It is also uncommon for a newspaper to bring somebody in from the business side to run the editorial side.

"In most companies, the business board and the editorial side are very separate," he said. "The editor represents the editorial side and doesn't normally come from the board."

Cannon said he realizes he has big shoes to fill in following Hughes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who edited the Christian Science Monitor. Hughes drew wide attention as the newspaper's first non-Mormon editor.

The new editor is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "I can't not be a Latter-day Saint," Cannon said. "That's part of the whole package that you get."

He said Hughes "tried to be very sensitive to the fact that A, it's a church-owned newspaper and B, the vast majority of our readers are Latter-day Saints," an example Cannon said he will follow.

"Every paper has an owner. We have an owner. Our owner makes a lot of news. I expect to cover the news as fairly as possible. I don't see it as our job, however, to be ark-steadiers," Cannon said.

The biblical reference, he said, means that the newspaper's job is not, for example, to "describe to the church that we think the temple-building program has gotten a little out of hand. ... I don't think it's our job to lecture our owners."

That extends to editorials, he said, noting it would be "unlikely to find editorial policy at this newspaper or any other newspaper in the country that comes out and editorializes against its owners. ... You're not going to see a change in the editorial stance of this newspaper."

Cannon said he doesn't believe the Morning News "should be a gigantic ward newsletter. It should be a newspaper that really is the best newspaper for everybody. So that people can pick it up and read the news and feel like they're getting the news."

At least initially, Cannon said, he has no plans to make changes at the newspaper. "I don't come in with a preconception that something needs to happen," he said. "But I'm not a static guy either."

At 57, Cannon told the newspaper staff during a meeting called to announce his appointment that he expects this will be his last job before retiring.

"I don't expect to have another job in my life. I don't need to make anybody feel good," he said. "I think a lot of people who might be happy with this, who think they're happy, are not going to be so happy in a while. Some of the people who are not happy are going to be surprised."

---

Contributing: Josh Loftin and Dennis Romboy

E-mail: lisa@desnews.com