And a happy birthday to us.
The Deseret News is 175 years old this month. The inaugural edition came off the presses — or press, as there was just one — in a small adobe building on South Temple Street in Great Salt Lake City on June 15, 1850. There were 220 copies that went on sale that Saturday at the rate of $2.50 for a six-month subscription or 15 cents for a single copy ($6.15 today). The paper was eight pages and measured 7 1/4 inches by 9 3/4 inches, which, by way of comparison and sheer coincidence, is almost exactly the size of an iPad.
A handful of newspapers in the California gold fields had started printing before 1850, but all of them, like the gold, disappeared. With the exception of the Santa Fe New Mexican, first published just seven months prior on Nov. 28, 1849, the Deseret News is the oldest newspaper in the United States west of the Missouri River.
At that, the paper might have started back in 1847 when the first Latter-Day Saint pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, except for the fact they didn’t bring a printing press with them. It took three years and several teams of oxen to get a second-hand 4,000-pound Ramage hand-press from Philadelphia to the newly established territory of Deseret — a much larger version of what is today the state of Utah.
The Deseret News has been in business ever since, first as a weekly, then a biweekly, then a daily, delivering through the decades, as the saying goes, the first draft of history.
It has taken no small amount of grit and gumption to do it. Delivering the news has never been a job for the timid. By any measure, the last 175 years has been quite a ride, one full of lows and highs, setbacks and solutions, questions and answers, and most of all, constant change. As a birthday tour of the quarter-century eras indisputably shows, to not just survive but to thrive, the Deseret News has been anything but timid.
1850-1875
Isolated in the Great Basin nearly 1,000 miles in any direction from their nearest neighbors, 11,380 souls, almost all of them members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, inhabited the Salt Lake Valley when Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Deseret News was published.
The paper began as a weekly, issued every Saturday, with the motto “Truth and Liberty” on the front page. There were fits and starts in the beginning due to a lack of paper to print the news on. There was no paper mill in the valley to greet the pioneers when they arrived, and no equipment to make one. The meager paper supply they brought with them ran out faster than a sunset on the Great Salt Lake.
By the fall of 1851 the paper shortage was so acute that publication ceased for three months, the longest break in the newspaper’s history. That prompted a front page story, once the paper managed to print again, pleading for any kind of cloth material — rags, old laundry, gunny sacks, quilts, stray socks — that could be made into “homemade paper.” People could get a paid subscription in exchange for the worn top from the covered wagon that brought them across the plains.
In September 1850, just three months into publication, the paper’s first name became outdated when the U.S. Congress changed the name of the new territory from Deseret, a Book of Mormon word meaning “honey-bee,” to Utah, in homage to the predominant local Indian tribe, the Utes.
Undeterred, editor Willard Richards and his staff of three (one typesetter, one proofreader, one man to run the press) decided to stick with the original name and it’s been Deseret News ever since. (In 1854, the paper’s very first illustration appeared in the form of a beehive — in tribute to Deseret — that was cut above the editorial column. The beehive has been the Deseret News logo ever since. It is also Utah’s official state symbol and the honeybee is the state insect.)
Publishing has always originated from Salt Lake City, with one exception. In the spring and summer of 1858, out of concern that federal troops coming to the territory might seize and silence the presses, the press was hauled to Fillmore in central Utah, where it was made operational in the basement of what had once been the territorial statehouse.
The press made the 150-mile trek to Fillmore hidden in a buggy driven by a future editor of the paper, George Q. Cannon, with his new wife, Sarah Jane Jenne, sitting beside him. The ruse worked. Who was going to look for a printing press on somebody’s honeymoon?
The press stayed in Fillmore from April to the end of August, by which point war tensions had simmered — few shots were fired in the so-called Utah War and no one died — and the printing press returned to Salt Lake.
News content in the earliest editions of the Deseret News came from two main sources: personal letters and newspapers from the East Coast and West Coast. Both arrived via the mail, which could often take months to show up (the “latest” news in the first edition was of an earthquake in San Francisco that happened six months previously). Due to a lack of breaking news, or any news at all, it was not uncommon, since the readership was almost entirely Latter-Day Saint, to have a majority of an issue filled with news about the church (excerpts from the personal history of Joseph Smith ran on the front page in every issue the entire year of 1856).
But with western settlement came change and progress, and much faster access to the news. In 1860, riders on horseback called the Pony Express began delivering the mail, cutting delivery time down dramatically. Then, in 1861, the world got considerably smaller when the entire country was connected to the telegraph, with Salt Lake City the final link. Now, important information could be transmitted instantaneously by wire, as it was in April 1865 when news of the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appeared in the now biweekly (Tuesdays and Saturdays) Deseret News just days after both momentous events happened.
By then, the News was printed on a steam-powered cylinder press purchased in 1864 that was capable of printing 1,800 newspapers an hour, a massive leap from the two-per-hour rate of the original Ramage press.
In 1867, the Deseret News evolved from a biweekly into a daily (except Sundays) and changed its masthead to read Deseret Evening News. Another two years after that, the golden spike was driven at Promontory Point, completing the transcontinental railroad and connecting Utah even more directly to the nation and the world — and, not incidentally, to the world’s paper supply. The Deseret Evening News was no longer waiting on news to print or paper to print it on.
1875-1900
The beginning of a new era marked the end of an old one when Latter-day Saint president Brigham Young, long a champion of freedom of speech, died on Aug. 29, 1877.
The great colonizer passed away at 4:01 p.m. of a ruptured appendix. As both a tribute to the man who, more than anyone, had made sure the Latter-day Saints procured a press and produced a newspaper in the first place, and to the ability of that newspaper to react quickly and accurately to breaking news, less than an hour later, that day’s newspaper hit the streets with extensive details about Brigham Young’s last hours on Earth, the cause of death and the people at his bedside.
By now the Deseret Evening News wasn’t the only paper in town. Five major newspapers had gained a foothold in Salt Lake City, including, besides the News, the Herald, the Evening Chronicle, the Democrat and the Salt Lake Tribune, which is still in existence today. Started in 1870 by an anti-Latter-day Saint faction, the Tribune and News were known to trade editorial volleys throughout the 1870s and 1880s, often heated and often about polygamy. When polygamy ended in 1890, the rancor simmered down, although never completely.
On the production front, in 1890, the News acquired a steam-powered Bullock press that could print on both sides of a sheet of paper at once. At full speed, it could produce 14,000 eight-page newspapers an hour, another huge leap in production. At about the same time, an invention called a typewriter, hailed as a “miniature printing machine,” found its way onto newsroom desks, eliminating the need for reporters to write their stories in longhand.
When a linotype machine was purchased in 1897, capable of setting type five times faster than doing it by hand, and photographs made their first appearance in 1899, it was as if the modern newspaper had reached its zenith. What could top this? What more could possibly be invented?
1900-1925
In an era that began with no cars on the streets, no airplanes in the skies and no electricity, indoor plumbing or radios in homes — and ended with all of the above and more — the Deseret News kept pace with its own kind of innovation. It began at the start of the century with the hiring of a new general manager named Horace “Bud” Whitney.
Whitney’s specialty wasn’t technological inventions, it was making the newspaper more appealing and entertaining.
It was Whitney who expanded sports, business and society coverage, who instituted a stock market report, who added one-picture cartoons and who introduced big, bold, eye-catching banner headlines that spanned the width of the front page. Including this one that ran on Nov. 12, 1918, the day after the end of World War I:
“Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth PEACE.”
In 1920, “Evening” was dropped from the masthead as the name of the paper, although it still continued to be delivered in the evening, returned to the original Deseret News. That same year the Deseret News Wireless Club was formed, with members sending messages by Morse Code via shortwave radio — a nod to a much more substantial kind of wireless coming in the then-distant future.
Two years later, in 1922 the News was approved by the Federal Communications Commission to start a radio station, giving it the call letters KZN. It was the first broadcasting license issued in Utah, but by 1924, the station hadn’t turned a profit. Nobody knew for sure if radio had much of a future, and the license was sold to private investors (eventually the call letters were changed to KSL and the station was purchased by the Church of Jesus Christ).
But for all the cosmetic changes, new technology and dramatic headlines that occurred as the 19th century turned into the 20th century, the most significant newspaper development, and not just at the Deseret News but everywhere, was a new kind of ad.
What became known as “Want Ads” or “Classified Ads” allowed individuals to use the newspaper as a personal marketplace to buy, sell and seek goods and services. In small adverts at the back of the newspaper, people could buy or sell their horses and wagons, offer their services as a handyman or a piano teacher, rent band instruments, seek employees for their small businesses, and any of thousands of other possibilities.
In 1894, the Deseret News first made these ads available to the general public at the rate of 1 cent per word. Soon, what began as a trickle of business turned into a torrent. Classified ads would provide the most dependable, constant revenue for newspapers for the next 100 years.
1925-50
This quarter century began with the most melodic sound ever heard in a newsroom, a sound old-timers pine away for like a lost love: the teletype machine.
The Associated Press wire service, and later its rival UPI, started distributing these machines to member newspapers in 1931. For the next 50-plus years (until satellites rendered them obsolete), the teletypes tapped out a steady clack-clack-clack as news from all over the country and around the world was printed electronically on low-grade paper that was constantly threaded through the machine. At most newspaper offices, including the Deseret News, teletype machines were kept in a corner or small office to cut down on the noise, but throughout the day their constant hum not only added to the ambience, but produced news ready to print.
As with most everything else, the Great Depression put a damper on the newspaper business. Newsboys still protected their turf on Salt Lake City’s street corners, happy to at least still have a source of some income, but as thousands of banks failed and unemployment skyrocketed, subscriptions declined from just under 40,000 in 1930 to 34,000 a decade later.
That all changed in 1941 with America’s entry into World War II. Americans hungry for war news turned again to their newspapers. Circulation figures grew exponentially, cresting at the Deseret News in 1948 when the number of subscribers reached 100,000. With the new readers came expanded coverage in virtually every department, including farm, home and garden sections and a weekly magazine. Home delivery routes were increased in the growing suburbs. The editorial staff soared to include 100 editors and reporters. As the crowning achievement in this decade of unprecedented growth, on May 16, 1948, after 98 years without one, the Deseret News printed its first Sunday edition.
1950-1975
The runaway growth of the 1940s had a downside. The Deseret News and its chief competitors, the Salt Lake Tribune and Salt Lake Telegram, competed so hard with prizes, come-ons and cut-rates to entice new customers that they were all losing money.
To right the ship, the Church of Jesus Christ, owner of the evening Deseret News, and the Kearns-Tribune Corporation, owner of both the morning Tribune and evening Telegram, got together and agreed to a business deal. Each would remain editorially independent, meaning their newsrooms would operate entirely separate from each other, but beyond that they would share all non-editorial costs in the areas of advertising, production and circulation. With the News an evening paper and the Tribune a morning paper, it was agreed that both newspapers would print on the same presses and deliver on the same trucks, while salespeople at the newly organized and jointly owned Newspaper Agency Corporation would solicit subscribers and sell advertising for both newspapers.
As part of the agreement, the Deseret News agreed to buy the Telegram from the Tribune for cash and also agreed to discontinue its short-lived Sunday edition. In return, Deseret News subscribers would get the Salt Lake Tribune delivered on Sunday mornings.
On secure financial footing again, in 1962 the Deseret News was able to achieve the highest award in newspaper journalism: a Pulitzer Prize.
The honor went to reporter Bob Mullins, who doggedly covered a robbery-murder-suicide case in southeastern Utah. The newspaper’s bureau chief in Price, Mullins was the first to break lead after lead as he chased the developing story from one end of Grand County to the other, putting more than 1,000 miles on his car. He was the first newsman to report the finding of the murder weapon. The Pulitzer committee cited him for “outstanding local reporting against deadline pressure.”
Also in 1962, the Deseret News launched its Sterling Scholar program, honoring top high school students in a variety of subjects throughout the state of Utah. More community outreach included the sponsoring of the first Deseret News Marathon in 1970, the 26.2-mile course mirroring the route taken by the Days of ’47 Pioneers. Both the marathon and the Sterling Scholars continue to this day.
1975-2000
The golden age of newspapering continued apace in the final quarter of the 20th century. Under their joint operating agreement, the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune installed new presses at a location on Regent Street. The presses, capable of producing 50,000 newspapers an hour, ran morning and night seven days a week.
The Deseret News published three editions every day, one for rural Utah and parts of Idaho, one for the rest of the state outside Salt Lake County, and one for Salt Lake County itself. Dozens of correspondents and bureau chiefs in all corners of Utah, as well as in Washington, D.C., collected and reported news on a grassroots level.
In 1983, the advent of word-processing computers allowed reporters to file their copy electronically over the telephone, eliminating the need to call the rewrite desk to dictate stories, or to use the telegraph or teletype to send copy.
With prosperity came growth. In the mid-1990s, the Deseret News demolished its cramped offices on Regent Street and began construction of a nine-story office tower designed to look like a newspaper. The building on the corner of 30 East and 100 South — located one block south of the little adobe building that published the first Deseret News — was finished in 1997, greeting a staff of more than 150 editors and reporters.
2000-2025
It wasn’t long into the new century that it became obvious the Deseret News needed to pivot yet again. The computer age that introduced word processors, a welcome change when they arrived in the 1980s, also brought with it a problem that caught the newspaper world largely by surprise.
The advent of the World Wide Web meant news content that for hundreds of years had been the province of ink and print could now be delivered without the need for paper at all — transmitted electronically and displayed on a computer screen.
At first, newspapers treated the new technology more like a novelty than a serious rival. Like so many others, in 1995, the Deseret News added a website (desnews.com) and, like so many others, didn’t charge for the content, the idea being that the online product would attract new customers who would then sign up for the more expansive and traditional print product.
Instead, consumers were quick to realize they could get the news without paying for it and started canceling their subscriptions. Worse, internet providers like Craigslist, eBay and, closer to home, KSL.com, started offering online ad space free of charge. Almost overnight, the classifieds that for decades had been proven money-makers for newspapers were all but eliminated.
The decline in print took a heavy toll on newspapers. Since 2005, a third of the papers in the U.S., more than 3,300 of them, have gone out of business. In order to stay afloat financially and plan for a future emphasizing technology instead of print, in 2010, the Deseret News laid off 43% of the editorial staff, sold the brick-and-mortar building (that still looks like a newspaper) on the corner of 30 East and 100 South, and moved to offices in the Triad Center to join forces with KSL TV and Radio.
While the demand for a print product has continued to slide — in 2021, the Deseret News finally discontinued its daily print edition and returned, for the first time in 156 years, to biweekly publication, with printed newspapers mailed to subscribers on Wednesdays and Fridays — the number of visitors to the website, which never closes, has continued to soar, making up the difference a hundredfold.
The comparisons are dramatic. Whereas print subscriptions peaked at 100,000 in 1948, and hovered around the 75,000 mark during the years of the joint operating agreement with the Tribune, the deseret.com website registers millions of page views every day and upwards of 25 million unique visitors every month. Beyond that, the geographical boundaries that existed in the print era have disappeared. The Deseret News can be accessed virtually by anyone, anytime, anywhere on Earth where there is computer access.
The bottom line: In 2025, the audience reading the Deseret News is far bigger than ever before.
The legacy of the Deseret News
Disseminating the news at no charge, without a printing press, to readers from Salt Lake City to Singapore and everywhere in between?
Such a notion would have been as fantastic to imagine for those who printed the first edition of the Deseret News in 1850 as it would be for the staff in 2025 to imagine what it would be like to publish a newspaper on a canvas wagon top.
Each era has seen its unique challenges and, more importantly, a way around them. The staying power and determination to continue to print Truth and Liberty, no matter what, is the legacy of the Deseret News — one of just 47 American newspapers that have been publishing for 175 years or more.
What will the next era bring? Hard to say. But if the past is indeed prologue, one thing is certain: There will be one.
