Officers and staff of the Deseret News report to an eight-person board that sets policy but is not involved in daily editing of the newspaper. The Deseret News is expected to pay its own way and make a profit, and it does. It is not subsidized by the church. When the Deseret News moved into a handsome new building in , it paid for it with funds from its own accumulated profits. Other newspapers in the United States are affiliated with churches, including the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor, which is owned by the Christian Science Church.
As editor of the Monitor for nine years and editor of the Deseret News for three and a half, I have not experienced any such pressure. During my tenure at the Monitor, no church official sought to generate a particular news story in the newspaper, or keep one out, or censor parts of one, or put a particular spin on one.
My experience at the Deseret News has been the same. Editorials, expressing the viewpoint of the paper, are in a different category from news coverage and are clearly identified on the opinion pages. Different newspapers handle their editorial pages in different ways. At some, owners introduce their views. At some, publishers play key roles in determining policy.
At some, leadership comes from the overall editor. At some, editors of the editorial pages run fiefdoms separate from the news pages and are not accountable to the overall editor.
At the Christian Science Monitor, editorials prepared by the paper's editorial writers were sent in advance of publication to a designated liaison on the church's five-person board of directors. Occasionally there was some discussion about them. Sometimes there might be minor changes agreed upon by the editor and the board member.
At the Deseret News, the procedure is almost identical. An editorial board meets each morning to decide what topics will be selected and what the general theme of the newspaper's comment upon them will be. The board is made up of the editor, managing editor and assistant managing editor, and the three editorial writers. No church official sits on that board or is party to the discussion. Somehow we hear some of our values in Sean Hannity, but it feels angry and polemic.
By staying away from an explicit focus on its own religion, Gilbert said Deseret News hopes to create a broad dedicated readership. The Boston Globe, for example, plans to launch a site focused on Catholic coverage. Gilbert, a former Harvard Business School professor, is known for his work around Christensenian disruption theory; you can see him talking about his work at an event here at the Nieman Foundation last year:.
In , it launched a weekly national print edition, and its success — with subscribers in all 50 states — hastened the launch of the standalone national website. It also syndicates its content to more than different publications around the United States, Gilbert said. The growth has been received well by advertisers, and Deseret has been able to staff up to launch the nationally focused site.
Print classified revenue plummeted 70 percent. Deseret News slashed costs by 42 percent, and in August , it laid off 85 staffers. Here at the Lab, Jonathan Stray got into elements of the national strategy — including the launch of a family-friendly movie guide — back in The rollout of the site and the feature was timed for Passover, which starts Monday at sundown, and Holy Week, which culminates with Easter on April The site will feature original content, cross-posted on the Deseret News local site, but it will also feature plenty of aggregated content as well.
Despite the conservative editorial leanings of the main newspaper, Gilbert said the national site would not take political stances. For instance, Last month, the site published a story on a Pew Research Center study that showed an increase in acceptance of same-sex marriage by black Protestants.
Part of that national move is partnerships. He said he was in discussions with two organizations about partnerships, but said nothing was finalized. Cite this article Hide citations. Lichterman, Joseph.
The church-owned Deseret News considers you a growth market. Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 14 Apr. Lichterman, J. Religious but not Mormon? Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified April 14, Accessed November 11, The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.
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