For the first time in its 155 years, and after years of planning, The Salt Lake Tribune is making its daily journalism free to anyone.

“As a nonprofit, we believe that everyone should have access to news and information that can help them make decisions that are going to ultimately, we hope, result in better outcomes,” said Lauren Gustus, The Tribune’s executive editor and CEO.

The shift means Utah’s flagship news organization is moving from a subscriber model to a member-driven one, where support isn’t necessary to access the news.

“We don’t want to be presumptuous,” Gustus added, “but the thinking is we can help strengthen Utah’s communities by removing this barrier, by removing that paywall, so more people have more access, in a time when mis- and disinformation are proliferating across digital platforms.”

Local news organizations across the country have gone through a seismic shift over the last 20 years. Advertising revenue moved to digital giants like Facebook and Amazon, and hedge funds bought large local chains with an eye toward maximizing profits. These developments have resulted in the loss of nearly 3,500 local newspapers since 2005.

Studies have shown that when local news disappears, the cost to live in that community rises, corruption increases and civic engagement falls — because accountability reporting disappears.

Younger consumers generally don’t like paying for news content, said Tom Love, chairman of The Tribune’s board of directors. “There is too much free information available everywhere, no matter how unreliable it might be,” he said.

Dropping the paywall, Love said, makes “an attractive offer” to get those consumers to look at “a trusted, local news outlet covering the things most important to [them].”

Read more: Robert Gehrke: Making the news available at no cost is a massive victory

The Tribune became a nonprofit in 2019. And it took deliberation and care to get to this moment.

“When you change business models, it’s not like flipping a light switch,” said Danyelle White, The Tribune’s chief of content. “Subscriptions were a significant amount of our revenue. We couldn’t just risk all of that while still being responsible for the livelihoods of all the Tribune employees and the sustainability of the broader organization.”

Before the path to free was possible, The Tribune had to dig out from the substantial financial hole its former owners, the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, carved out.

First, Paul Huntsman purchased The Tribune from Alden in 2016. After a layoff and other efforts to right the ship, Huntsman in 2019 agreed to turn the legacy paper into a nonprofit, surrendering sole ownership. The IRS approved the historic shift in October of that year.

Roughly a year later, at the end of 2020, The Tribune’s long-standing joint operating agreement with the Deseret News ended. That opened the door to financial stability, because it meant The Tribune could sell its own advertising and print subscriptions for the first time in decades. The presses were owned by the company formed in the JOA, and those were shut when the JOA dissolved. Both The Tribune and the Deseret News went from printing seven days a week to one.

By late 2021, Gustus announced in a note to readers, The Tribune was not only sustainable but adding reporters and even introducing a second midweek print edition. An article from Nieman Lab, which monitors the news industry, called it “quite the turnaround.”

Collaboration not competition

One key to The Tribune’s sustainability, White said, was to operate like the nonprofit it was — to “stop thinking of other local outlets as competition first and foremost, and more as partners in the same mission of doing our best to inform Utahns and strengthen our communities.”

The Tribune spearheaded two major collaborations with other Utah newsgathering outlets.

The first, the Utah News Collaborative, lets outlets large and small share and republish work from other journalists across Utah, maximizing reach with limited resources. The Tribune also publishes their reporting, lifting up reporting statewide. White called it “one thing we could do to help better serve the entire state.”

The other, the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, enables outlets to team up on and trade stories about the plight of Utah’s best-known natural phenomenon. That effort also connects educators and public interest organizations “to try to save this very important biological entity that we live by and are named after,” White said, “because it affects all of us.”

With those and other initiatives, White said, “we’ve spent a lot of time building, and in some cases rebuilding, trust throughout the state with our audiences.”

Expanding reach

A major addition to The Tribune’s statewide reach came in 2023, when the longtime local owners of The Times-Independent in Moab decided to donate the 127-year-old paper to The Tribune.

Newly nonprofit, The Times-Independent changed its distribution model, mailing nearly 6,000 free copies of its weekly print edition to households across Grand County while also shifting to free online access. Gustus told Nieman Lab the move marked a chance to experiment with the free-to-all model she envisioned for The Tribune.

That test case worked, according to Ciel Hunter, The Tribune’s chief development officer. When the Moab paper moved to free, it offered to refund its subscribers for whatever was left on their annual subscription fee, and “nobody took us up on that.” Instead, subscribers rolled that money over into a one-time donation, Hunter said.

The Moab experiment was one of many, Hunter noted, including making specific types of Tribune content free at times and taking Tribune reporting to different platforms, in an attempt to find new audiences and bring them into the news organization’s ecosystem.

In early 2025, The Tribune again expanded its reach — this time to the north, in Logan and the Cache Valley — partnering with Utah Public Radio to fund a reporter based in the community and launching a local newsletter called “The Cache Crop.”

Last October, The Tribune also launched The Southern Utah Tribune, serving readers in the St. George area and greater Washington County by distributing 40,000 free print copies via mail delivery once a month and offering a free newsletter.

Announcing the paywall’s fall

The Tribune first publicly announced it aimed to one day go free-to-all at its first annual NewsMakers Gala in late 2023. That couldn’t happen, The Tribune shared, without substantial donor support — enough to ensure The Tribune could stay sustainable without a paywall.

The announcement came with news that the nonprofit would make its election coverage free throughout 2024, one of several tests to help understand how the free-to-all model could work.

A question lingered, though: How would subscribers react? To test that, Hunter said, The Tribune contacted 350 subscribers about halfway through 2024 with an offer: End your subscription in exchange for becoming a voluntary member.

After six months, and a fair share of message-testing, 87% of those subscribers stayed on as members — a higher retention rate than expected, Hunter said.

News of The Tribune’s intent to go free picked up speed in late 2024, when Gustus told donors and friends at The Tribune’s next NewsMakers Gala how the organization would pay for it: By raising $1 million in one year, beyond its regular fundraising, to secure a matching $1 million grant from Salt Lake City philanthropists Summer and Chris Gibson; Chris Gibson is also a Tribune board member.

By fall 2025, The Tribune was “on track” to hit that goal and then some, Gustus told Nieman Lab.

“We have not gone into this blind,” Hunter said. “We have been working on this.”

Love said the challenge was twofold: Communicating to existing subscribers to keep them engaged so they would switch to donating to The Tribune, and encouraging nonsubscribers and new readers to “come sample us, read us, join us.”

Punching above its weight

Even before the paywall came down, The Tribune was punching above its weight.

Its website traffic consistently ranks among the top four in the nation for nonprofit news readership, frequently outpacing statewide outlets like CalMatters and The Texas Tribune and holding its own with national outlets like ProPublica, according to Nieman Lab.

That’s because the news organization is constantly working to make sure its reporting is relevant to readers, White said.

“Leaning into what we’re good at, leaning into our bread-and-butter — the accountability [reporting], the explanatory [reporting] — is an effective strategy for us,” White said.

Love said his barometer of success from dropping the paywall can be summed up in two words: “Growth, baby!”

Love said he expects to see more readers and circulation growth across all of The Tribune’s platforms, “creating more engagement with our reporting, editorials, photojournalism ... and ultimately adding to our advertising and donor base.”

Richard Tofel, former president of ProPublica, said The Tribune’s transition to free coincides with a trend of news outlets nationwide trying to fend off ownership from private equity firms and hedge funds, whose strategy typically involves “milking them” until they “kill them.”

“What you all are building there is a really important thing, not only for the communities around Salt Lake and the state, but for the country as a whole,” said Tofel, who also operates Gallatin Advisory, a journalism consultancy.

It’s the kind of “experimentation and community focus” that people are looking for, he said.

The latest historic moment

Providing The Tribune’s award-winning journalism free of charge marks a historic moment. Here’s a timeline of The Tribune’s major milestones:

• In October 2025, The Tribune started The Southern Utah Tribune to serve Washington County. It distributes 40,000 free print copies on the second Tuesday of every month.

• In June 2025, The Tribune ended its 20-year lease at The Gateway, and moved into its current downtown Salt Lake City office.

• In January 2025, The Tribune launched The Cache Crop, a newsletter for Logan and Cache Valley readers in northern Utah that has more than 4,300 subscribers.

• In July 2024, Tribune journalists formed The Salt Lake News Guild, the news outlet’s first labor union. The Tribune recognized the union four days later, and in November 2025, management and the Guild signed a collective bargaining agreement.

• In 2023, The Tribune acquired The Times-Independent in Moab. Every week, nearly 6,000 copies are distributed around Grand County.

• In 2019, The Internal Revenue Service approved The Tribune’s application to become a nonprofit — the first legacy newspaper in the country to do so.

• In 2017, The Tribune was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for its coverage of sexual assault at Utah universities. That reporting began in 2016, when The Tribune found cases where alleged victims who came forward to Brigham Young University’s Title IX office or other authorities were later disciplined for Honor Code violations. Reporters later uncovered information-sharing between BYU police and the school’s Honor Code Office. That work developed into an in-depth investigation of campus policies and practices.

• In 2006, The Tribune launched its YouTube channel. Its first news video covered avalanche safety.

• In 2005, The Tribune moved out of its long-standing office building on Salt Lake City’s Main Street to a new location in The Gateway shopping center.

• In 1997, the Kearns-McCarthy family who had owned The Tribune since 1901 sold the paper to Telecommunications Inc. (TCI), parts of which later became Comcast. The family intended to buy The Tribune back in five years, but those plans were thwarted in 1999, when AT&T acquired TCI. That led to a rollercoaster of ownership changes: Newspaper chain MediaNews Group bought The Tribune from AT&T in 2000; MediaNews Group, saddled with debt, sold it to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in 2010; and Paul Huntsman extracted The Tribune from the hedge fund in 2016.

• In 1995, The Tribune introduced a new way to distribute its reporting: a website. The name sltrib.com was picked because it was an early internet practice to make domain names as short as possible.

• In 1956, Tribune reporters rushed to cover the crash of two airliners over the Grand Canyon, killing 128 people. The following spring, the team was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. The Pulitzer jury noted they “surmounted great difficulties in distance, time and terrain.”

• In 1952, The Tribune and its local competitor, the Deseret News, entered a joint operating agreement, combining their business operations (like advertising and circulation) while keeping separate newsrooms and editorial pages. It was the first of several such deals in two-newspaper cities across the country — and, at the end of 2020, it was one of the last to dissolve.

• In the early 1920s, The Tribune hired Florabel Muir, the paper’s first female reporter. She covered the night police beat, and during her stint here became the first woman in Utah to witness an execution. According to one report, her editor was struck that she didn’t throw up like the man he assigned as her backup reportedly did.

• In 1902, The Tribune launched an afternoon edition, The Salt Lake Telegram. The Tribune sold The Telegram in 1914 and bought it back in 1930. It was disbanded in 1952.

• In 1901, former U.S. Senator Thomas Kearns and business partner David Keith bought The Tribune. When Keith died in 1918, Kearns bought out his partner’s share, and the Kearns/McCarthy family owned the paper for most of the 20th century.

• The first edition of The Salt Lake Daily Tribune and Mining Gazette came off the press on April 15, 1871.

When asked how people can support The Tribune, Gustus reiterated that while the nonprofit believes the news should be accessible to all, it still requires resources to produce. She asks that anyone who is able to support continues to do so by donating.