Utah's journalism and political communities have been buzzing the last couple weeks with rumors of an impending implosion of the Deseret News. Let me concisely repeat the rumors:

* In the next few weeks, a significant part of the DNews staff will be laid off.

* What remains will leave the Deseret News building in the heart of downtown to be resettled with KSL in the Triad Center.

* The DNews will no longer publish daily, but three days or so a week (it would, of course, continue to exist online with Mormon Times).

The staff at the DNews is so utterly demoralized and terrified that it is impossible to get any of this nailed down on the record. As one DNewser told a Trib colleague: "the stink of fear" permeates the newsroom.

Salt Lake City Weekly's Josh Loftin, a former DNews editor and reporter, tries to make sense of the weak signal coming from inside the monolith of Mormon Media under new strongman Mark Willes.

Despite the recent de-evolution of the 150-year-old DNews under Editor Joe Cannon (photo above) and Willes from the "Christian Science Monitor of the West" to a LDS faith-promoting publication with a purged political staff, it still remained a player in Utah's media, particularly in state government coverage.

Newspapers, including The Tribune, have struggled the last few years with declining revenues following the online information revolution, but the DNews also has been buffeted by pressures to publish news with a positive slant and to advance the LDS religion. Such goals are, of course, an anathema to good journalism.

The funny thing is that everyone in the business thought the DNews would outlast the Tribune because of its iconic position in LDS Church history. But all it took was a couple of suits with a management theory.

Full disclosure: Hard to believe, but I was a reporter at the DNews in the 1980s.