Deseret News history

In the summer of 1854 the first issues of the News were published on "homemade paper" that was very thick, and grayish in color.<

The Deseret News was forced to move from Salt Lake City to Fillmore, Utah, during the armed conflicts of 1857–58.

On May 5, 1858 the first issue of the News with Fillmore City as the publication place appeared; issues would continue to be printed in both Fillmore and Parowan until September 1858 While in Fillmore, the press was kept in the basement of the Utah Territorial Statehouse.

The coming of the Pony Express to Utah in 1860 would bring changes to the paper, allowing news from the East to arrive to the Territory much faster.

In October 1861 the lines of the First Transcontinental Telegraph met in Salt Lake City, making the Pony Express obsolete, and bringing news to the Territory almost instantly.

On October 8, 1865 the News launched its semi-weekly edition, this allowed news to get out more quickly and allowed for more advertisements.

In November 1867, George Q. Cannon became the editor, and on the 21st of that month, the News published its first daily edition, which was published in the evening, and as such was named The Deseret Evening News.

Godbe and Harrison had earlier been readers and supporters of the News, but in the wake of their excommunication in 1869, both men came to loathe the News almost as much as they hated Young.

In 1870, the Mormon Tribune, later named The Salt Lake Tribune, was first printed, adding a new newspaper rival to the Salt Lake area.

In 1873, three Kansas businessmen purchased the Tribune, and for the next three decades, its pages took a darker, more starkly anti-Mormon turn.

The first university course in journalism was given at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1879–84.

Tensions cooled slightly between the rival newspapers when Charles Goodwin became the Tribune’s editor in 1880, at the same time Charles Penrose was running the News.

The mill began producing paper in April 1883, and was known as the Cottonwood Paper Mill.

On October 1, 1892, The Deseret News Company leased the News along with all the company's printing, bookbinding, and merchandising to the Cannon family.

On October 1, 1900 the George Q. Cannon & Sons bookstore was sold to the LDS Church, and renamed the Deseret News Bookstore.

Meanwhile, in 1901, the Tribune passed into the hands of United States Senator Thomas Kearns, who “eventually pushed the paper in less Mormon-antagonistic ways,” Turner said.

In 1912 Columbia University in New York City established the first graduate program in journalism, endowed by a grant from the New York City editor and publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

The daily, called the Deseret Evening News was renamed the Deseret News on June 15, 1920; the paper's 70th anniversary.

In April 1922 the paper received a license to officially operate a radio station, with call letters KZN (later changed to KSL). The station's first regular broadcast aired on May 6, 1922 in the form of a talk by then-LDS Church president Heber J. Grant.

In 1924 the station was sold to John Cope and his father, F.W. Cope, who formed the Radio Service Corporation of Utah.

On May 16, 1948 the News would deliver its first Sunday paper.

The joint operating agreement with the Tribune in 1952 had ended the paper's Sunday edition, but when the 30-year-old agreement was up for renewal, it was changed to allow the News to publish a Sunday morning edition and change its Saturday publication from an evening to morning paper.

Deseret News reporter Robert Mullins won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for local reporting "for his resourceful coverage of a murder and kidnapping at Dead Horse Point State Park".

The first Sunday morning edition of the News appeared January 16, 1983, and the paper has published a Sunday edition ever since.

The network also allowed users to access the paper's complete text along with archives back to April 1988, the Church News and the LDS Church Almanac.

Disclaimer: Information on this site was converted from a hard cover book published by University of Utah Press in 1994.

Installation of the Crossroads software—which was mailed on floppy disk to each subscriber beginning in February 1995—was required on each user's computer.

The newspaper moved into its newly constructed headquarters in on Regent Street downtown Salt Lake City in 1997.

The Newspaper Agency Corporation was renamed to MediaOne of Utah in 2007.

On April 13, 2008, Joseph A. Cannon announced in a front page editor's note that the name of the newspaper had been changed back to the Deseret News, although the News would continue to be published in the morning.

In 2010, the Deseret News moved its offices out of the Deseret News Building to the broadcast house in the Triad Center, so they could integrate with KSL's newsroom.

In May 2011, the Deseret News launched an expanded business section with Jordan Burke, formerly an editor with Bloomberg, as the business editor.

Utah is often portrayed as a political and cultural monolith, whose Latter-day Saint majority helped Mitt Romney hold Barack Obama to less than 25 percent of the state’s vote in the 2012 presidential election.

In 2013, for instance, the New York hedge fund that owned the Tribune sold half of the paper’s future revenue to the News for a quick profit, a move that forced the Tribune to lay off dozens of journalists and cut its budget.

In 2016, in a demonstration of his independence from the church, he funded a Tribune lawsuit against church-owned Brigham Young University that changed the way university campus police shared information with the press and won the paper its second Pulitzer Prize.