In many ways, the multi-platformed Deseret News of the 21st century seems lightyears removed from its earliest days in the 19th century.
News today moves at a nearly instant pace to the paper’s website, and then the world, offering instant access to award-winning writing and photography. A printed version is available twice a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays. A slick publication called Deseret Magazine is printed monthly, offering in-depth writing and thoughtful perspectives, as well as its own website. The weekly Church News offers in-depth news of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with its own printed version, as well as a website.
By contrast, the first edition of the Deseret News came off a simple Ramage press that had been carried across plains and mountains by pioneers. It filled eight pages with news. Printing was a laborious process, with each letter typeset by hand.
There was no home delivery. Readers had to come to the paper’s office — a small adobe building (more of a shack, actually) and pay either 15 cents for a copy or $2.50 for a six-month subscription, due in advance, at least in theory. In reality, cash was hard to come by in the Salt Lake Valley in those days.
The editor, Willard Richards, who also was a member of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owned the paper, was willing to accept in-kind payments to support himself and his three-person staff, as well as to cover the costs of production.
Light years, and yet there are similarities today. The 19th century was a time of rapid changes and technological discoveries, just as is true with the 21st century. The Deseret News survived by being innovative and forward-thinking, then and now.
As the mid-19th century progressed, newspapers became less expensive and more expansive. The invention of the telegraph dramatically shrank time and distance. The so-called “penny press” era, which began around the 1830s, allowed new newspapers and periodicals to start overnight. Some were highly partisan. Others served specific audiences.
In some ways, today’s internet era is reminiscent of that time — a highly partisan age characterized by multiple competing voices and ever-improving technology.
But pioneer settlers in the Salt Lake Valley, who had left this bustling new world for the silence of a remote Western desert, were hungry for news — any news. Even with their hardships, they gladly did what they could to get a copy of the Deseret News.
As former Deseret News publisher Wendell Ashton wrote in his book “Voice in the West,” the need for news was “increasing with every swing of the ax. Newsworthy events — momentous ones, along with the everyday items of tragedy, humor, and human interest — were happening by the wholesale in the Mountain West. And more than that, the people who were providing them thirsted for ‘intelligence,’ as they called it, from the outside world, as well as from their church leaders.”
A replica of the first building, as well as a replica of that first press, is at This Is The Place Heritage Park. Its original location was just east of Main Street on South Temple. You might be able to find a replica of the first copy of the Deseret News, which on June 15, 1850, provided a message President Zachary Taylor had given to the House five months earlier, and news of a fire in San Francisco that happened six months earlier. Even old news was welcome news.
People were so eager for this that the paper’s circulation grew to 4,000 within six years.
Supplies were as scarce as money in those days. Employees of the paper found it hard to live on barter, and the supply of paper ran thin. For a while, the Deseret News could afford to print only once every other week. Other times, printing had to cease for weeks, and even as long as three months.
The solution was for pioneers to make their own paper. Readers were asked to donate rags, which were used to produce a paper-like substance that was thicker and grayer than the real thing, but that allowed people to read the news.
In 1852, the Deseret News moved into a three-story adobe building located on the northwest corner of South Temple and Main Street. It also housed a post office.
Two years later, the paper moved its offices to the old Tithing Office building across from Temple Square on Main Street, and two years after that, it moved to the Council House, which also served multiple needs as a public gathering place, a legislative hall and a church meeting place.
When federal troops threatened the territory in 1858, the expanding printing press was moved temporarily to Fillmore, with part of it going to Parowan. They were returned to Salt Lake City after tensions subsided.
Paper shortages were a constant problem. One man was called on a rag mission and collected more than 100,000 pounds of the stuff. Brigham Young bought a paper-making machine in 1860, but it soon proved inadequate for the growing newspaper.
By the 1860s, other newspapers had begun competing with the News. In 1864, according to Ashton’s book, the paper acquired a “Hoe cylinder press.” Richard M. Hoe & Company had invented a “lightning press” in which “the type and the paper sheets revolved on cylinders, printing four sheets at a time, or eight thousand sheets an hour.”
Ashton described this steam-powered press as “a newspaper wonder of the century” that could turn out 1,800 papers per hour. By comparison, the old hand-operated press the News had used would print just 120 papers an hour.
Two years before the transcontinental railroad was established in 1869, the Deseret News became a daily newspaper, a monumental sign of growth over a 19-year period. By now, the news business was in full swing in the growing territory, with five daily papers competing head-to-head by 1885.
Ever-expanding, the Deseret News in 1890 obtained another printing marvel, the Bullock Press, for $8,500 from the Omaha Republican. It could print two sides of a paper at once, turning out 14,000 eight-page newspapers an hour.
At about the same time, telephones entered the market, followed closely by typewriters in the newsroom. Salt Lake City now had electric streetcars. Reporters could move and report quickly. In 1892, the first reproductions of line drawings appeared in the paper. Want ads began to appear, and the News began an annual Christmas edition.
In 1897, despite desperate financial difficulties, the Deseret News obtained linotype machines — large devices with keyboards that allowed technicians to set type about five times faster than by hand.
These were temperamental machines powered by steam and attached to a single shaft. If one went down, they all stopped. But they got the news out to people much faster than before.
Photographs began appearing in the paper. The Deseret News was a leader in that field, too. The first photos to appear on its news pages were in 1900, depicting the aftermath of the Scofield mine disaster.
Once again proving its leaders were visionary in new technologies, the Deseret News in 1920 began transmitting “wireless news flashes” each night by Morse code to members of a wireless club. The preferred option was to begin a radio station, but AT&T held a monopoly on equipment at that time and demanded $25,000 for tubes and condensers.
Deseret News business manager Elias S. Woodruff managed to find the necessary equipment for only a few hundred dollars from sources in the East, and KZN, later changed to KSL, made its first broadcast from a tin shack atop the newspaper’s building on May 6, 1922. Although the paper sold the station, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later reacquired it, paving the way for today’s KSL radio and television.
At about this time, sports and society pages began to become popular, leading to more specialized journalism. Comics pages soon followed. In 1926, teletype machines — remotely operated typewriters — began churning endless copy from newswire services. In 1935, the News obtained a 50-horsepower Hoe press, capable of printing an incredible 120,000 20-page papers an hour. It also could handle four-color printing.
By then, the 20th century was in full swing, with syndicated content and, thanks to flashbulbs replacing exploding powder, action photographs. In 1934, veteran news photographer Bill Shipler shot photos of a highly publicized plane crash site in Parleys Canyon in 1934. Ashton’s book said these were stunning to readers who had been used to stilted, posed studio photographs, if any were displayed at all.
Soon, photos of touchdowns and other events became common, along with wire photos of news from around the world. By the end of the 1940s, the News employed 10 full-time photographers.
In 1948, the paper began a Sunday magazine featuring color photographs. It was one of the first of its kind and won many honors. It also boosted circulation, which by that time was more than 100,000.
In 1952, amid sluggish ad revenue, the Deseret News and the Salt Lake Tribune entered into a joint-operating agreement, sharing printing, delivery and advertising through a separate company called the Newspaper Agency Corp. That lasted until 2021, but it did not stop the endless march of technological wonders in the news business.
In 1972, hot metal type disappeared in favor of a photo composition process, sending linotype machines into landfills and museums. In 1983, typewriters gave way to computers, or word processors, as they were called. No longer did editors use pencils to mark and correct copy. The newsroom became suddenly quiet, except for the clickity-clack sounds of keyboards and the rattling of wire-service printers, which disappeared shortly thereafter.
Word processors quickly gave way to full-fledged computers capable of accessing the world through the internet and email. Photos became digital images on screens. The darkroom became a storage place.
In 1995, the Deseret News launched the Crossroads Information Network, a dial-up service that linked computers to the News. Again, this was at the forefront of new technology, even though the paper’s new website and rapidly expanding home internet services soon made this service obsolete.
Not long after the joint agreement with the Tribune was allowed to expire in 2021, the Deseret News recognized the importance of its web product and reduced its printed product from daily production to what now is a twice weekly product delivered to subscribers by mail.
That move also was visionary. Today, Deseret.com is read around the world, continuing the visions its pioneer founders had 175 years ago of a news service that would inform, stimulate thought and inspire minds using the best technology available at the time.
