Over the next few days, you will detect a modest reallocation of news and feature space in the Deseret News, involving increased emphasis on business and technology and expanded features for busy lifestyles.
As with all newspapers, the amount of this space is determined by the amount of advertising sold. When advertising goes up, the "news-hole" goes up. When advertising goes down, the "news-hole" goes down. Advertising varies from day to day, so there are peaks and valleys in the ratio of news space.While the editorial departments of the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune compete vigorously, advertising for both papers is sold by the Newspaper Agency Corp., which also prints both papers and delivers them.
Thus, after the advertising is sold for a given day, the Deseret News gets from the NAC a set of "dummies," which show how many sections the paper will have, how many pages there will be in each section, the layout of the ads on those pages and the remaining space that can be filled by the editorial department.
This overall space is apportioned by the editors to the various departments (city, national and international news; sports, features, business; editorial pages) according to need and reader interest. It is in this allocation of space that you will detect some change.
Our daily Business section will get more space, increased national and international coverage and broader local coverage. The technology portion of our Wednesday Science and Technology section will become part of Wednesday's Business section. The Business section will carry our existing stock and mutual fund tables, which are also carried on the Deseret News Web page. Newspapers throughout the country are debating the value of these tables in their print editions, and we would welcome comment from readers on their utility.
Friday's Leisure and Outdoors section will be expanded into a bright and fast-paced section for weekend readers with an active lifestyle. It will be renamed LIFE, etc. Part of its new space comes from the now-defunct Sunday Scene section, which was abandoned by the NAC for lack of advertising support. Replete with general features, ideas for family activity and coverage of health, recreation, fitness (including the popular Garth Fisher column), the outdoors and science, it will complement Friday's Weekend section specializing in coverage of movies, theater, music and entertainment in general.
Additional coverage of science and the outdoors will flow through other sections of the paper.
We hope you will be better served by this reallocation, and we will be happy to get your reaction.
Deseret News staffers win a steady stream of prizes and awards from various journalistic organizations. But once a year their work is recognized and rewarded by their peers on their own newspaper.
From the entire staff come nominations of fellow reporters, photographers, artists, editors and other workers who have done outstanding work during the preceding year. A selection committee of senior editors makes the final cut -- no easy task because the examples of excellence exceed the number of awards available in several categories.
On Wednesday night, at the Little America Hotel, we held our 29th annual awards banquet to honor the awardees for last year. The banquet is named after Mark E. Petersen, who served the Deseret News continuously for 60 years as a reporter, copy reader, news editor, managing editor, general manager, president and chairman of the board.
The principal award, for excellence in writing, is also named after Mark Petersen and this year went to Lois Collins, whose writing, as one of her nominators put it, "sings."
We also inaugurated this year a parallel award, for excellence in reporting, named after Robert D. Mullins, a Deseret News reporter from 1951 through 1987 who won the Pulitzer prize in 1962 for his gripping coverage of a July 4 murder-kidnapping in the Moab area. The first recipient of this new award is Lee Davidson, our Washington bureau chief, who was rewarded for his dogged persistence in digging out in the nation's capital stories of significance to Utah readers. In accepting the award, Davidson said Bob Mullins was the kind of reporter he had modeled himself after.
John Hughes
Editor