The Salt Flat News — a short‑lived tabloid that aimed its lens at the emptiest reaches of Utah’s West Desert — ran from 1970 to 1975, entertaining readers with offbeat photos, bold headlines and a steady appetite for the unusual.
Published by Richard Goldberger and supported by journalist‑photographer Richard Menzies, the paper set out to document what others overlooked: racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats, military activity near Dugway and Hill Air Force Base, and the odd characters and incidents that punctuated the desert’s vast quiet.
“There’s nothing there, and nothing means a lot,” Goldberger later said of the region the paper covered. The Salt Flat News leaned into that nothingness, turning it into subject matter.
“'The only newspaper in the world that gives a damn about what happens on the Salt Flats,'” read the paper’s masthead, according to rare‑book dealer Ken Sanders, who called the paper fun from the start.
What readers found in the pages
Stories ranged from quirky human interest to the macabre. The paper published headline‑friendly items such as a profile of a self‑styled “wolfman,” coverage of train wrecks and photographs of dead animals alongside glamour shots and profiles of local figures — including polygamist families and hermits.
- Chief beats: Bonneville speed racing, military operations, desert characters.
- Notable content: bold photography, eccentric features, provocative headlines.
- Circulation: at one point reportedly peaked near 80,000.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founding date | July 4, 1970 |
| Price | 25 cents (during publication) |
| Run | Approximately five years |
Legacy and local interest
Though the Salt Flat News rarely met a deadline — its first issue may have been the only one published on time — it developed a following for its audacious tone and irreverent coverage. Goldberger described wanting to be “a very sophisticated model on nothing,” summing up the paper’s paradoxical aim to produce thoughtful coverage about a place defined by emptiness.
The venture lost money and folded in 1975, but back issues retain appeal. Ken Sanders, who sells vintage copies, said collectors pay about $30 for an old issue. For readers and collectors today, the paper represents a snapshot of a particular era of regional journalism: small, scrappy, occasionally sensational and resolutely local.
For residents interested in Utah’s media history or the culture of the West Desert, the Salt Flat News is a reminder that even places labeled by others as empty produced stories worth telling — and that some publications embraced the odd and ephemeral in ways mainstream outlets did not.
— Miles Christensen, News Block
