"Former journalists say the decline of The Salt Lake Tribune stems from a conspiracy between the paper's corporate owner and the LDS Church."

With the above headline, I hope the international press pick it up. Anyone got any contacts?

http://www.cityweekly.net/utah/article-501-19159-disappearing-ink.html

Print journalism is dying everywhere. Even if they kill the SLTrib, the Deseret News is not going to suddenly become a more widely circulated paper. So they're just going to screw themselves twice.

And they're not going to be able to stem the flow of information against the church. It's not really to be found in the pages of the SLTrib, it's all over the internet.

True, but it isn't about circulation numbers. Even if it's just available online, there's a lot of value in a local paper. Local issues, local concerns, local politics. If SLTrib is swallowed whole by DN, where's the voice of opposition? Where's the balance?

I understand the value of SLTrib to non-mormons. My argument is that since the invention of Craigslist, print journalism is not able to pay for itself like it used to through ads. And while I will miss the SLTrib, I'm sure they're not especially profitable and LDS church or not, it will likely go under at some point anyway. Although I would argue that Des News was likely to go under first!

My thoughts, too. Newspapers everywhere are dying. The Deserted News is aimed at Mormoms. I think it's not so much that they want more subscriptions, they just want no other (local) options that TBMs could look at. The only reason the Deserted News is around is so the TBMs can get their religious news daily, with a little bit of other national and local news. Their "sports" pages are a joke, and they might as well just delete that section. Anyone that wants real sports news (other than high school scores) won't find anything in it.

Clearly, they are "Bleeding the beast." When the Deseret is the only local paper left, the church will control the flow of print information in Salt Lake.

One thing to consider is that Singleton, the current owner of the Trib, always bleeds his newspapers for current cash flow. He expects them all to go under eventually. He closed the Dallas Times-Herald and Houston Post in the Nineties. He's currently milking the San Jose Mercury News by keeping news coverage to a minimum. He's a real profiteer. I have no doubt that he'd conspire with the Mormon Church if he could, but I think the decline of the Trib can be explained in simpler ways.