How The Salt Lake Tribune spent 2025 preparing for a 2026 without subscription revenue

Personally, my favorite form of journalistic impact is when the reporting becomes a central plot point on a Real Housewives franchise.

In the Season 6 premiere of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City that aired on September 16, Bronwyn Newport tells her fellow cast members that another castmate, Lisa Barlow, seemed to be in a lot of legal trouble and facing at least five lawsuits. Barlow’s friend and castmate Heather Gay asks, “And you’re reading this in testimonials that you’re Googling?”

“It was in The Salt Lake Tribune!” Newport shoots back, and a screenshot of the Trib’s 2024 headline is displayed: “One of the ‘Real Housewives’ is being sued, accused of not paying back more than $400,000 in loans.” The reporting and lawsuits have come up a few more times throughout the season.

Contributing to Real Housewives drama was the tip of the iceberg this year for the Tribune. According to its annual report published on Friday, the Tribune has more than 32,000 digital subscribers and is on track to make $2.6 million in digital subscription revenue in 2025. (It had 30,362 digital subscribers in June 2024, according to its first annual report.) The nonprofit newspaper has budgeted nearly zero subscription income in 2026, however, because of its plans to drop its paywall and adopt a membership model.

In the voluntary membership model, readers will choose between three membership tiers, ranging from $5 per month to $26 per month. The higher the tier, the more perks. Members of the highest tier will receive twice-weekly print editions to their doorsteps.

The Tribune believes it can replace subscription revenue with donations and membership dollars. From the report written by data columnist and Utah Jazz beat writer Andy Larsen:

We believe that most of our current digital subscribers will join a voluntary and donation-based membership program. For one, a poll of our subscribers indicated the major reason they became subscribers in the first place was not to bypass the paywall, but to support independent news in Utah.

We were grateful for this, but we wanted to make sure. In 2024, we ran an experiment with a statistically significant and randomized number of our digital subscribers, telling them they’d now receive their digital Tribune subscription for free for three years. Upon receiving notification of this, they could choose to opt out of any recurring payment to the Tribune — or they could continue their payment, as a donation.

After three months, 87% of those who were newly receiving the Tribune for free were continuing their membership. And in the ensuing months, we’ve seen those people churn out of that donation at the same rate as our normal digital subscribers, another good sign.

The paywall drop has been in the works for more than a year. My colleague Sophie Culpepper reported on it last month:

Making The Southern Utah Tribune free is consistent with The Salt Lake Tribune’s bigger-picture, mission-driven vision to make its reporting accessible to all. Last year, the Tribune’s first-ever annual report revealed that the newspaper aspired to drop its paywall, which it described as a “necessary evil.” The plan is to drop the paywall in the first quarter of 2026.

Read the full annual report here.