Salt Lake City, Utah -- The Deseret News, Utah’s oldest daily newspaper and leading online news source, has named Chris Lee as publisher, Paul Edwards as editor and Rick Hall as the Utah edition editor.

 

Lee joined the Deseret News in June 2010. Prior to this appointment, he served as the vice president of digital. Lee was recently nominated to a three-year term on the board of the Suburban Newspaper Association of America, assisting in its transition to the Local Media Association. Prior to his arrival at Deseret News, Lee was chairman and CEO at Heritage Makers, a leader in web-to-print personalized photo products. Previously, Lee was the director of new business development for Ancestry.com and director of product management for MyFamily.com, a unit of Ancestry focused on building a social network for families, from 1999 to 2002. Lee holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors (double major in Economics and Italian, magna cum laude) from Brigham Young University.

 

In addition to his role as national editor, Edwards will continue to oversee the opinion and faith sections of the paper, which he has done since September 2010. Prior to joining the Deseret News in 2010, Edwards had a distinguished academic career. Most recently, he served as executive vice president and provost at Southern Virginia University. Before that, he was president of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and vice president for academic affairs at the Institute for Humane Studies, also at George Mason. Edwards taught political science at Brigham Young University, where he earned his undergraduate degree in history and graduated magna cum laude and with university honors. He also studied French language and culture at the Sorbonne (University of Paris). He served as a judicial law clerk to the Hon. Cecil Poole on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

Hall has been on staff at the Deseret News since 1974, when he began as a copy boy while in high school. Hall has served as the paper’s managing editor since 1998. In his tenure at the Deseret News, Hall worked his way through virtually all areas of the paper, including local-news and sports reporter, state editor, city editor and Olympics editor. Hall earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Utah and received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Utah Department of Communications, the Utah Press Association’s Jim Cornwell Distinguished Service Award, and was a member of a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange Team in India.

 

“This management team exemplifies excellence and a shared commitment to the mission that guides the Deseret News,” said Clark Gilbert, CEO and president of Deseret News and Deseret Digital Media. “Over the past year, during the paper’s radical restructuring, they have helped transform the Deseret News with a new business model for the 21st century, incorporating a cutting-edge digital strategy into our legacy news product and expanding our print products locally and nationally.”