SALT LAKE CITY — It’s been over a decade, but Lauren Gustus is returning to the Salt Lake Tribune with a different title and a new undertaking.
On Tuesday, the paper announced Gustus, currently the editor of the Sacramento Bee and executive editor over a group of western newspapers owned by the McClatchy Co., as its new editor. Gustus will take over the job in early December and replaces local veteran journalist Jennifer Napier-Pearce, who resigned from the post in August.
The 40-year-old Gustus takes over the reins of the Tribune as the third woman to serve in the top editorial position for the 150-year-old publication. In her previous stint with the paper, Gustus worked as an assistant sports editor from 2004-07. Since then she’s worked for organizations with a national news presence, including Gannett and McClatchy in various managerial positions. In her most recent job, Gustus’ responsibilities included overseeing 250 journalists from 10 newsrooms as well as heading up McClatchy’s community fundraising efforts.
While the Tribune was a holding of the Denver-based MediaNews Group during Gustus’ first tour of duty, the paper has since switched hands and business models several times. Following a 2016 acquisition by Paul Huntsman, son of the now deceased Utah billionaire chemical industrialist and philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr., the paper earned approval last November from the Internal Revenue Service to become a 501(c)(3) public charity, opening the door for opportunities to seek tax-deductible support from readers and philanthropists.
Raising money to support news reporting is an area of expertise for Gustus, who raised some $4.5 million in philanthropic funding over the past 18 months for McClatchy, according to the Tribune.
But she said she was drawn to the job, where she will head up a Tribune staff that numbers around 70, in large part due to the paper’s current effort to become the first legacy newspaper in the U.S. to make a viable transition to nonprofit status.
“The Tribune has a unique opportunity among legacy news organizations in this country,” Gustus said. “It has a shot at proving that the nonprofit model can work for legacy news.”
Gustus will also be steering her new paper through a shift in how content is delivered, with the Tribune having already announced plans to cease publication of a daily print edition at the end of the year.
While Gustus’ fundraising expertise is likely very attractive to an organization that last year announced plans to raise a $60 million endowment as a nonprofit, she said her initial priorities at the Tribune will be focused on news and building audience for a website that switched to a paywall/digital subscription system in 2018.
“In earnest, the focus is journalism,” Gustus said. “Beyond that, there are opportunities for us to look at what the community wants and needs ... what readers and would-be readers will support.”
In October, the Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune announced dissolution of a decades-long Joint Operating Agreement that pooled the costs of a shared printing facility as well as revenues from print advertising and a few specialty publications.
With the end of the agreement at the end of 2020, both publications will contract their printing needs with third parties, continue to enhance their digital footprints and will be free to chart their print and digital futures independently of each other.
The Deseret News will also be moving away from a daily print product starting in 2021 and publish a weekly newspaper and continue growing its daily digital news presence as well as publishing a monthly news magazine.
Deseret News Publisher Jeff Simpson said the 170-year-old publication’s digital readership volumes were in the midst of a stellar growth arc.
“We are in a unique position because for years now our digital readership has dwarfed our print readership and the great majority of the remaining print readers have become digital first,” said Simpson. There are nearly 500 times the number of digital users on Deseret.com than local print subscribers.
“Over the past two years alone, our digital users have nearly doubled across our various platforms and 70% of that group are from outside Utah,” Simpson said.