Before Salt Lake City became a two-paper town, the scrappy Evening Telegram prided itself on being "the people's" news. 

• Utah Historical Society
• Launched in 1902, the Salt Lake Telegram published for five decades before falling victim to the business machinations of The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News.

To the board of directors governing the Salt Lake Telegram, August 30, 1952 must have been a day of mixed emotions.

"We sincerely appreciate the loyalty of Telegram readers and advertisers, and the support that they have given our staff," the board announced in the paper's final edition. "To the public of Salt Lake City, to Telegram advertisers, and to the staff of the Salt Lake Telegram, our sincere thanks."

After publishing for 50 years—through two name changes and three transfers of ownership—it was time for the Telegram to say goodbye. This holdout in a decades-long competition between Utah's once-multitudinous daily newspapers would be joining its fellow departed atop the Great Newsrack in the Sky, while the remaining combatants—The Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News—were pooling their resources and building a sanctioned duopoly to dominate the local market.

Still, the Telegram's leadership remained hopeful for the future.

"We have every confidence that evening newspaper readers of this area will continue to receive the best of service and a product of highest quality."

A page had turned with the loss of this scrappy newspaper, the consequences of which would play out across the decades that followed.

What was the Telegram? And what can its story tell about the journalism profession in days of misinformation, billionaire acquisitions and mass layoffs? After City Weekly staff kept coming across—and relying on—clippings from the now-departed Telegram in their research of the Wasatch Front's past, we thought it was time to report on the reporting, and retrace the news of the news.

In the Beginning was the Word ...
With printing equipment having arrived in the Salt Lake Valley the year before, the first edition of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' then-weekly Deseret News was released in June of 1850. The News remained the lone journalistic voice in the territory for nearly a decade, when it was joined in 1858 by the Valley Tan, a weekly intended to serve the soldiers at Camp Floyd.

"The economic success of the Tan—or rather, the lack thereof—was part of the reason behind the vituperative, accusatory editorial stance its editors assumed against the Mormons," historian Richard Saunders wrote in 2000. "The Mormon newspaper ignored the Tan almost totally. This fact ultimately worked against the Mormons, for the Valley Tan was exchanged with newspapers, primarily military post sheets, throughout Colorado, California, and the East. Many of the non-Mormon newspapermen who later came to Utah had their first bitter taste of the intermountain West in the pages of the Valley Tan."

With battle lines drawn early, the Deseret News had won the first skirmish, but victory wouldn't last long.

Confrontations and accusations were played out again and again in the newspapers of Utah. Throughout the years, a plethora of journalistic start-ups joined the fight, each choosing sides according to the foremost social divides of the time: Mormon vs. non-Mormon; mining vs. agriculture; Republican vs. Democrat. Weeklies, dailies, monthlies and newsletters all jumped into the fray, some lasting months and others years.

By the turn of the 19th century, Salt Lake City had among its major dailies the Deseret News, The Salt Lake Tribune, the Evening Telegram, the Inter-Mountain Republican and the Salt Lake Herald, all brawling for dominion, yet at the same time losing money. Contractions and mergers loomed on the horizon for each of the participants.

The Herald was the first to merge, going from a venerable Democratic paper to a shill for the Republican Reed Smoot machine in its combination with the Inter-Mountain Republican before its ultimate demise in 1920.

According to O.N. Malmquist's The First 100 Years: A History of the Salt Lake Tribune (1972), the Deseret News was considered safe because of financial support from the LDS Church. And the same could be said for the Tribune with the deep pockets of mining magnate Thomas Kearns (1862-1918), who had purchased the paper in 1901.

"Despite all the claims of growing circulation and advertising volume," Malmquist observed, "the obvious fact was that the Salt Lake City newspaper structure was and had for some time been in an economic wringer which had forced the merger of the Herald and Inter-Mountain Republican and which was still threatening to squeeze the life out of one or more of the four survivors."

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• Utah Historical Society
• The Salt Lake Telegram was originally distributed as an evening paper for 3 cents per copy, and is credited with popularizing the use of a local or “split” section among Utah newspapers.

"The People's Paper"
An unlikely victor of the era, the Telegram began in January of 1902 with the purchase of the local Associated Press franchise from the Tribune by Cincinnati's William M. Butler, who was intent on starting his own evening paper in the Beehive State.

Calling itself "The People's Paper," the Telegram's editors rejoiced over its first few months of publication in an April 1902 announcement: "What the Salt Lake Evening Telegram has accomplished in the few weeks of its existence, both in growth of circulation and advertising patronage has never been equaled by any other newspaper enterprise launched in the Intermountain States."

The paper attributed its rapid circulation of 3,500 in a few weeks to its "expert journalists," its "experienced managers" and its "low price," at only three cents per copy.

It also was, apparently, rather feisty and innovative, as J. Cecil Alter noted in Early Utah Journalism (1938). Working against the prevailing custom of leaving the "Home News" to the back pages, the Telegram moved the local reporting to the front of its second section—colloquially known as "the split" among newshounds.

"This two-section plan 'clicked' with the public," Alter wrote, "and soon the other Salt Lake papers followed suit."

Another innovation involved the burgeoning field of radio. In May 1922, the Telegram's then-owner A.L. Fish and radio enthusiast Ira Kaar started one of the state's first commercial radio stations: KDYL. Kaar was fascinated with wireless telegraphy and at the time was studying at LDS High School in that field, while Fish was similarly intrigued by the radio stations of Pittsburgh.

"Fish, Kaar and one of Kaar's professors met at Kaar's home and mapped together a broadcasting plan that would give Salt Lake City its first broadcast news station," Carter Williams reported for KSL in 2019. "Once the ability to broadcast signals was completed, Fish offered his newspaper to formulate broadcast content from the home."

But despite its successes, the Telegram was always near margin and the financial strains of the stock market plunge in 1929 only made matters worse. While it secured bonds to continue operating, the Telegram's resources were nevertheless exhausted by the end of 1930.

Neither the Tribune nor the Deseret News were then too keen on the idea of buying the Telegram, as the Tribune had been financially strapped since the death of Kearns, and LDS Church president Heber J. Grant was reluctant to expand the church's business enterprises.

In the end, the Tribune went forward with purchasing the Telegram, combining staff and cutting costs by infusing the former with the skills of the latter. In addition to keeping its name and delivery time after the purchase, the Telegram retained its maverick personality, as could be seen in the closing hours of the Prohibition era.

On the day of the repeal of the 18th Amendment, Utah was set to be the 36th and deciding vote for ratification by the states. A Tribune reporter convinced the delegates that the vote should be delayed until evening, thus giving the morning-delivered Trib a breaking news story and an opportunity to participate in a nationwide radio hook-up.

This plan was "thwarted," however, by "staff members of the Telegram," according to Malmquist.

"Don Howard, Telegram news editor, contrived a fake news bulletin stating that Maine, scheduled to vote for repeal the following day, had decided to convene its convention and act immediately and thereby take the role of the deciding state," Malmquist explained. "The bulletin was shown to some of the Utah delegates who, in a panic, took the decisive action four hours earlier than planned," which placed Utah in a seat of notoriety and the Telegram ahead of the news.

Three's a Crowd
By the end of WWII, the dormant rivalry between the Deseret News and the Tribune took another turn under new leadership. Advertising was by then booming and people had money to subscribe to newspapers, but production costs zoomed upward while a paper shortage and newsprint rationing added to the difficulties.

Due to three Kearns family deaths, which necessitated the payment of taxes, the combined Tribune-Telegram operation was struggling—this despite earning 80 cents of every dollar spent on newspapers in the Salt Lake Valley.

Whether or not it was spurred on by the celebration of the state Centennial, the Deseret News launched a 1948 campaign to boost business. Substantial funds were earmarked from the LDS Church to pay for a campaign that included increased salaries, newspaper price cuts, and circulation drives within local LDS wards.

And in a one-two punch, ZCMI (then the Tribune's largest single advertiser) withdrew 13 weeks of ads from both the Tribune and the Telegram.

"Under the impact of the intensive drive of the News," Malmquist wrote, "retailers began giving more space to the News and less to the Telegram. Tribune-Telegram salesmen, trying to counter this trend, were told, in effect: 'The town doesn't need the Telegram. We could best be served if only the Tribune and Deseret News existed.'"

Little did anyone at the Telegram suspect at the time that the final shot in the battle between the big local newspapers would be fired thousands of miles away in the Federal District Court of New Orleans.

It was there that the United States Department of Justice—acting on behalf of a small newspaper, the Item—had filed antitrust charges against the Times-Picayune and its sister paper, the States. The two papers' system of combined advertising and circulation was functionally identical to that of the Tribune-Telegram arrangement.

With the way the wind was blowing, something had to give back home in Utah.

"Massive losses by the Deseret News and disappearing profits, with prospects of insupportable losses, for The Tribune had at long last brought about discussion between the managements of the newspapers of possible solutions," Malmquist continued. "One satisfactory to both parties was found in what was known as a newspaper agency operation."

Thus, the Telegram was sold to the Deseret News and merged into a single afternoon newspaper. Then, business and production operations of the two surviving papers, the Tribune and Deseret News, were set up in a non-profit entity, the jointly-owned Newspaper Agency Corporation (NAC).

The funds obtained from the sale of the Telegram were then used to purchase the interest of Thomas F. Kearns and thereby keep the Tribune ownership within the family corporation.

Now cooperating in a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) through the NAC, the Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune shared advertising operations as well as pooled production and distribution costs. It was an arrangement that benefited them both for decades.

• Left: The Telegram was purchased by the Tribune and later sold to the Deseret News when the two major papers created the jointly-owned Newspaper Agency Corporation. Right: An editorial cartoon published in the first edition of the Salt Lake Telegram.

An Unholy Alliance
Despite public criticism of joint-agency operations by smaller media outfits, such partnerships continued to be employed by larger competitors. And with the passage of the Newspaper Preservation Act in 1970 by the U.S. Congress, competing local newspapers could continue forming Joint Operating Agreements with legal exemption from antitrust laws.

This solidified the Tribune/Deseret NAC as well as similar arrangements by other newspapers around the country.

Although these developments lent stability to the Tribune and Deseret brands within the Beehive State, they also fostered numerous problems for the overall health and quality of the local media ecosystem, as John Saltas explored in his "Unholy Alliance" series for City Weekly back in our Private Eye days of 1990.

"The real horror of a JOA agreement is not losing a dollar or two to a classified ad [in two newspapers simultaneously]," Saltas wrote in the May 22 installment. "The real horror is watching both papers snivel along the sidings of every man or woman who claims to be a politician. It's watching everyone with a big dollar and a big promise tear apart the core of a city uninhibited by a mongering press."

Further installments to the series looked at how the NAC crowded out local community papers as well as their advertising channels, the overall point being to illustrate how artificial the perceived dominance of the two newspapers really was and how it had compromised the public's awareness of and response to local issues and happenings.

"Our two dailies no longer compete for readers via aggressive, investigative reporting," Saltas lamented. "Their motivation to build circulation through gained readership is long dead. Their profits are set by the NAC, and you, reader, lose big-time."

In 2020, the JOA between the Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune ended; the following year, both papers ceased daily publication.

In sum, having formed to provide yet another journalistic outlet to the public, the Telegram became collateral damage to the ambitions of two larger rivals, in a venture that ultimately proved ephemeral even to the beneficiaries.

Thinking Outside the Market
While the involvement of mining magnates and ecclesiastical institutions provide a local inflection to this case study, the internecine blindspots and market weaknesses are characteristic of any region that pursues the course that American journalism has been following since the 19th century: consolidated ownership by a few wealthy individuals, families or corporations.

Two years ago, as Northwestern University's Local News Initiative in Illinois recalled for its 2024 State of Local News Project report, "the State of Local News Project predicted that by the end of 2025, the United States would have lost one-third of its print newspapers over the past two decades. In this year's report, we found that the country has already exceeded that mark. A little fewer than 5,600 newspapers remain, 80% of which are weeklies."

The 2024 report goes on to say that since 2005, there has been a net loss of more than 3,200 papers in the U.S.; that almost 55 million people in the country have limited to no access to local news in areas referred to as "news deserts;" and that newspaper employment, circulation, content and frequency have all declined while large and medium-sized owners control the vast majority of remaining newspapers through acquisition.

"While many of these statistics paint a bleak picture for the local news landscape, there are some encouraging signs from startups, policymakers and legacy media organizations pursuing new strategies," the report added. "In several cases, startups have been formed with the explicit purpose of filling the void created by the disappearance of a long-standing news outlet."

Academics Rodney Benson and Victor Pickard second the need for "bold and comprehensive" civic responses to a profession faced with ongoing "systemic market failure" in their Feb. 2024 article for The Conversation. "When quality journalism disappears," they write, "it intensifies a host of problems—from rising corruption to decreasing civic engagement to greater polarization—that threaten the vitality of U.S. democracy."

In Benson and Pickard's view, news outlets need to be able to independently resist destructive market forces, wherein even philanthropic donations do not entirely escape "oligarchic influence." They write that journalism should be treated on a similar plane to libraries, schools and research universities, or to the robust public broadcasting systems of other countries, which receive earmarked taxes, fees and subsidies while maintaining an arm's-length relationship from their funding source.

"We have to start thinking outside of the market, and really pushing for a paradigm shift, when we see journalism as not just a commodity whose worth is determined by its profitability on the market, but rather as a public service upon which democracy depends," Pickard later emphasized in an interview with the national media watch group FAIR.

"We need to separate capitalism and journalism," he said, "which was always a very troubling union, to say the least."