Newly appointed Deseret Morning News Editor Joe Cannon will not join any local boards or commissions, including the Alliance for Unity — on which former editors of both the Morning News and the Salt Lake Tribune once sat.

Instead of Cannon, the newspaper's top editor, Morning News Publisher Jim Wall, will sit on the Alliance — matching the Salt Lake Tribune's Publisher Dean Singleton's slot on the community group.

The Alliance is a local volunteer group formed several years ago by industrialist/philanthropist Jon Huntsman Sr. and Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson. It has taken on a number of controversial local issues, including who has control of the closed portion of north Main Street and a unity center on the city's west side.

The latest list of Alliance board members, found on its Web site at www.allianceforunity.org, has former Morning News Editor John Hughes and Tribune Publisher Singleton as members. But Anderson on Monday said that was an outdated list and Hughes is no longer on the board.

"No, Hughes is off and Wall is on. That's already been decided," said Anderson, in New York City for a large-city environmental meeting.

Cannon said Monday that the Alliance members have not asked him to serve on its board. But if members did, he would have to turn them down.

"When you are an editor, I just think you should be off all (local) boards," said Cannon, because newspapers have to report on those groups' activities.

He will continue serving as a board member of a national/international Holocaust remembrance organization, he said.

"We've come to believe that there were conflicts with the (newspaper) editors' role on the Alliance for Unity," said Anderson.

When the Alliance first formed in the early 2000s, Huntsman and Anderson asked both Hughes, then Morning News editor, and Jay Shelledy, then Tribune editor, to serve with a dozen other local civic and religious leaders.

The policy statement of the board said it would seek to bring various factions of Utahns together over common goals.

While the Alliance is a statewide group, at the time there was a bitter battle going on over whether the LDS Church alone controlled the closed portion of Main Street — which the church purchased from the city — or whether the city still had responsibility for free speech areas on the closed street.

The Alliance brokered an agreement between the church and city officials, which included the church providing some land on the west side's Sorenson Multi-Cultural Center for expanded civic activities there.

After Shelledy resigned as Tribune editor in early 2003, Alliance officials assumed he would resign from the Alliance board as well. But he didn't. In 2004, Alliance board members considered new Tribune Editor Nancy Conway as a board member, the Tribune reported at the time. But she declined to avoid conflicts of interest over reporting on Alliance activities, the Tribune said.