The Salt Lake Tribune, now moving toward a never-before-tried foundation approach business model, has sent out a survey to its subscribers with several questions having to do with dumping the printed paper format.
Long Utah’s leading daily newspaper in size and influence, the Tribune has fallen on tough times.
Last month UtahPolicy.com was first to report that owner/publisher Paul Huntsman, one of the sons of the late billionaire/philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr., is looking to move the newspaper from a for-profit business into a non-profit foundation model.
If young Huntsman is successful at it, the Tribune would be the first “legacy” newspaper in the country to become non-profit, relying on donations from the community to stay afloat.
Well, not totally from the community.
UtahPolicy.com also wrote that when Huntsman appeared on KUER’s Radio West talk show, he said that the family – six children and Sr.’s widow – was looking to “soon” announce that the huge Huntsman Foundation – which previously supported a cancer research institute and hospital at the University of Utah – would expand to funding other causes to help the human condition, including the Salt Lake Tribune.
In any case, the survey (which UtahPolicy.com, as a subscriber, received) asks its current newsprint and/or digital subscribers:
= If they would be willing to donate to the newspaper’s operating foundation more money than just a subscriber fee.
= If they were more or less likely to subscribe to the newspaper if it became a nonprofit.
= Whether they would continue to subscribe if the newspaper dropped some of its current seven-days-a-week publishing schedules.
= Whether they would continue to subscribe if the newspaper stopped publishing a paper product altogether and just went digital only.
The Tribune, which printed more than 100,000 papers a day for its flagship Sunday edition just a few years ago, has dropped to under 30,000 printed daily circulation, by far most of those sold in Salt Lake County.
A year ago January the paper started charging $7.99 a month for its digital-only product.
And while that online circulation has progressed as projected, Huntsman has said, he adds that is not enough to sustain the paper financially today.
A year ago the Tribune laid off more than a third of its staff.
And, ironically, one of the “personality” columnists the new survey asks about, Michelle Quist, was laid off as an editorial writer/columnist at that time, but now writes as a contributing (non-staffer) columnist today.
Huntsman says he would like to continue the printed paper for the time being. But he adds that is not a sustainable option down the road.
The current joint operating agreement (JOA) with the LDS-Church-owned Deseret News runs out the end of next year.
The profit split is currently 60-40 percent for the DN, renegotiated down from 70-30 percent to help Huntsman financially when the paper was sold to him back in 2015.
But unless LDS Church leaders give Huntsman a terrific new JOA deal, it is hard to see the printed paper continuing after 2020.
It is unclear how a non-profit Tribune would work financially.
It could “sell” subscriptions at a fixed rate to online readers, kind of a donation to a non-profit foundation.
It could solicit and accept more substantial donations to the Tribune’s foundation – one of the questions on the new survey.
But in giving the new Tribune foundation tax-exempt status, the IRS will have to determine if it is fair for a non-profit to compete in the marketplace with for-profit operations – like the Deseret News or local TV and radio stations’ news-gathering and publishing operations.
Several things are clear: The Tribune is not the editorial voice penetrating the Utah community that it once was.
And a foundation-based Tribune will be relying on the goodwill and support of its subscribers more over the next few years than it ever has before.
