In Salt Lake, Deseret Has Hold On Local Media

Salt Lake City’s media market is a heady brew of the innovative and the unique. While some special characteristics might be hard to emulate, the region hints at changes that could be in the future for the industry.

Covering the entire state of Utah -- where Salt Lake City is the only major urban area -- the market attracted just under $1 billion in local advertising in 2010. About $142 million, or 14%, of that came from online ads, according to media consultants Borrell Associates. Online dollars are projected to grow to $252 million by 2015, when they will make up 19% of a $1.3 billion local advertising pie.

The big show in town is Deseret Media Companies. The for-profit arm of the Mormon Church -- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- has a television Web site and a newspaper site that include an uncommon amount of religious news.

But to peg Deseret as a quiet, conservatively-run church operation would be a mistake.

This is the company that brought in Clark Gilbert, a Harvard-educated business professor known for aggressively prodding traditional media to adapt. Since his arrival in 2009, Gilbert, now CEO of the company’s new Internet arm, Deseret Digital Media, and its newspaper, the Deseret News, has presided over a 43% cut in newspaper staff and the relocation of survivors to an office building used by the company’s television station, KSL TV.

The paper’s enterprise and investigative reporters work on separate floors, Gilbert said, but most other journalists now are part of a large, integrated newsroom that includes TV, radio and Internet staff as well, said Gilbert.

“We have opted for most of our reporters to be able to work cross-platform,” he said. “We’ve had to ask the team who’s here to really rethink their traditional models of producing a newspaper, journalism,” with everyone expected to think “Web first” and be comfortable tweeting and building an e-mail following, he said.

Despite the newspaper’s cutbacks, print circulation has gone up since August, Gilbert said, and Web traffic has also increased. Deseret Digital Media’s revenue zoomed up 70% from fiscal year 2009 to fiscal 2010, he added without providing dollar numbers.

The paper had an average daily circulation of 69,000 during the six months ending Sept. 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Its Sunday circulation averaged 75,000, according to the same source.

Deseret’s addition of new contributors has been instrumental to the company’s growth during the down economy, Gilbert said. Former NFL player Vai Sikahema and authors Richard and Linda Eyre -- all Mormons -- are on the list of contributors. The company has also recruited prominent people from around the country to an editorial advisory board that writes and suggests stories, Gilbert said.

Some question whether Deseret’s formula would be as successful elsewhere. Its Web sites don’t just provide news to Utah residents, they serve Mormons worldwide, noted Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at The Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalists. “I think their situation is unique, or nearly so,” he said of Deseret.

Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, said he is skeptical about merging newspaper and TV reporting staffs. “A newspaper reporter is very different from a TV reporter. … You’re talking about two very different cultures.”

Still, Borrell is impressed by what he describes as Deseret’s management savvy and entrepreneurial bent, praising KSL in particular.

The television station’s site doesn’t just dominate the competition here, it crushes it. More than 60% of area adults visited KSL.com during a month measured in late 2009, according to The Media Audit, a Houston company that tracks Web traffic. Its closest rival was corporate sibling, newspaper site Deseretnews.com, at 26.7%. That was followed by SLTrib.com, the site for the Deseret paper’s long-time Joint Operating Agreement partner, The Salt Lake Tribune, with 22.3%.

Meanwhile, two additional TV sites, Fox13Now.com and ABC4.com, lured 18.3% and 15.2% of adults, respectively, according to The Media Audit.

To put KSL.com’s market appeal in perspective, the nation’s top newspaper-related sites all clocked in at 56% or less of adults visiting during a month in 2010, according to The Media Audit.

It’s unusual for a TV site to excel like this, Borrell said. “In two-thirds of the markets, the newspaper’s Web site is the leading Web site.” Newspapers were generally first to launch and more focused on building their sites, with TV stations taking a more “lackadaisical” approach, he said.

But that will change, Borrell predicted. TV is better at driving people to the Web, he said. For one thing, its audience doesn’t already have their hands occupied. “I think in very short order -- probably in the next two years -- the largest Web sites are going to be television Web sites in the majority of markets.”

Executives at Fox13Now.com and ABC4.com are more apt to attribute KSL’s success to the site’s free classifieds than to superior management.