griggs, among six recipients. The Tribune is in the fast company of Louisiana’s Advocate group; The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina; The Assembly in North Carolina; Spotlight PA; and Cityside, just east of San Francisco.
More of that kind of support is in the works.
Avoiding complacency. Despite the Tribune’s successes, Gustus said, “We haven’t got everything figured out.” At a strategic level, there is more to be done in creating a civic community and plugging into it.
A bump in the road during the Huntsman years was that he chose to be an owner with frequent suggestions about news coverage, especially when his brother Jon ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2020. Some issues of that sort remain with lay members of the board, Gustus said, needing to explain to them that journalists bridle against “anything that looks like interference. … It’s on me to fix that.”
Growth as a tonic. Board chairman Tom Love made a point of saying that a highlight of 2025. Is adding six new positions — three journalists and three on the business side. The journalists I spoke with — managing editor McCann, investigative reporter Jessica Schreifels, and union representative Larsen — all said that even that modest staff growth seems proof positive of a turnaround.
McCann summed it up: The dialogue with audience has shown, she said, that “hard news — the watchdog journalism we have been doing for decades — is what people like to read. … Industrywide, I see outlets that won’t be here, but I’m totally optimistic for us.”
Correction (Thursday, May 29, 4:10 p.m.): The Growth Challenge Fund is led by Knight. Google is not involved.
