City Weekly founder John Saltas looks back on 40 years in print 

• Cover design by Derek Carlisle
• Private Eye/City Weekly founder John Saltas at the newspaper’s downtown offices.

When it comes right down to it, Salt Lake City Weekly owes its existence to three things: a parched landscape for Utah's fourth estate, bizarre liquor laws and John Saltas needing a job.

Almost 40 years since the inaugural issue of the Private Eye newsletter made its way to select private clubs, Saltas today looks back upon the endeavor with a wide range of feelings, everything from amusement and pride to wonder and regret.

"It's been a long ride," he said. "I've met so many great people and characters along the way. It's truly been a group effort."

And what most fills him with amazement and delight is that despite significant hurdles—and thanks to an alignment of some particularly opportune stars—a simple newsletter became Utah's third largest newspaper in circulation during the aughts, only to nearly die during economic downturns and a pandemic.

"I guess we had herd immunity. We wedged our way into the fabric of this city," Saltas said.

That place in the fabric helped to elevate and empower some voices, he said, and contributed to notable changes in the community.

"We did it," Saltas marvels. "That's an incredible piece of work that so many people—family, employees, friends—had a hand in."

With the paper's 40th anniversary approaching in 2024, City Weekly will be spending the next 40 weeks digging through the archives and exploring how its history unfolded alongside a changing city and state. And while the paper launched in 1984, the story of its creation starts in Chicago in 1981.

• Working in Chicago in the 1980s, Saltas was inspired by alt-newspapers.

'Salt Lake Should Have One of These'
Having worked various jobs in bars and construction—laboring everywhere from Kennecott Utah Copper mine in Bingham Canyon to the card tables of Wendover—John Saltas found minimal prospects in Utah for someone with a fresh degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of Utah.

It was in Chicago that he got his start as a published journalist, working as an associate editor of Country Style magazine.

"I was wide-eyed and enjoying every minute of it," Saltas recalled. "It was a great time to be there."

The city of Chicago—in contrast to places like Salt Lake City—was brimming with notably expansive ethnic and minority populations.

"It was just like being in Bingham Canyon," recalled Saltas, "only bigger."

A particular source of enlightenment came by way of Chicago's gay community, whose visible and organized parade events left Saltas wondering if any similar support structure would ever come to Utah to help his own friends and family members who were gay.

His arrival to the Windy City also coincided with the emergence of a new demographic creature called the "yuppie" ("young upwardly mobile professional"), whose penchant for stimulation and urban living would have a great effect upon the ethos of the coming decade.

Reporting on the concert scene in the midst of this environment, Saltas found both guidance and inspiration from an alternative weekly called the Chicago Reader, which pioneered a locally focused style of journalism within a daring new model of free circulation.

"I'd never seen such a paper," Saltas recounted. "[Back home in Utah,] we had the morning Tribune and the afternoon Deseret News—and nothing else."

Saltas described himself as "stunned" by the breadth and style of the Reader's reporting and design. His conclusion? "Salt Lake should have one of these," he said.

Starting as a Newsletter for Private Clubs
While event-driven papers existed in the Salt Lake region in the early 1980s, they typically had short lifespans due to the absence of a core source of advertising and distribution. Saltas saw that such a source would be feasible through the hospitality and liquor industries, but there was just one problem: Utah's liquor laws.

Under the state's former regulations, establishments that served alcohol were regulated as "private clubs," able to serve customers mixed drinks only after they completed an application for membership and paid an annual fee. In clubs, a drink was prepared by a bartender primarily from a mini-bottle purchased at the point of sale. Everywhere else, customers were allowed to bring in their own liquor and mix their own drink at the table after purchasing mixers, or "set-ups." That practice was also called "brown bagging."

Mainstream commercial consumption of alcohol at that time, then, was basically non-existent. Which is why, as Saltas opined, "there weren't very many good restaurants around."

Private clubs ruled the nightlife but, crucially, they couldn't advertise. Their only option was in sending out mailers to their internal membership lists with information on coming events and entertainment programming. "I can take this pressure off you," Saltas remembers saying to local club owners.

The newsletter he envisioned would contain the same combination of articles, but feature unique cover content geared to each of the individual clubs within the Private Eye network, be they the Sage Supper Club, Sandy's Station, Widow McCoys, Club 90 and so on. Each club got a certain amount of space, while the rest was for Saltas to populate with stories and advertising.

The number of copies run would be determined by club membership lists for several years until the paper succeeded at gaining public distribution.

"It took some serious wrangling with the DABC to be able to put it on the street," Saltas observed.

It was following this shift to a widely available product that the Private Eye switched from a mailed newsletter to a full-fledged alternative newspaper.

Getting the Ink on Paper
Getting those first newsletters out was indeed a group effort, and Saltas has particularly deep appreciation for Jim Landers (1932-2012) and his family, who owned the Midvale Sentinel and provided him with needed tutelage in the newspaper production process.

Landers not only gave Saltas guidance, but allowed him use of the Midvale Sentinel facilities, from which the Private Eye was produced for years.

"I had been published," he said, "but never had I sold an ad, designed an ad, designed a newspaper, built a dummy typeset, handed it off the printer and then distributed it."

Saltas experimented with different kinds of recurring news beats, some of which stuck (like music and dining) and some of which did not (like sports, fashion and travel). In the earliest issues, most of the contributors—when they were not filler pen names used by Saltas—were often bartenders and waitresses from the local clubs pitching in.

"I didn't know where it would go," he remarked. "We were just winging it."

In the process of printing, labeling, sorting, bundling and mailing the finished newsletters, Saltas noted that it was often a "family affair," with relatives and friends assisting in the work. His mother was one of the paper's earliest distribution drivers, and his father set up their mail-sorting room.

Among the many others who assisted in the creation of the Private Eye newsletter were, of course, the club owners themselves as well as advertisers who chipped in contributory funds.

"They supported us just because we were not the daily," Saltas says with a smile.

It was not very long before contributors of varying styles and backgrounds were also supporting the Private Eye's quirky vision for storytelling and commentary, including at least half a dozen writers from the competing local dailies ... who sometimes wrote for Saltas under a pseudonym to avoid conflict with their day-job editors. "Whenever [the other papers] mocked us," Saltas laughed, "it was their own writers they were mocking."

He said there was a "slew" of writers in town who yearned for a piece of expression, and that such people were happy to tackle stories and subjects that were being overlooked.

When writing for an alternative weekly, as Salt Lake Tribune reporter and columnist Robert Gehrke observed, "you sort of have to have a chip on your shoulder," with a "swagger and attitude that lends itself to scrappy reporting."

Such strutting self-assurance was precisely what Saltas and his team imbued into their work.

"We were being funny, we were being clever, we were being mean, we were being obnoxious," Saltas said. "We had no friends in the protected class that other media danced around, so we weren't afraid of losing a lunch date if we did a story on the mayor or a banker. We were doing things far differently in the storytelling, and that's part of being an alternate newspaper. We also never shied away from hard news, with many of our reporters and editors knocking down all kinds of journalistic awards—hundreds of them."

Tom Wharton, who wrote for decades on sports and outdoors subjects for The Salt Lake Tribune, expressed admiration for the Weekly's provocative effect upon the community at large.

"This will sound strange coming from a guy who worked nearly 50 years at the Trib," Wharton wrote on social media, "But I liked it when Saltas [and co.] went after local media, including the Trib. It often stung, but it was interesting and challenging."

It Took Its Toll
Looking back after all these decades of work, Saltas admits that the enterprise became a larger responsibility than he ever imagined. And the demands ensuing from what started as a modest newsletter have corresponded to both turmoil and joy.

"[It] has taken a toll—no two ways about it," Saltas said. "It has been hard on every aspect of my life."

Most tellingly, Saltas regrets the time he lost on the family front. His wife and three children have been along for this ride with him, and they have been obliged to both share in the highs as well as suffer the storms that have come with the territory. "It may have been a lot easier on everyone if I had followed a different path," he believes. "I'm still pissed I put down my guitar and songwriting. That would have been a breeze."

Were he to speak with the John Saltas of 1984, he said he would likely ask one question: "Are you sure you want to do this?" He said he believes the younger Saltas would respond just as he does today, acknowledging the challenge but also its motivating possibilities. "If it was so easy," Saltas said, "we'd have at least a competitor."

What's more—and far beyond the daunting prospects of Private Eye surviving in the Utah of the 1980s—Saltas has been surprised by the impact that the paper has had upon others. There are those among the Private Eye/Salt Lake City Weekly alumni who have gone on to work in more prominent and far-reaching positions in a variety of fields and professions, including, of course, the realms of journalism and graphic design.

"We changed their arc, and they changed the arc of so many others," Saltas expressed with astonishment. "Each of them enriched my own life."

Who would have thought that such could be possible from "just licking stamps" for a locally made bulletin?

"Nobody warned me about that," he said. "It was a freaking newsletter!"

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