Comments 8

  1. Hi, John!

    First, I’d love to know whether it is, indeed, uncorrelated. I doubt very much that this is the case. In any event, whether it is formally “correlated,” I don’t think you’ll find anything in that new section that speaks ill of the Church.

    Don’t get me wrong — you know I’m all for more openness. But I don’t think that the Deseret News is the place to look for it.

    Has anyone in Utah seen this new section? I’m speaking only my opinion, of course.

  2. Jeffrey stole my thunder. I was wondering if John maybe had it from an insider that it was “uncorrelated”. However, if you are employed by an otherwise correlated or at least influenced business, and you are a temple recommend holder, and you believe in the “one trueness” of the church… you pretty much correlate yourself, don’t you?

    At least at church in regards to teaching Sunday School or Relief Society/Priesthood, the correlation advisories from the manuals are usually spoken about in almost a scriptural reverence. Correlation is not a program to the orthodox, it is the Lord’s way of teaching.

  3. John D: The tea leaves that you keep reading as “steps towards openness” are really just signs that the leadership understands there is a problem. These won’t be signs of actual openness until church departments and church-owned institutions like the Deseret News are given effective autonomy.

  4. John D,

    Having read the section in the Morning News (the name DesNews would prefer to go by) I would say there will be an emphasis on soft-focus journalism and profiles of members, stealing Meridian Magazine’s market, for instance. Stories appearing in the section like “RMs on the gridiron” and “Top Ten LDS News Stories of 2007” are not investigative journalism by any means. I believe this is an editorial move to consolidate the pieces which normally appear in the News in a scattered way, so that non-LDS in Utah know which day the Mormon items will normally appear and can therefore avoid them. Circulation is the name of the game here.

    It’s also a chance for Orson Scott Card to have a regular column. It’s decent, but I’ll take Robert Kirby in the SLTrib over a sci-fi writer. The only thing I like about the DesNews which is missing from the Trib is the NYTimes crossword anyway.

    I also think that these pieces are not submitted to the Correlation Executive Committee nor to the Correlation Department. There is no danger of the DesNews staff getting out of hand. Self-censorship reigns there.

  5. I loved the Orson Scott Card piece. His column is though out, intelligent and, in my opinion, very accurate. If the Morning news can get a few more writers like him I would happily bookmark that section and read it everytime it came out. Judging from the comments to the OSC column I think that a lot of other people out there feel the same way.

  6. Hey everyone… Maybe I can shed some light on this. Mormon Times is uncorrelated and the team of reporters work in their own department. Recently there was a semi-controversial piece about DNA. The site and content is still changing and adapting to the audience, but we percieve it to be more of a magazine style site with feature stories, etc. Some of the stories in the past may seem light, but there will be more indepth stories… like a magazine.

    If you have any questions let me know.. you can find me on the Deseret News site.

    Charlie
    Director of Interactive Media
    Deseret News

  7. Why do young adults have to prove to the church or temple that they are worthy of being mormon? Why cant we be mormon because our beliefs are similar? It seems like we put on a fake face to prove to everyone in the church that we are loving our life and we have no problems, when in fact everyone does but being mormon makes us feel like we shouldn’t have ANY problems. Why are we told to prey for all the other religions and hope the find the truth(mormonism). why cant they believe what they think is right. What if they are right?

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