In 1963, the Deseret News offices were located on the east side of Richards Street about midway between North Temple and 100 South. (That section of Richards Street was eventually swallowed by the Crossroads Plaza. A Richards Street entrance to the mall on South Temple is all that remains.)
The newsroom was on the third floor of the old four-story building that had housed editorial and printing operations since 1926. Along the northeast wall was a bank of noisily clacking teletype machines spewing out a seemingly endless stream of stories at the rate of 65-70 words a minute - Stone Age technology compared with today's whirlwind computer delivery.The teletype was the major delivery system of news to newspapers at that time. An operator would type a story at a central bureau, the keystrokes carried by electrical impulse over phone lines to a distant newspaper office, where the story would be simultaneously reproduced on a receiving teletype.
The sending teletype had a keyboard much like a typewriter. The receiving unit was essentially an electronic box on legs with an inside keypad that produced all-caps type. The front of the box had a hinged glass face with a beveled edge at the top that could be used for tearing off stories, which were printed on flatfold paper that fed onto a typewriter roller.
News photos were received from a unit that scanned a photograph at the sending point and transmitted the image over wires onto photo-sensitive paper.
Editors operated in a pastepot-and-pencil mode. Late-breaking stories moved in separate "takes" - the lead paragraph, adds and inserts, to which were attached headlines and captions for accom-pa-ny-ing photos. All this had to be pasted in sequential order, pencil-edited and sent to the composing room where it was set in metal type, one character at a time, on Linotype machines. The system was cumbersome but always seemed to work miraculously on deadline.
In September 1952 the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune entered into a joint operating agreement, merging advertising, production and circulation under the Newspaper Agency Corp. Editorial operations remained separate. Under the agreement the Tribune continued to publish its morning edition and closed its afternoon paper, the Salt Lake Telegram. (The ghost of the Telegram remained for several years, however, its logo carried as part of the Deseret News masthead.)
The Deseret News sold its presses and began printing on Tribune presses at Regent Street, about two blocks south of the Deseret News offices, creating unfamiliar problems of expediting copy. Copy couriers either drove to the Regent Street composing room or walked. Late news developments had to be dictated by phone or sent by facsimile to liaison editors.
Page makeup editors, after finishing their tasks at Richards Street, hurried to Regent Street to put the finishing touches on their pages before press time. Being distanced from the mechanical end of the process put severe pressure on editorial deadlines.
Finally, in 1967, the Deseret News relocated its editorial operations to Regent Street with its front offices on 100 South.