Deseret News to utilize specialists as way of enriching local reports

It took four days for news of the Battle of Trafalgar to reach Britain in 1805.

It took 12 hours, after telephone and telegraph service were interrupted, for news of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which struck Japan in 1923, to reach the outside world.

It took exactly 1 hour, 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds for the SR-71 Blackbird to fly from New York City to London, England, in 1974.

And it took milliseconds for this article, traveling at 186,000 miles per second on the Internet, to reach the other side of the globe.

"Technology is changing news and content distribution in fundamental ways," said Clark Gilbert, Deseret News president and CEO. "This creates a major opportunity for growth and will greatly benefit our readers."

The fact is simple: The Deseret News today reaches more than people than ever before in its history, he said. "Some people are concerned about the Internet; we embrace it and see it has a chance to increase our reach and impact."

One way the Deseret News is doing that is by using technology to alter the way the company connects with not only the consumers of news, but also with previously untapped contributors of news, said Matthew Sanders. He leads Deseret Connect, a news organization that will cultivate a network of local and national contributors to create relevant, insightful and engaging stories to be published in the Deseret News.

Part of that news model is to use the Internet to understand what stories readers are looking for, he said. "Now we can actually write the articles and measure whether someone truly likes them."

The Deseret News does not plan to abandon the traditional model of professional reporters collecting news, he emphasized. "We work carefully with our editors to understand how to complement their stories with content from remote writers," Sanders said. "This is going to drive how we generate and shape our news development strategy."

For example, a Deseret News reporter with experience and sources might cover a highly publicized immigration policy debate in Utah, he said. But readers may also want to know about the nation's history of social and political struggles with immigration. Immigration attorneys from Texas or Florida, through Deseret Connect, could provide that insight.