Utah's Story - 150 Years of Photography from the Salt Lake Tribune (Season 2, Ep. 18)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, senior public historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience.
If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, this is the place.
My guest today is Salt Lake Tribune reporter and project editor, Matt Canham and Jeremy Harmon, who was until recently the director of photography at the Salt Lake Tribune. Good morning, Matt. Good morning, Jeremy.

**Matt Canham** (0:49)
Good morning.

**Jeremy Harmon** (0:50)
Good morning. Happy to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (0:52)
So glad you're here. Jeremy and Matt have joined me on Speak Your Piece to discuss the 2020 published book Utah Stories, 150 years of photography from the Salt Lake Tribune.
Now, as a reporter and project editor, Matt Canham has served in this capacity and has worked. Well, let's see, when did you start working for the paper?

**Matt Canham** (1:16)
I started working at the paper back in 2002

**Brad Westwood** (1:22)
And he has had a number of positions in the paper since.
Now, previously, Matt has worked as an investigative reporter, as a senior managing editor. He was involved with the papers reporting in Washington, DC. How long were you a correspondent there, Matt?

**Matt Canham** (1:43)
I spent seven years in Washington.

**Brad Westwood** (1:46)
Jeremy is now the director of photography. He's our second guest. Photography and visuals for the Tennessean and the US Today's South Region based in Nashville, Tennessee. Before working for the Tennessean, Jeremy worked for the Salt Lake Tribune from 2007 until 2021 For most of these years, he served as director of photography, a massive undertaking which included focusing on tracking incoming images taken from numerous photographers and reporters while also caring for hundreds of thousands of past accumulated images. This body, this massive amount of material, of photographic images have often been described as photomorgues. It is from this remarkable collection that the Salt Lake Tribune has gathered up these photos and published it in the book Utah Stories 150 Years of Photography from the Salt Lake Tribune. We are talking to the curators and those who selected and wrote about these images. Thanks again to both of you for being here.
First I want to talk about the Salt Lake Tribune in general. Matt, in 2019, the Tribune became the country's first not-for-profit metro digital news organization.
Its timely work across Utah, its investigative reporting, its coverage of politics, education, the environment, sports, you name it, is most important. Will you talk about this new newspaper environment, maybe a little bit about news deserts, this idea of regions without any comprehensive, accurate news sources or websites that are aping this idea of community outlets. I'm also fascinated by these ideologically bent news farms that distribute thousands of algorithmically created or generated articles.
How does that work in to this new model of the Tribune?

**Matt Canham** (3:50)
Well, thanks for the question. I mean, obviously, the environment for local news is difficult out there, and I'm sure many of your listeners know that. But it's not because we don't have people who want to read what we write or see the great images that our photojournalists provide us. We have an audience. The problem is, how do you make it work financially?
And we used to be an advertisement-based business.
But with Facebook and Google eating up so much of that, with print declining in circulation, that has made it hard to survive financially, and it leaves local news organizations like the Salt Lake Tribune making some difficult choices. What the Salt Lake Tribune did, which is innovative, is its owner gave up sole ownership and created a non-profit. This allows us to raise money from donors. On top of the money we get from subscribers and we get from advertisers, and it gives us a better chance to survive financially. Now, this comes when other newspapers, some smaller organizations have closed up shop. And as you talked about, there are fewer and fewer places where there is a variety of new sources. So we call these places news deserts.
Luckily in Salt Lake County, we have multiple news sources. But in some of the more rural areas of our state and in many places across the country, you might have one news source, you might have none. And people will try to fill the gap when local journalists are not out there looking for stories. And that's when you see people trying to take advantage of what you talked about where they'll use an algorithm, they'll push an agenda. And they'll try to make sure they get into your Facebook feed and you click on their stories and you think it's real news and it's meant to manipulate.