New editor named for the News

Joe Cannon, who will be taking over as the new editor of the Deseret Morning News, readily admits it's his relatives who have the newspaper experience, not him.

"There's a history here I feel duty-bound to try to live up to," Cannon said in an interview shortly before his appointment was announced Friday. He will assume the top editorial job at the newspaper on Jan. 1, succeeding John Hughes, who is returning to Brigham Young University as a professor of communciations after a decade as editor.

Cannon's grandfather, Joseph J. Cannon, served as the newspaper's editor from 1931 to 1934, and his great-grandfather, George Q. Cannon, was editor for eight years between 1867 and 1879. The newspaper was founded in 1850.

But it's his grandmother, Ramona, who really introduced Cannon to the business. She "wrote a column for the newspaper for over a quarter of a century. That was just the center of her life and therefore the center of all of us around her," Cannon recalled.

As a child, he would go to her Avenues apartment to pick up her column and take it down to the newspaper's old offices on Richards Street. "She probably had a bigger influence on me in terms of the history and the knowledge and background of the newspaper," Cannon said.

Not enough influence, though, to lead him into a career in journalism. Instead, Cannon went to law school and became heavily involved in GOP politics, including an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate and chairing the Utah Republican Party.

Cannon served in the Reagan administration as assistant administrator for air and radiation in the Environmental Protection Agency and as associate administrator for policy and resource management.

He and his brother, Rep. Chris Cannon , R-Utah, were among several investors who reopened the idle U.S. Steel plant near Orem in 1987 as Geneva Steel. Though they had no experience in the industry, they quickly turned the mill into a profitable business.

The company, however, foundered in the 1990s as it spent hundreds of millions of dollars to modernize and couldn't compete with cheap imported steel. It filed for bankruptcy in 1999 and closed in 2001.

Now a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a law firm specializing in environmental and administrative law, Cannon has also served on a number of boards, including the Morning News. He was a member of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee that put on the 2002 Winter Games.

"I am a product of my background. I can't become like a brand-new person," Cannon said when asked how his experience, especially in the political world, would affect how he edits the newspaper.