34
Tribune Personalities BECAUSE OF FREQUENT changes in ownership up to the turn of the century and the proclivity of publishers thereafter for anonymity, the prestige of The Salt Lake Tribune has always been focused on the newspaper as an institution rather than on the individuals who created it. There are, for example, no counterparts in its history of a Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis PostDispatch and New York World, or a Colonel Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal, or a Charles Dana of the New York Sun, or a Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, or a F. G. Bonfils and H. H. Tammen of the Denver Post, or a William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette. The subordination of personal prominence to institutional advancement, which was particularly pronounced after John F. Fitzpatrick became the dominant influence in policy-making, was not just an incidental reflection of a publisher who disliked personal glorification. It was rather the result of a deliberate and sustained effort to give The Tribune an institutional personality of its own; an effort which encompassed a wide range of services and programs to bring the newspaper into intimate contact with the people it served in areas other than its primary function of gathering and disseminating news and information. Offshoots of this policy are numerous, occur at a one-a-week pace and are geared to the masses as well as the individual. 410
