Hey, it’s The Tribune’s new annual report!
Wait, what’s that?
We’ve been thinking of how to be transparent about ourselves. Our whole deal is that we’re a nonprofit news organization that serves this community, and so we want to let you all — you know, the community — know about how the Tribune operates. Hence: an annual report.
Writing this report is me, Andy Larsen, a data columnist and sports reporter at The Tribune. To write this report, I had access to our internal financials and metrics of every kind, publicly-available IRS 990 forms, and I interviewed leaders on both the editorial and business side of the Tribune. I was even given our CEO’s credit card statements.
The headline here is: Honestly, The Tribune is in pretty good shape! There’s no doubt that it’s hard to be a news organization in 2024. But thanks to our subscribers, donors, and advertisers, we’ve built an operation that isn’t going anywhere — one that will continue to lead out on quality journalism in Utah for decades to come.
This report is broken up into four sections. Section 1 will talk about our current business — who we are, how we got here. Section 2 will dig into our news and audience strategy. Section 3 will be forward looking: our goals for the future and how we hope to get there. And finally, Section 4 is going to be my favorite: hardcore financial numbers for how we make and spend money, for the nerds among us.
Let’s dig in.
Section 1: Where The Tribune is now
So, yeah, we’re a nonprofit news organization.
What does that mean? Well, we’re governed by a board of 11 volunteer directors who have big-time community ties in Utah. People like Tessa Arneson, the founder of Salt Lake City’s Maven District; Rebecca Chavez-Houck, former Utah state representative; Sarah George, who ran the Natural History Museum of Utah; and Randy Dryer, a former journalist and First Amendment law professor at the University of Utah.
Our board chair is Tom Love, recently retired as a leader of Love Communications. He’s also been the board chair for the Utah Symphony/Utah Opera and the United Way. Tom became board chair of The Trib in February, replacing Paul Huntsman.
Paul was instrumental in the survival of The Tribune years ago by extracting it from the evil hedge funds, and we are immensely grateful for his intervention, along with his support in running the paper and transitioning it to a nonprofit. I often hear from people who believe he is still involved in running or funding The Tribune, but neither he nor the Huntsman family are currently.
Being run by this community board of directors on rotating 3-year terms means our directive from the top is truly to do the best journalism for Utah that we possibly can. (If our board thinks we’re doing a bad job at that, it can replace our top officers: Executive Editor/CEO Lauren Gustus and Chief Development Officer Ciel Hunter.)
Our leadership, then, has given us writers a north star: be essential. The goal is to be as useful as possible to as many Utahns as possible. That can happen through game-changing accountability journalism in government or environment, or it can happen through more light-hearted culture and sports coverage. Regardless, we want The Tribune to be impactful to you.
This community-first philosophy also means that we can be collaborative with other news organizations. Look, my first instinct as a journalist is to be competitive, not collaborative — to try to beat the competition to get the story first. This has been a real mind shift for me. But if we truly want to improve journalism in Utah overall, not just at The Tribune, working together with others makes sense.
So we founded the Utah News Collaborative, a group of Utah news outlets who can share stories and information with one another. We have 12 members at this point, including the Fox13 TV station, the Park Record in Park City, the Provo Daily Herald, the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and the St. George News.
The Taylor family donated The Moab Times-Independent to us in 2023, and we promptly made it a nonprofit; we give the print section out to everyone in Moab for free and make its online news free to all.
Being a nonprofit means we are duty-bound to put our revenues back into the main goal: investing in journalism in Utah.
For that reason, The Tribune board recently voted to restructure our advertising work so we can focus on our core mission. Essentially, a group of Tribune ad employees were building a burgeoning business within The Tribune’s advertising department but outside of the purview of Utah journalism. So a new and separate digital agency was formed — six advertising employees went to work for it, and they’re now getting the chance to succeed outside of the nonprofit structure. We wish them well.
By the way, it turns out that not very many people know about our nonprofit status! We found this out because we surveyed folks in November, asking residents in Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber, Washington, and Summit counties about their news habits and The Tribune specifically. We discovered that only 32% of people knew The Trib was a nonprofit. Now, if you’re the kind of person who reads newspaper annual reports, you’re probably one of those 32%... but y’all should tell your friends.
Another thing you should tell your friends: The Tribune is actually doing well financially.
No, for real! We had $15.3 million in revenue last year, and made a net revenue of $779K on that. Both numbers are increasing:
We have 85 staffers working for us, 60 who primarily work in making our news products every day. Our last layoff was in 2018 — and we have not only stabilized our news staffing levels, we have grown them by about 10%. We’ve also seen payroll costs go up by even more:
Section 2: Our editorial strategy and results
As we’ve transitioned into a nonprofit, we’ve made more of an effort to listen to and think about community needs more often. The news business can sometimes become pretty siloed in the affairs of the elite — government figures, business executives and the like. But we want to more directly communicate with everybody in all walks of life.
So we have multiple full-time roles dedicated to this: our Community Engagement Editor, for example, works to connect Utah residents with Tribune editors and journalists. Our Voices Editor proactively reaches out to those who haven’t had their chance in the proverbial sun to share their stories through opinion columns and features. We’ve started doing an annual source audit, in which writers count the folks we speak to for our stories and see if they, overall, represent the state of Utah, demographically and economically.
And I think that mentality has been reflected in our staff’s journalism. Jessica Miller has changed Utah multiple times — first by her Pulitzer-winning joint coverage of the “perverse, punitive and cruel treatment” given to sexual-assault victims at BYU, but most recently by highlighting the problems within Utah therapists, life coaching, and teen treatment centers. Courtney Tanner’s coverage of the problems within the University of Utah’s safety procedures, as well as how the Ute tribe’s education has suffered, has led her to become perhaps the state’s most frequently award-winning journalist. Leia Larsen’s coverage of the Utah Legislature’s grant to a Utah Lake developer led to the cancellation of that grant. She was just named the “Best newspaper reporter” in Utah in 2023 by the Utah Society of Professional Journalists.
But the truth is that we can go on and on about the quality of our reporters. Robert Gehrke and Bryan Schott’s reporting on Attorney General Sean Reyes’ malfeasances led to his decision to not run again. Sofia Jeremias’ reporting on community land grants for more affordable housing led to $15 million towards those efforts. Mark Eddington’s coverage of southern Utah has brought more focus to an under-considered community. Etc, etc, etc.
Honestly, the quality of my coworkers’ coverage changes the state of Utah nearly every day. I know that’s corny. It’s true. Over and over again, The Tribune’s reporting has led to real changes in our state — and I can’t even begin to imagine how some of Utah’s bad actors would operate if they knew we weren’t here to hold them accountable.
A majority of The Tribune’s news employees — including me! — also last week announced the intent to start a union. The Salt Lake News Guild seeks to represent Tribune news workers in labor negotiations, and you can read its mission statement here, along with Tribune management’s response here. As I write this, we are in the super early days in this process, but it is the hope and expectation of both the Guild leadership and Trib management that I’ve talked to that this will go rather cordially.
Right now, The Tribune has 60 news staff, which include journalists, photographers, and editors. Among those 60, the median salary is $66,539. We’re also currently hiring for two open slots. Here’s the breakdown of how many people are employed in which roles; roll over the chart to interact with it.
Again, mythbusting a bit: some people complain about the amount of coverage we have on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From my perspective, the church is perhaps the most powerful institution in the state, and it is critical for us as an independent outlet to cover all aspects of its impact. We have two excellent journalists covering them, Peggy Fletcher Stack and Tamarra Kemsley, and senior managing editor Dave Noyce overseeing their efforts. Covering them also just makes fiscal sense: LDS stories are frequently our most successful at generating subscribers.
Speaking of subscribers, as you’d expect in 2024, our print subscriber count is dropping and our digital subscriber count is increasing.
We’ve been actually somewhat heartened at how many of our print subscribers have retained their subscriptions — our estimates derived in part from results from other print newspapers would indicate that we should have expected bigger drops. They are a loyal audience, and we love them so. We still make a significant amount of revenue from print, and want it to remain a part of The Trib’s business.
Digital subscriptions, meanwhile, have been going relatively well. A couple of years ago, when management started sharing subscription info with us, I was surprised to learn that they were quite sale-dependent.
Relative to industry standards, higher numbers of people stay on after the sale price ends, though. Optimistically, that’s because they’re impressed with the journalism. But upon further investigation, we also have some great behind-the-scenes staffers who study how to keep people around. They’ve created new subscriber “journeys” to impress upon people the value of their subscription, and it seems to work well.
So now we’ve shifted our strategy to reflect that skill — to have a permanent introductory offer. New Tribune subscribers can join for just a total $8 for all three initial months, which then renews at $8/month after that.
Overall, we averaged 2.18 million users per month in 2023. Industry-wide, audience habits are shifting away from getting news from typing in a website URL in favor of simply following specific news outlets on other sources, like social media and newsletters.
But that’s a benefit of our nonprofit identity: we don’t have to only prioritize driving people to our website. We can reach people wherever they are. Alternate forms of coverage work for us.
At the moment, we have just over 88,000 newsletter subscribers. Because this method allows us to reach people directly through their email inboxes, we’d like to expand that method of distribution.
And then we know that our social media audience is where most people are going to be learning information from The Salt Lake Tribune moving forward. That audience is significantly growing.
Section 3: The Tribune in the future
But let’s be honest: we’re not totally satisfied with those numbers. We want to bring high quality journalism to all Utahns. We recognize that in order to remain essential, we have to evolve.
How?
Well, we want to continue to expand The Tribune’s newsroom. Our readers, in particular, want us to focus on accountability and investigative journalism, and so we want to make hires in that area. In particular, local government, public education, and environmental reporting are three key focuses of ours that will drive The Tribune’s growth strategy moving forward.
We also want to continue to grow our work around the state of Utah. The Utah News Collaborative and Great Salt Lake Collaborative are awesome examples of the kinds of things we can accomplish with only a few years of work — but can we do more? Can more be done to cover news better outside of the Wasatch Front? Can we do more to help other small, local news organizations survive and thrive? I think we can. Sharing stories is an obvious one, but collaborating on tech, HR, payroll, and more can significantly lessen the burden behind the scenes for those mom-and-pop local news outlets.
Strengthening journalism isn’t enough, though. We have to make sure it’s relevant and accessible, which means widening our reach. The Tribune’s brand hits with those who have been reading us for a long time — but what about those who haven’t been? We can do more to talk to those outside of our current readership base. Of course, that starts by listening more, and making journalism that’s relevant to those audiences — but we also need to make that journalism easy to access.
Right now, that means social media. We need to continue to grow our audiences on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Yes, even if that means they never visit The Salt Lake Tribune website. Our goal isn’t to capture people in our ecosystem, it’s to inform them. We can, and should, improve our ability to share our reporters’ insights on those platforms.
But those who want more details — the full story that isn’t easy to tell in the small bites on social media — need to be able to access our website more often, too. To be sure, requiring people to subscribe to read more than 3 stories a month has been a necessary evil, in that the income it has generated has paid our reporters’ salaries and kept The Tribune afloat. There’s no doubt, though, that it has also limited some number of people from reading our journalism.
Our goal is, at some point in the years to come, to remove that paywall. To allow everyone, regardless of their ability to pay, to read more Tribune journalism.
It’s a push we’ve started to make this year — we’ve raised $340,000 and counting to fully remove the paywall on all of our election coverage ahead of the critical 2024 races. We’re not there yet from an income point of view (more on that later) to make our website free, but we hope to grow our donor base and income to the point that we’ll be able to open everything up to everyone.
We also want to build better bones for The Tribune’s future. What do I mean by that?
First of all, we’re looking for a new physical home.
For the last two decades, we’ve been in offices at The Gateway, in a way-too-expensive long-term lease that no longer reflects the post-pandemic real estate market we’re in now. That lease ends in the middle of 2025. We have that amount of time to figure out where we want to work moving forward — we’d like it to be in Salt Lake City and in a space where the community can interact with us more, too. If you have any ideas for us, please let us know by emailing development@sltrib.com.
Second, we just have to improve our tech.
We’ve cobbled together various third-party technical solutions — our website is run by Washington Post’s Arc XP, our app uses PageSuite, our subscriber system is run by Piano, and our donation system is run by News Revenue Hub. There are times when it doesn’t all work together well, and while our four-person product team sometimes can make improvements, the experience isn’t what it should be overall. We need to dial this in — and again, if you want to help us in these efforts, email development@sltrib.com.
Third, we have to have a significant reserve fund. Despite apocalyptic predictions to the contrary, the economy has not collapsed in the last few years. That being said, we need to grow a long-term reserve so the next downturn in the market doesn’t lead to layoffs. They are too damaging to the soul of The Tribune, and we should do everything we can to prevent them.
To all of these ends, our fundraising team is actively seeking the following targeted one-time, big-time donations in the six-to seven figure range from those in our community who want to leave a lasting legacy on journalism. Those include specific amounts for:
- Statewide expansion, including editorial staffing to cover communities throughout Utah.
- Establishing the Tribune Reporting Fund, which can be our backbone moving forward.
- A targeted three-year investment in editorial roles to further strengthen the internal Tribune newsroom.
- Funds to rebuild our tech stack — both for implementation and three years of maintenance.
- Finally, the donations necessary to transition the whole website to free access for all.
I know that’s a lot of money. Most reading this don’t have access to that. But if you do, contact development@sltrib.com for more information on your specific point of interest.
Of course, it’s not only big donations that matter. Roughly one-third of our donation revenue is from individual donors; roughly 87% give under $100.
Our First Amendment Society is also growing, now 136 members strong. That’s our exclusive membership program for supporters who pledge at least $1000 in support per year; they also get access to member-only updates and events.
We also dearly appreciate any and all of our basic and supporting subscribers — you play a huge role in keeping Utahns informed.
But even if you have zero money to help, there are a few things you can do for free. Following The Salt Lake Tribune on social media platforms like Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube, and even TikTok raises our profile and can lead to a snowball effect, further increasing the reach of our journalism. Obviously, sharing posts from those pages helps too. The same goes with subscribing to Tribune newsletters. All of these actions also tend to impress grant givers as well, leading to more financial support.
Section 4: Finances
Okay, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. How does the Tribune make money, and how do we spend it?
There are three main sources of revenue: subscribers, donors, and advertising.
Among subscribers, our revenue is nearly evenly split between our print and digital products. In 2023, our print income outweighed our digital income, but our 2024 projections anticipate that will flip. We also get a small amount of income from selling single copies of our Sunday section in grocery stores, gas stations, and so on.
Overall, we earn just under $5 million per year from our subscribers.
How about donors? In general, The Tribune has a wide base of donors who have either given one-time or annual donations.
Donors gave about $3.3 million in 2023, and we project it to be about $3.8 million in 2024. We receive money from individuals, major grants, and companies. All of our donors who gave more than $5,000 are listed here.
Finally, we earn about $5.2 million in advertising. Rather than type it all out, I’ll just show you the graph:
All in all, there was $15.3 million in revenue in 2023. We anticipate that number to decrease to about $14.8 million with the reorganization in advertising — but we expect our expenditures to decline by more. In other words, we expect The Tribune’s business to be in a better place moving forward.
So where do those revenues go?
The majority of it is payroll, as you’d expect. In 2024, we’ll spend $6.4 million on salaries and another $2.1 million in benefits, payroll taxes, bonuses, 401(k) matches, and so on, for a total of $8.5 million on our people.
From there, we have a number of annoying expenses that make up the rest of our costs. The largest in 2023 and in 2024 was what we spent on our advertising team’s expenses, though that decreases from $1.6 million to $1.1 million given the advertising changes.
Other than that, our building rent is most expensive, at a total of $769,000. Printing the physical newspaper cost $490,000 last year, then distributing it cost an additional $481,000. Wire services costs went down as we transitioned from the Associated Press to the New York Times wire, decreasing from $311K to $201K. All of our various software services will cost us $638K in 2024.
There are some further expenses not listed above, all under $75K — like insurance, accounting, utilities, equipment repairs, office supplies, legal fees, and so on. Those miscellaneous expenses total $483,887.
Conclusion
Phew! Thanks for making it through all of that.
It’s funny — The Salt Lake Tribune has been around for 154 years, right? I remember reading it on the kitchen counter in the morning as I ate cereal before school growing up, and now I work here. That story has repeated itself for, like, seven generations now. We retain that century-old institutional brand and reputation.
But in a lot of ways, in 2024, working at The Tribune feels like working at a startup. The change to a nonprofit simply shifted so much about our approach to our business. It’s absolutely led our news outfit to sustainability, which is something to be eternally grateful for in our current moment.
Goodness, there’s so much more opportunity for us to make a difference, though. There are so many stories we’re missing right now because our staff is busy covering something somewhere else.
We can and should increase the number of questioning eyes we have on Salt Lake and the state as a whole. We definitely should expand our reach so as many people as possible see and understand that reporting.
As Utah’s population grows, so too does its need for community-oriented watchdog journalism. We want to meet that need, and we will be able to. Thanks — entirely — to your help.
