Salt Lake Tribune to move to Gateway in 2005

The Salt Lake Tribune will make its home at The Gateway as of April 2005, the newspaper confirmed Friday.

Dean Singleton, publisher of the Tribune and chief executive of Denver-based MediaNews Group, said the Tribune will move from its current Main Street building to the One Gateway office building, 90 S. 400 West.

The paper has signed a 20-year lease (with two five-year renewal options) to occupy the building, which is located directly north of the new planetarium/IMAX theater, Singleton said. The Tribune's editorial operations will be housed on the seventh (top) floor, with its editorial page, library and other offices on the sixth floor.

"The old Tribune building in 1937 might have been a good setup for a newspaper, but for today's newspaper operations it just isn't functional," Singleton said. "We were determined to stay downtown, and we believe that The Gateway is part of downtown."

With the move of the Newspaper Agency Corp. to West Valley City (expected in 2006), Singleton said, it was impractical to continue operations at the Main Street location. The NAC provides production, advertising and distribution services for the Deseret Morning News and Tribune.

MediaNews considered several Main Street locations, Singleton said, but concluded that "Gateway is the future."

"Any building we looked at on Main Street would have been an old building, with roots from the past," he said.

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson said while he understood the Tribune's rationale for moving off Main Street, he "certainly would have preferred the Tribune to stay in the historic Main Street district of our downtown."

"I can't take a position in support of one property owner or developer over another, but it is no secret to anybody how important I think the revitalization of our historic Main Street area is," Anderson said. "I think it's a real mistake to think of any community's downtown as 'the past.'

"And that's particularly true when a developer like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is about to invest upwards of half a billion dollars into the heart of our historic downtown. . . . The future bodes very, very well not only for The Gateway, but for our entire central business district."

Gateway managing partner Jake Boyer said the mixed-use development was one of several projects aggressively bidding to house the Tribune, and the paper's decision reflects progress in the growth of the city.

"I don't think that choosing The Gateway diminishes other parts of the city," Boyer said. "It just shows that the city is progressing, that we're taking steps to expand the borders of downtown, that we are not limited to one or two streets. That we are a larger city."

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E-mail: jnii@desnews.com