The very first issue of the Deseret News told the story of the paper itself. Published on June 15, 1850 — 175 years ago this month — the lead item established the paper’s motto as “Truth and Liberty” while promising to “promote the best interest, welfare, pleasure and amusement of our fellow citizens.” It promised to bring readers the world, with foreign news and the ornamental works of “our poets and poetesses.” The edition covered the dealings of the U.S. Senate, where North Carolina’s Willie P. Mangum had threatened to dissolve the Union, and a “terrible fire in San Francisco.” And it included a plea, encouraging readers to save physical copies of the Deseret News so that “their children’s children may read the doings of their fathers, which otherwise might have been forgotten; ages to come.”
It may seem odd to our modern digital sensibilities, asking readers to keep physical newspapers around as a record of a people and their place in the world. But such were the demands of the era. The Deseret News, owned then and now by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was established for the practical reason that there was no better way to transmit information at the time. “Before our internet universe, the best way to communicate to just about everybody was through a newspaper,” says Brad Westwood, former director of the Utah Historical Society. “It was the place to learn. To experience. To sell. To buy.” It was the place to make sense of the wider world — in words and, later, in pictures.
The Deseret News published its first local news photos on May 12, 1900, in a spread about a mining disaster in Scofield that killed over 200 men. Photos soon became a dominant force in newspapers, with better resolution and color printing added over time. The images helped tell the story of what the Intermountain West was and wanted to become. They were one among many innovations to that end, from a sports page, added in 1893, to the first bylines in the 1920s and ’30s, as the Deseret News grew and became something both new and familiar at once.
“If you want to know how Salt Lake City, or Utah, was built, it was built on journalism in a very big way.”
“What’s interesting about the Deseret News,” says Ed Adams, a scholar of media history at Brigham Young University, “is this evolutionary process of being a frontier newspaper, and then making its way to a commercial newspaper.” Indeed, the Deseret News was always more than a newspaper about the dealings of church leadership, even if it certainly was that. Those early settlers also had to contend with the difficult demands on life in the Mountain West. The Deseret News offered a kind of common language across this vast, arid country, connecting people across what Westwood calls the “Mormon commonwealth” — the land that we know today as the Intermountain West, plus parts of Canada, California and Mexico. It also connected those pioneers and their viewpoints to the rest of the continent. “It communicated to its members, then it communicated to (their) neighbors in Utah,” Westwood says. “And then it was communicating to the nation.”
It did so with a voice that amplified church views on social issues and criticized the sensationalism that emerged among its larger contemporaries along the East Coast, particularly during the “yellow journalism” era that marked the early 20th century. It could do so because Salt Lake City was, at the time, one of the most isolated cities in the country, which insulated the Deseret News from having to copy the New York tabloids to stay afloat. The paper did, however, have to adapt to a changing journalistic business environment. It adopted classified ads and came to embody the corporate structure of most major newspapers. It added the Church News in 1931 to stay relevant to its longtime constituency. Most importantly, it partnered in 1952 with its biggest rival, The Salt Lake Tribune, to share production costs and advertising revenue as part of a “joint operating agreement” that kept both papers afloat.
Despite that shared business arrangement, editorially the two Utah papers of record competed fiercely. The Deseret News defended the church and a more conservative outlook. The Tribune was often critical of the church and promoted a more liberal worldview. Their frequent opposition shaped each other, and the surrounding region, in a way that continues to reverberate. “If you want to know how Salt Lake City, or Utah, was built,” Westwood says, “it was built on journalism in a very big way.” The Deseret News won its first and only Pulitzer Prize in 1962. The Tribune won its first in 1957 and its second in 2017. Both papers ended the joint operating agreement in 2020, reflecting broader changes in the media landscape.
For a publication that made sense of the “Wild West” for readers across the frontier, the Deseret News is well-positioned to weather the current storm.
The Deseret News has weathered changes before, but nothing so seismic as the digital revolution that has shuttered legacy publications across the country. “With the onset of social media, the power of publishing is in the hands of everybody,” Adams says. “So now everybody can say anything — and they do. … We’re out in the Wild, Wild West again.” For a publication that quite literally made sense of the “Wild West” for readers across the frontier, the Deseret News is as well-positioned as any established media company to weather the current storm. A 175-year history connotes a certain level of authority. Even if it’s not nearly as dominant a voice as it once was, Westwood says, the Deseret News “can speak from experience. And it (does).”
More recently, the organization has poured more resources toward its digital initiatives, bolstering the online home it founded in 1995. In 2021, the Deseret News ceased daily print publication in favor of a biweekly edition. That same year, it launched Deseret Magazine, a monthly print publication, to add more national depth and analysis to the mix, with more changes surely on the way as media continues to evolve. “The main change in the Deseret News since (its inception) is that now we can have global reach, with global influence, and we want to make use of that,” says Executive Editor Doug Wilks. “We do not think we are greater than we are, but we think it is worthwhile to make an effort to, if not change the world, then change the hearts of people in the world.”
In that sense, the Deseret News hasn’t changed much since that first issue in 1850, when it proclaimed that “a paper that is worth printing is worth preserving.” And conveying the true people, places and events of today is still just as valuable as it was 175 years ago. It’s still an enduring force, and one worth preserving in new ways. In words and photos that will continue to make sense of a region and its people — to each other and to the wider world.
This story appears in the June 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
