[Newspapers] Here in the small, small world of Salt Lake City media, we've been aware for months of the Deseret Morning News' plan to launch a new Web site, Mormon Times. Yup, honest, it's really called that. For the rest of you, official news of the site broke a few days ago.Of course, God's newspaper can do what it wants, and it always does. But I do get a little pang of nostalgia when I remember back to my first real newspaper job, as a cub reporter in 1981, at what was then the Deseret News. I promise not to go all weepy and memory lane on you, but there was a time in that publication's history when even the power brokers at the LDS mother ship on 50 E. North Temple were mostly content to offer readers a newspaper wide in scope, diverse in coverage and driven to do investigative journalism with little fear of political or religious repercussions. (Interestingly, the vaunted three-person investigative reporting team in the '70s and early '80s was two-thirds non-Mormon)
So. Well. Times change. An editor who once served as a busy Washington D.C. lobbyist, whose brother is a sitting congressman and who never worked for a newspaper before calls the shots now. Just like every other newspaper, the DMN is fighting to survive in an electronic age. Whatever works. It's just ... sad.
(Holly Mullen)
