On October 9, a Thursday, The Southern Utah Tribune published its first issue. The monthly, free print newspaper, identified as a “product of the Salt Lake Tribune,” was mailed to 40,000 homes and businesses across Washington County (population just over 200,000), the fast-growing southwest corner of the state in what’s known as red rock country. Beyond an array of news stories, its index points readers to a calendar, obituaries, puzzles, sports, and a “voices” opinion section.
Washington County is a four-and-a-half hour drive from Salt Lake City, where The Salt Lake Tribune — an old newspaper turned young nonprofit — is headquartered. But The Southern Utah Tribune is not intended to be a satellite or bureau offshoot of Salt Lake City’s newsroom, CEO and executive editor Lauren Gustus told me. Rather, this is a local news product for Washington County; its form and content are rooted in what county residents told the Tribune they wanted, and it has two full-time reporters living in Washington County. (One, Brooke Larsen, is a new hire, while Mark Eddington has spent much of his career at The Salt Lake Tribune.)
“When I saw the Tribune was hiring a reporter to write about an undercovered and rapidly growing part of my home state, I jumped on the opportunity,” Larsen writes in her introductory column. Eddington notes he left the Tribune for more than a decade to work as a press secretary and speechwriter (for Senator Orinn Hatch and Governor Gary Herbert, both Republicans), where he says he “learned that spin is best left to washing machines” before returning to the Tribune. A local volunteer advisory committee, whose members appear on The Southern Utah Tribune’s masthead, will provide input on stories of local importance and play a role in connecting the publication with “potential supporters.”
The monthly newspaper’s name — chosen with community feedback — strikes a balance between its geographic affinity and acknowledgement of its tie to The Salt Lake Tribune. “With respect to naming it in a capacity that’s similar to The Salt Lake Tribune, we don’t want to hide who we are or what we’re trying to do,” Gustus said. “There are folks who appreciate The Salt Lake Tribune in Washington County; there are folks who don’t appreciate The Salt Lake Tribune in Washington County. And our job is to try to reach all of them.”
“There is no source of truth”
The Southern Utah Tribune’s inaugural edition leads with a welcome note from Gustus. “We believe creating community happens when people have access to information that helps them make informed decisions,” she writes. In the latter half of the note, Gustus shares a detailed breakdown of the topics Washington County residents told The Salt Lake Tribune they wanted to see covered, with water conservation topping the list:
The lead story of the first issue: “Pools multiply faster than population: In water-strapped southern Utah, more pools and bigger pools test the limits of growth.”
Understanding that this area is more conservative than Salt Lake City, Gustus said, is important to effectively serve this audience’s information needs. (The Southern Utah Tribune reporters’ editor, Colton Lochhead, is based in Salt Lake City, but has spent a lot of time in southern Utah and nearby Las Vegas.) “We have to report in a way that what we do will be received by those that we want to see it,” Gustus said, using the example of covering access to water. “It must be done thoughtfully.”
“We have to do the work of being present, of listening, of understanding what’s important to people and then reflecting that back versus making assumptions about what they want,” she continued. “We have to write for this community, not about it.”
Hard news aside, the edition dedicates three of its 24 pages to a detailed community calendar, where the featured event is the Downtown Farmers Market and events run the gamut from city council meetings to corn mazes.
The “Voices” opinion section comprises another two pages, with commentaries from the mayor and a challenger candidate. “While we encourage Utahns from all walks of life to submit, we want to ensure that submissions help to strengthen civic discourse, fight polarization and solve problems,” Tribune staff write in a column explaining how to submit opinion content. They’ll consider “essays, illustrations, videos and other proposals.” (The goal is to build out a localized version of The Salt Lake Tribune’s Voices section, which it introduced as an effort to refocus its opinion journalism in 2023. “It will take a bit of time to get the same volume of submission for SUT as we do for SLT,” Gustus said, “so there will be a bit of a ramping period.”)
Both features, Gustus told me, were resources Washington County residents said they wanted. “I think a lot of times when you hear about a news org that’s launching, it’s, ‘We’re going to make an impact, we’re going to do journalism that’s going to make change’ — and that should be done and is important,” she said. “And yet, even as folks in Washington County said they wanted accountability reporting, they also said, ‘We would just really like a good events calendar.’…We also heard that they wanted to hear from each other, so we’ve included letters to the editor and op-eds — not editorials, but perspectives, voices of the community in the products across all platforms.” These are examples of taking what the Tribune team heard in listening sessions and “applying them directly to the product.”
Another takeaway from that audience research: “the primary source of news for folks in Washington County is social media, and there’s also a high response rate for word of mouth,” Gustus said, suggesting the county is a true news desert. Respondents said, specifically, that they felt “there is no source of truth.”
“I don’t know that The Southern Utah Tribune can be the source of truth,” Gustus said. “I don’t know that any news organization can be the source of truth for a community anymore, given the bifurcation of local media. But we’re going to strive to be fair, to explain how we do what we do, to provide context, to go in depth, and also to give people more of what they’re telling us they want.”
Gustus shared excerpts from a few reader reactions to the first issue:
OMG, I never thought I’d see the day where the media finally is waking up to all the life happening in southern Utah, one of the fastest growing communities in the country! Bravo.I’m a paying subscriber to the SL Tribune and am thrilled you’re creating news targeted to us Southern Utah folks. The local paper, The Spectrum, used to be good with local news but since being bought out, it’s a hollow echo of USA Today and I recently canceled my subscription there. Thanks again.
What I noticed that was missing in the calendar of events section is fine arts events, exhibits, competitions (like Plein Air), gallery events, etc. And maybe you don’t realize the importance of fine art and craft artisans in this area. We have world-class artists here, although we struggle with getting much support from city or county leaders. There are some positive changes, but when budgets are tight, visual arts are the last in line. So, I hope you will reach out to the Southern Utah Art Guild, Utah Tech, and other groups that help us thrive instead of just survive, and highlight visual arts here in the future of the new Tribune.
It was a surprise to see a real newspaper. At no cost! Trust me, I understand the challenges of printing news (worked as an artist at the LV Review-Journal). Although we all check out devices for news online (especially since we don’t have much print media here and hardly any live broadcast media here — unless something tragic happens), there is nothing like reading the newspaper cover to cover.
“We can learn from Southern Utah”
So, why make The Southern Utah Tribune a free print newspaper? “Given the demographics of the community and the size of the community, we felt like a printed paper gives us a branding vehicle for the journalism,” Gustus explained. “And it enables us to reach more people more quickly than if we were growing site and social organically.” While the print product is the central offering, all stories published there are also available at southernutahtribune.org. The print edition also directs readers to a supplementary weekly newsletter, the Red Rock Roundup, which just surpassed 3,500 signups.
The other key appeal of a print product (perhaps counterintuitively) is that the Tribune team believes it can make money. “The idea is that the print product is a revenue generator, which then can support other platforms and other products,” Gustus said. “We’re not revenue-positive just yet, but the ramp is such that we intend to be.” She views revenue diversification as critical to accomplishing this. One key stream is advertising across platforms and properties — because the Tribune now has products specific to Salt Lake City, Cache Valley, Moab, and Washington County, “there’s a great deal of flexibility for advertisers that want to reach people throughout the state, and we think that’s a benefit.” Other revenue streams include philanthropy and small-dollar giving.
The Southern Utah Tribune is hiring a general manager, who will lead local sales and philanthropy. With that hire on board, the goal is for the print product to be profitable by the first quarter of 2026.
“We believe that the first thing we have to do is build something that people want,” Gustus said. “And we also believe that if we’re going to be a nonprofit news organization, we have to be focused on growing trust and building community.” Those are tall orders, she acknowledged, but “if we do those things, we believe the business model will follow. So, yes, it’s mission, but it’s mission that’s informed by the people we seek to serve, and then we build out a P&L.”
Making The Southern Utah Tribune free is consistent with The Salt Lake Tribune’s bigger-picture, mission-driven vision to make its reporting accessible to all. Last year, The Tribune’s first-ever annual report revealed that the newspaper aspired to drop its paywall, which it described as a “necessary evil.” The plan is to drop the paywall in the first quarter of 2026.
Dropping that paywall, Gustus said, is what keeps senior Tribune leaders up at night. There’s a lot of work associated with the transition, from significant changes to its tech stack to how the newspaper communicates with supporters and subscribers. At the same time, “we also have to think about how the journalism should continue to evolve as we make that transition to free.” But The Tribune is “on track” to raise the $1 million necessary to take this step. Specifically, “We now have commitments totaling over 1.5x that goal,” on top of the $1 million matching gift from Chris & Summer Gibson, Gustus said.
Given the broader trajectory of The Salt Lake Tribune, “the thinking is that we can learn from Southern Utah, and its position as a free news organization across platforms, as we look to take a larger entity to the same model,” Gustus said.
Local news for Moab and Cache Valley
The Southern Utah Tribune is neither The Salt Lake Tribune’s first localized local news product beyond Salt Lake City nor its first free print product. In January, as part of its concerted expansion into local news across the state, The Tribune launched a weekly newsletter for Cache Valley called The Cache Crop. “We started there because it was a smaller community, and because we felt like we would kind of learn and test and design in a capacity that would enable us to be more nimble,” Gustus said. “One of the things that was really important to us as we looked at building out an expansion strategy was that we met people where they were, and we understood as deeply as we could how they wanted to receive news and information,” which means one size does not fit all. For Cache Valley, a newsletter made sense; for Washington County, the team settled on a print newspaper.
Meanwhile, in 2023, The Moab Times-Independent was donated to The Tribune. Long a family-owned weekly newspaper, under The Tribune’s stewardship, the publication became free to read online and is mailed to Moab residents for free.
From the outset, The Tribune was clear that “we weren’t going to upset any apple cart with respect to editorial strategy” in Moab, Gustus recalled; the editor, Doug McMurdo, is a local institution and “understands better than we do what’s important to Moabites.” The Tribune saw its role as taking things off McMurdo’s plate like payroll, HR, and the logistics of printing the newspaper. In Southern Utah, drawing from a lesson learned in Moab, Gustus thinks of The Salt Lake Tribune’s role as, “How can we let the journalists focus on the reporting?”
The Moab operation works, she added, “because there’s a community that cares about the future of Moab and is willing to invest in the Times-Independent, and it’s principally a business community that’s supporting the TI vis-à-vis advertising. That may not be the model for Washington County. It may, [but] we’ll have to figure that out.”
Another big-picture takeaway: “People in the communities that we’re serving want to make connections. They want to feel like they know their neighbors, like they have touchstones and that there is somewhere that they can come together,” Gustus said. “I’m not suggesting that that’s The Times-Independent or The Southern Utah Tribune, but I do think we have to figure out how to help facilitate more intentional community-building.”
For now, Gustus said, The Tribune is not considering further launches or expansions, instead focusing on nurturing its Cache Valley and Southern Utah news products, and preparing to drop its paywall.
That said, as soon as The Tribune announced its Southern Utah newspaper, it received some requests to add reporters beyond Washington County, Gustus noted. “We would love to be able to do that,” she said. “We think there are gaps in other counties in Southern Utah — but first we’ve got to make sure that this is a success.”
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