 and for business innovation for the slot like Tribune. Take it away. And I should say the folks who have created the unprecedented first step, the first for-profit news organization in America that has successfully convinced the IRS to convert it to nonprofit status. Congratulations. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Julie. So as Julie mentioned, I am the publisher and owner of the Salt Lake Tribune. I hope next week to be the chairman of the board as we legally make the transition to a nonprofit. We put our application in this last winter. I expected a ruling with a lot of questions in February is what I was told. And we received a letter from the IRS last November accepting our application as is. So we spent the last three months working through the transition. And we're just right on the cusp now of legally now moving all of the assets into a nonprofit entity. But I'm so grateful to be able to share a little bit about our story with you today. I come from a family of entrepreneurs, of civic-minded individuals, as well as philanthropists. And as Julie mentioned, my day job, which I thought I'd be spending the vast majority of my time, is in investments, not too dissimilar to what you would find in private equity. And when the opportunity came up to acquire the Salt Lake Tribune, which four years ago was in financial turmoil due to some short-term decisions that the hedge fund owner had done to the paper, I realized that as I looked at our community going forward, that our community simply would not be able to function as it has been. And as we look at all the challenges and opportunities going forward to not have the paper of record for the last 150 years in the state of Utah. And so as we've gone down this journey, I do not have a background in journalism. I never expected to be a publisher five years ago. I went around the country, and I visited with a lot of the leaders, many of you here in the room, Alberto being one, the Lenfest Institute, and so many others. And I realized that the pathway that we needed to go down to, and again, it was all about long-term sustainability. The business model for local newspapers is completely broken, as the industry has been shifting from a print product to a digital product. And I think every newspaper and community needs to figure out what that right pathway is. And for us, like a lot of problems that was mentioned and challenges that was mentioned earlier this morning, problems are solved on the local level. We had to bring the stewardship back to the local community and have some leadership and to be able to solve this moving forward. This is something that we would not be able to do without the strong support of not only of our community leaders, but our citizens at large. And so we're very early on in this experiment. And so far, the community has been very, very supportive. We're very encouraged by what we're hearing. And really, really grateful for the position that we're in right now and very confident that we're going to be able to sustain this longer term. Well, I want to, again, thank everyone for being here. I also want to just give a shout out to my sisters in arms who've really been with us from the very beginning. Jennifer Preston at night, Terry Quinn from the Texas Tribune, and Annie Madonia from Lenfest. These women, and there are so many in the room, have taken steps forward. We may be the first print and legacy metropolitan daily to become a nonprofit. But there are many models out there that we're able to not put too fine a point on, to steal from, very generously. So I'm, like Paul, I don't come from the journalistic background. I've spent my life in nonprofits and public service and some work with foundations. And in some ways, I kind of see myself as the test case for a person that would pay more for the news that is so important to all the work that I've done in my life. And when Paul approached me and said, I have this idea to turn the paper into a nonprofit, it really just felt like a natural. And I had absolute confidence that the IRS would support our idea because newspapers are, as Alberto said, just clearly for the public good. The only difference with our model is that now that public good is shared between our institution and the community that we serve. The leadership of the paper, the way we interact with the community, our accountability to them has deepened by our becoming a not-for-profit. And our vision, and it's one I hope that we'll be able to share our success with you over the long term, is to really help create a new and sustainable model for institutions like ours that are the paper of record in their communities that are vital to the civil and civic. And I want to emphasize civil and civic discourse that we need in our state to become the state we want to be in the democracy we believe we are in the United States. Our model is really adaptable. When we approached the IRS, we said, everything we're doing now, we want to continue to be able to do. Sell advertising for as much and as long as we can. Sell subscriptions which aren't necessarily deductible because they are good in a service, but continue to receive the revenue from the community that values what we provide to allow philanthropists, national, for those of you in the room, national philanthropists as well as local philanthropists to support this model and to support the tool that journalism brings to our democracy. We're also doing more community engagement work and we'll look for ways to deepen our discourse with the community. The only thing we don't do now is endorse candidates, which from my point of view is really helpful because Paul's brother is running for governor. So if things weren't complicated enough, being able to give that up. But we certainly will continue to have a very strong opinion page. One of the nice things too that a nonprofit model allows us is to provide and amplify the diversity of voices that can be on that opinion page. So we're reaching deeper into the community to find a place for again, that civil civic dialogue. We're also creating a longer term solution called the Utah Journalism Foundation. This is an endowment. Our immediate goal is to raise about $60 million, 20 by the end of next year. And the earnings from that endowment will go to support not only the Salt Lake Tribune, but also emerging voices in our community. We're concerned about the rural communities in our states that are losing their local journalism. We're concerned about emerging voices like our really large and vibrant refugee community in Utah, our tribal nations, our large Latinx community. We wanna make sure that as people lose their local journalism, we're there to help support it. And I think that becoming a nonprofit opens up all kinds of really exciting, exciting opportunities for collaboration, for deepening our engagement with our members, for community ownership, community accountability, and incredible community journalism. We look forward to sharing our progress with each of you and thank you for all the cheering that you've been doing for us. It means a tremendous amount to us. So the way this is gonna go is I'm gonna ask a few questions and then we're gonna open it up in about 15 minutes. But I wanna start with you, Diane. You and Russ Muson have been real pioneers in forging the notion of philanthropic support for journalism as core part of your mission. How did you convince your other philanthropic partners to do it? How did you build the base of support in your local community so that this is business as usual and not just a one-off? It's become very complicated. In the old days, you could put an ad in the Anchorage Daily News and on the Channel 2 News and you'd reach the entire state pretty much. There is no way to really get information out very efficiently anymore. So it really requires if you're involved in issues like we are and homelessness is a very complicated issue and it's not easily understood and it's easily misunderstood. So this time around it actually was easy. I think we're gonna have seven or eight other partners who are gonna fund it and it's been very easy to get them to do so. First of all, we all wanna have impact with our philanthropic dollars. And there's something about a newspaper that is not social media, it's not radio, it's not TV. You can place a newspaper on the seat of a state legislator so that when they get in their chair, it's sitting there and the front page is about alcohol and it had a very direct impact, the reporting on policy. So if you're serious in philanthropy and you're trying to change public norms, change public policy, you can't do it without a media strategy and I think we have all figured out it's gotta be part of the plan. Amen. Thank you. And David, just as a follow up, last night, Mindy Mark has said something that really struck me which was that given the constraint resources she was dealing with, she had to create some priorities in what her reporters were focusing on and those priorities were accountability and investigative journalism. And this is a tension in the newsroom because part of your job is covering the school board hearings and covering the zoning hearings and reporting on who's running for what office and just if you could give a few minutes on how you balance those tensions or how you deal with those tensions in a constrained resource environment. As everything has shrunk, it's just gotten harder and there needs to be more horsepower for local reporting all the way around. Investigative reporting, accountability reporting, it's hard, it's time intensive, it's expensive. But we've also, we've found I think like pretty much every newsroom has found public, the community really values that kind of reporting. So we are trying everything we can to get support for that kind of reporting but that's not the only job we have, it's not the only thing that our community expects from us and that really is the rub. I mean it's covering institutions that are important day to day and for us it's just covering important breaking news is important for us online. That's a big part of our audience and so it's just trying to make smart choices every day and hopefully building more resources as we go along. Paul and Frazier, so getting the IRS to give you I guess preliminary approval because it's a five year test process means that you've got to prove two things that you have a governance that's an independent board of directors representative of the community you serve and it means that you have to build a broad and diverse base of support. How are you planning on doing both of those? Well if I can just highlight the second part of the question of building out a board. We're gonna be holding our first board meeting this Friday which I'm really excited about and as you talk about a diverse board for a newspaper just take a look who our core reader base is. It's white, it's highly educated, it's center left and you can almost draw a fairly narrow circle in terms of the geographic region in Salt Lake City of where most of our readers are from. So as you look at a broader diverse audience to me my priority in building out a board was to go young and when I mean young I mean very young as in the 20s more of a technological oriented group of individuals as well as begin to reach out to our diverse populations who I believe that the paper in the past few decades has not done a very good job in reaching out to and then we also have to maintain a presence of our existing readers which is the group that I just described. So as I'm collecting this group we've got individuals that are in their late 70s and we have individuals in their mid 20s with a wide variety of ideological backgrounds of coming at it with a variety of different understands of technological tools but all with a passion of journalism and wanting to solve this and wanting to broaden the reach of our audience in terms of how is journalism gonna look and what is our focus gonna be as we enter into 2021. So I'm really looking forward to this very, very diverse group of individuals and the challenges that I have given them to really look at broadening the appeal of our journalism to reach a much broader and a much younger audience that needs to be much more engaged in journalism. Great, and part two. Yeah, in terms of diversifying the funding source and to make sure that we don't have just one or two major funders. I mean that's the big public asset test. We launched a drip campaign and drip funder as a campaign right after we became a not-for-profit to explain to our readers, newsletter readers as well as paying subscribers what we were up to and what we asked them to do. And I'm really pleased that to date we've had almost 2000 people come forward with a donation not even tied to access to the paper but just saying go team and those grants have those gifts have ranged from a dollar to $10,000 and this was just in a very light touch. We're also establishing a major gift program and of course we're getting the support of our key local foundations. I think that the diversity of the size of gifts says something. I think we also surveyed our readers and asked them what, and people who weren't readers and asked them what life would be like without the Tribune and would they be willing to support it either by subscribing or by making a donation. And granted it was a group of people that we thought were enthusiastic but we heard that 80% said they really couldn't imagine life in Utah without the Tribune. That is astonishing to me and what we need to do is convert them now to supporters in a bigger sense but that's very, very, very, I think hopeful for our future. It's very promising. I think I probably have room for one or two last questions. I'm gonna go back to David and Diane. You have both been extraordinarily entrepreneurial and seeking out every possible local and national resource to build up and beef up your reporting at the Daily News. What is that meant for the newsroom? That must have created some sort of tensions or changes in how you actually do your job every day. There's just been so much evolution over the past few years that I think that has become just part of it, although kind of at every step, I think what we've at least tried to do is find a way to do these things that maintain our core values. It has to do with its local, it has to do with maintaining those journalistic values. It has the things evolved and I think that's what I'd say. Great. Should we open it up? Yes. Questions. We have Mike Brenner's question up here. Thank you and it's so nice to have a happy panel. Something good going on. So I guess my question is, is there a limit to this? Are there communities or newspapers where you feel that the non-profit model or the approaches that you're taking, is there sort of a minimum viable product limitation here? And if so, what is it? What are sort of the minimum requirements for a community or a paper to take this path? I have a thought about that and I know that there are many of you in the room represent community foundations. I think that the path that you all have taken to place funds to support local journalism in a non-profit like a community foundation is open to any newspaper, any media organization of any size. There's nothing that really would prohibit you from creating a contract with the local community foundation to do certain types of work. We're not saying that every organization should take the leap that we have. I think Paul's a really unique person who's willing to give up a tremendous asset and the power that comes with the voice of a newspaper to the community. I mean Paul, honestly, it's a remarkable thing for someone to do. And I don't know how many other Paul Huntsman's there are out in the country who would be willing to turn over an institution like this to the community it serves. But that doesn't mean that there's things along the way, along the continuum that couldn't be used by other communities and other papers. Hello, my name is Ira Perman. I'm with the Atwood Foundation in Anchorage, Alaska, a foundation that is built on the prior fortunes of the media. And first I'd like to applaud the four of you for being pioneers. You really are doing some remarkable work that is inspiring the field. Certainly the Rasmussen Foundation and the Daily News inspire the work that we do. I have a question for Fraser and Paul. You guys are the first ones to make this change to a not-for-profit, still as a print media. And you're looking for funding to make that work. In 1967, Congress put in effect the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides public funds for broadcast entities, 1,400 of them, I understand. Would you be interested in hearing ideas of expanding that to print media? Well, I'll just say that this is a unique comment. I don't know if all of you will understand. As it relates to Salt Lake City, Utah. So Salt Lake is home to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or the Mormon Church. There was a story that just came out from the Washington Post about their balance sheet being over $100 billion. And so the question that I've received by many is, would you accept a contribution from the Mormon Church? And I often dovetail that as well. Would you accept a contribution, or would you allow the government to subsidize your work as well? And I've really thought a lot about that, and I'll be honest, I'm not sure really what the answer is on that. You know, considering and looking at how reckless some of our politicians have been as it relates to different organizations that they don't like that are funded, would I want to be tied into that or have our newspaper associated with that? I think that we can meet the funding obligations from among the community. There is so much money out there in the country that philanthropic funds that are trying to find their way to good causes. And then what I've seen that if you appeal to those individuals, those organizations, those foundations, there really is a willing appetite from members of the community that really want to support regardless of their ideology or background. They all want to see a strong and vibrant local newspaper. And so, again, I would be very hesitant to accept federal funds, but I think that the funds are there among local philanthropists. Thank you. We have a question back here. My question is for Paul. I'm Marcelle Epley, the president and CEO of the Long Beach Community Foundation. I'm here with Mark Yen, our board member, and David Summers from the Long Beach Post. And we've been exploring models in Long Beach. And one of the question marks kind of in my mind is in terms of your board. So I heard you say that you're having your first board meeting soon. Yes. Have you thought about the challenge between sort of the control of the board versus it was the publisher and the staff and the editors. And I don't know if you're relinquishing control or if it's a policy board. Like, what is the role of the board and how much do they really have access to into the day-to-day and the decisions of the newspaper? Sure, sure. So one of the first documents that we drafted was the bylaws of the newspaper. There's a very strict wall between the board and the newspaper itself. The role of the board is like, is not unlike any other nonprofit board. It's provide the resources to the newspaper to ensure that they can do their job. And so, you know, the newspaper and myself, we've had a very good working relationship. I've really looked at my role over the last three years is to ensure that the newspaper has resources to, you know, to do their job, to provide independent journalism to our community. And I really look at our board. You know, obviously we've got bylaws in place. And so, I'm not too concerned. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next year. Will there be, I think, the greater concern is when I go out and solicit seven-figure donations from members in the community and when there's stories that are about them. I expect to be getting calls from them. And so, you know, will that be a challenge? Sure. But I think that's just, you know, I just think that's the world that we're going to have to work through. And again, we're sort of transitioning into this era. But I'm not concerned with the board at all because, again, we've got very strict bylaws in terms of the board's role and responsibilities to ensure that we have resources. Dan, you wanted to add something. Sure. Before getting into philanthropy, because let's face it, nobody, when they're a little kid, somebody says, what do you want to do when you grow up, says, I want to be in philanthropy. We all fall into it from somewhere. I ran the Alaska Public Radio Network, which is a 26-station network, a news network, basically morning, noon, and night. And so I would say not all federal money is the same, not all government money is the same. Would we have taken direct support from the federal government for our news programming? No, we would not. Did we take money from the National Endowment for the Arts for Arts Program? Yes, we did. Did we take money from the Department of Commerce for equipment? We did. And in addition to that, with public radio underwriting, we had money from oil companies, from banks, from telephone companies, all of whom were covered by the news. And I don't believe it ever affected anything that appeared in the news. Who took the phone calls from the angry companies? I did. My friend Sheila Toomey, used to use work for you, taught me, one of your long-time great reporters, said, when they called, just say, I totally agree with you, reporters are scum. I couldn't agree with you. I am so sympathetic by what just happened. You know, you deal with it, but I think, did they cancel their underwriting? I can't remember anyone ever did. Occasionally, an advertiser will stop advertising. They almost always come back. Why? They want to be associated with us, because we're popular with the public, the public values us, and they know if their name appears at the end of the news, it's positive for them. So you just manage it. So I wouldn't say, at all, that I have a big issue with government funding. Julie, good luck. Hi, Laura, I'm from San Francisco. I had a question for Diane and David, and I just wanted to know if your coverage of alcohol and alcohol abuse has led to a change in the amount of money that has been awarded from the legislature, or made a difference in the laws or the public health initiatives that have, and has there been a different kind of support for programs for recovery or more education that is coming not from the news, but really actually in schools and public health organizations? Absolutely. So probably the biggest outcome we can show is that the age of people having their first drink is going up, and the incidence of binge drinking is going down. Can you attribute it all to the coverage? Of course not, but we definitely think it's a factor. In terms of funding, there was significant funding that came from the legislature for Recovery Alaska and its efforts. Everything about trauma-informed care. So a lot of people who have issues later on behavioral health experience trauma as children and getting that more embedded into healthcare provision. The new, we have legalized POT in the state, a significant amount of that money is going into after-school programs for kids to try and provide healthy alternatives. And I really think Recovery Alaska has been successful actually in changing the alcohol laws in the state of Alaska. So for example, there are very severe penalties for young people who drink. And I think that's one of the things that people who drank and were caught. If you were 14 years old and you were caught drinking in Alaska, it stayed on the record the rest of your life. If you were 14 years old and killed somebody, it got taken off your record when you were 18. And it just happened because people were angry about some, it was a young person driving, killed a cop on the road, and it was an overreaction. What happened is the penalties were so severe. And it seemed counter-intuitive that law enforcement officials were reluctant to enforce the law because they didn't want to saddle a kid with an alcohol charge that was discoverable if they wanted to get into the military, go to college, get a scholarship, and so on. So it wasn't enforced. So we actually had a change to like a parking ticket. And you could get rid of the parking ticket if you attended an alcohol class. And so clearly, and the background of that was the coverage in the Anchorage Daily News. We did a similar project after that with the Fairbanks News Minor, which is now a non-profit following in your footsteps as well. So I think there is a direct relationship between awareness among policymakers and from that coverage. But just to add, that's really not something we set out to do. We really were kind of doing our own thing. There really wasn't coordination like that. We were doing a deep exploration of the problem. And I just really want to emphasize that that we were solely in control of the content. The funders didn't know what the content was before it was published. And if it had impact, that was great, but that really wasn't our objective. It was to show the problem and the community could react as it chose. So here are four portraits of civic leadership. And I want to give every one of you the last word before we end this session. But I also want to thank you all for your extraordinary leadership and energy and enthusiasm and leading the path forward. And so last words. If any news organizations or funders are considering what we're talking about, I would just... My advice would be that there has to be some level of trust going into it, but there then needs to be very clear agreement what the rules are, where the lines are that everybody understands entering into it. I'd agree. And I think the last thing David said, each of our organizations went into this relationship with different objectives, but they were complementary and I think the outcomes were good for both organizations. I'd say there are a lot of experts in this room. We've benefited from the help of the news revenue hub from our friends at Lenfest, from Facebook and Report for America. There's so many tools available to us that no matter where you find yourself in the spectrum of a for-profit to a not-for-profit, take advantage of the wonderful investments that have been made by some of the major foundations in this nation to uplift all of us. So this last week, I just watched the docudrama of George Washington and I was reminded of the fact that in an age of disruption and where change is happening at lightning speed, that the work of journalism has not changed since the time of George Washington and the way that we consume it, the way that we deliver it, will continue to evolve and change, but the hard work that journalists do has never changed from the foundation of our country and will not change. Thank you.