KSL News: The Mormon Local Outlet Quietly Teaching the World How to Save Journalism

KSL News: How a Mormon-Market Local Outlet Accidentally Became the Canary in Global Media’s Coal Mine
By Dave’s Locker International Desk

Salt Lake City—nestled between mountains that look Photoshopped and a lake so salty it could season the world’s fries—doesn’t scream “global bellwether.” Yet KSL News, the mild-mannered broadcast child of Bonneville International (which is, of course, wholly owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), has spent the last decade demonstrating how to keep local news alive while the rest of the planet’s press corps auctions off its own oxygen tanks on eBay.

From an international vantage point, KSL’s survival strategy reads like a cheeky middle finger to the Silicon Valley death spiral currently digesting legacy outlets on every continent. While British tabloids pivot to TikTok dance-offs and German public broadcasters stage existential Zoom crises, KSL simply kept doing what provincial stations used to do: report zoning disputes, high-school musical triumphs, and the occasional elk that wanders into a Walmart. The twist? They layered that homespun casserole with a tech stack so obsessively polished it could moonlight as a Scandinavian banking app.

The numbers are almost indecent. KSL’s website clocks more monthly unique visitors than the population of Norway, and its podcasting arm quietly out-downloads several BBC World Service offerings. Advertisers—ranging from artisanal funeral homes to multinational ski-resort conglomerates—queue up like pilgrims at a sacred grotto, grateful for an audience that hasn’t yet installed ad-blockers out of sheer politeness. Meanwhile, international observers scratch their heads, wondering how a station whose weather segment still references “mountain snowpack at 127% of normal” manages to outperform global networks that have bureaus on every tectonic plate.

The secret sauce is, predictably, both reassuringly old-fashioned and faintly dystopian. KSL leverages the Mormon diaspora—roughly 17 million souls scattered from Manila to Manchester—who treat the outlet as an auditory comfort blanket. Picture homesick missionaries in Mozambique huddling around scratchy Wi-Fi to hear traffic reports about I-15 congestion, a Pavlovian nostalgia hit stronger than any Spotify playlist. That captive, emotionally leveraged audience gives KSL the sort of engagement metrics that make venture capitalists in Singapore weep into their oat-milk lattes.

But the world should pay attention for darker reasons, too. KSL’s editorial ethos—polite, family-friendly, allergic to profanity—has become a proof-of-concept for soft-power news laundering. Authoritarian regimes from Budapest to Harare now commission consultants to study KSL’s tone, hoping to replicate its “nice news” veneer while sliding the knife in between the ribs of pluralistic debate. The station’s habit of framing every civic issue as a solvable potluck problem (“We can end homelessness by 2030 if we all bring Jell-O salads!”) translates chillingly well to regimes eager to replace politics with vibes.

Economically, KSL’s success is a neon sign flashing “there’s still money in trust”—a revelation that has sent shock waves through media baron boardrooms from Sydney to São Paulo. The station refuses programmatic ad placements that might juxtapose a funeral-parlor spot against a breaking mass-shooting alert, a quaint moral stance that paradoxically earns premium CPMs from luxury brands desperate to avoid the toxic sludge of open-exchange advertising. In an age when CNN rents out its chyron space for NFTs and the Daily Mail sells editorial space next to “30 Bikini Fails,” KSL’s monastic restraint looks almost obscene.

And so, in a delicious irony, the planet’s most influential laboratory for sustainable local journalism is headquartered in a zip code best known for fry sauce and funeral potatoes. While the rest of us watch our hometown papers shutter faster than a North Korean disco, KSL continues to rake in eyeballs, donations, and—most astonishingly—trust. If that isn’t a miracle, it’s at least a very Utah kind of loaves-and-fishes hustle: feed the multitudes with green Jell-O, and somehow there are leftovers.

Global takeaway: When the last London freesheet finally chokes on its own pop-up ads and the New York Times paywall finally achieves escape velocity, the future of news may well be broadcast from a Brutalist building opposite a Temple Square parking lot. Repent, sinners—the end is nigh, and it smells faintly of melted cheddar.