Salt Lake Tribune to Launch New Super Blog

[Media] In keeping with its constant battle for relevance and readership in this whiz-bang, on-line era, The Salt Lake Tribune will launch a whole new, uber-blog shortly after the first of the year.

Salt Blog has learned that longtime Tribune staff writer Glen Warchol will assume the new post. Warchol, 55, has been with the paper for 10 years and has covered the general assignment, military affairs, legislative and state government beats.

Here at City Weekly, we also appreciate that Warchol has done his time in the alternative newspaper trenches. In previous lives, he was an editor at the defunct Twin Cities Reader in Minnesota and at the Village Voice Media-owned Dallas Observer.

Warchol says he'll be responsible for posting constantly throughout the day, with peak production times coming between 5 a.m. and 9 a.m.--when newspaper Web sites receive their heaviest on-line traffic. In establishing this position, the Trib follows nearly every other major daily in the country. Most papers have set up full-time blogs to sort through and update news stories worldwide for local relevance and to link readers easily to other sites.

Currently, the Trib publishes several beat-specific blogs. Those will continue. Warchol's big bad blog will simply take readers to greater dimensions, and all day long. At least that's what publisher William Dean "Dinky" Singleton and Trib editor Nancy Conway hope. Conway is said to have embraced the super blog concept--going so far out on a limb that she'll support an "edgy" (daily newspapers love that word) voice and Warchol's editorial freedom to be snarky, maybe even kinda-sorta profane (in a family newspaper way).

Oh, and in City Weekly's time-honored obligation to full disclosure, Warchol is my ex-husband and cohort in many past journalistic pursuits.

The Trib hasn't decided on a name for the blog. But the acerbic Warchol tells me he has his own suggestion: "I want to call it 'King Rat.'" (Holly Mullen)