Weber County, Utah - Newspapers

I found a great new site for geneological information - Utah Digital Newspapers. This site, created by the University of Utah, has a bunch of articles from different Utah newspapers - digitized and indexed! I did a quick search for Mathias Lund and Karen Lund in the Ogden Standard Examiner and found a few interesting articles, which I'll post over the next few days.

For now, here's some interesting information about the Ogden Standard Examiner from the Utah Digital Newspapers website.


Ogden Standard

The Ogden Standard Examiner

April 5, 1920

1879 - 1927
With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in northern Utah in 1869, Ogden saw the rise and fall of several dozen newspapers. Because of the short tenure of many of these newspapers, Ogden became known as the "graveyard of Western journalism."
The Ogden newspapers available on this webpage are listed below.

• Ogden Junction (1879-1881)
• Ogden Herald (1881-1887)
• Ogden Standard (1888-1908)
• Ogden Standard Examiner (1923-1927)

Gaps in the collection of the daily Standard are being filled with the semi-weekly version of that paper: Jan-Dec 1889, Jan-Jun 1896, Jan-Jun 1900, Jul-Dec 1905, Jul-Dec 1907.

More information about the Ogden Standard (from the website):


Historians have referred to Ogden, Utah, as the graveyard of western journalism because of the short life expectancy of the dozens of newspapers that sprang up there after 1869. The completion of the transcontinental railroad that year quickly transformed the sleepy agricultural town into a bustling transportation hub. Newspapers came and went, vying for the thousands of potential readers arriving on the nine rail lines with terminals in the city. The Ogden Standard bucked the trend. Founded by Frank J. Cannon, the Standard first appeared on January 1, 1888, with its front page featuring a poem entitled "A Hymn to Progress." When Cannon was elected to the U.S. Congress four years later, the paper's business manager, William Glassman, took over day-to-day operations. He acquired the Standard outright in 1894 and quickly molded it into a promotional organ for his own political career – Glassman served three terms as mayor.

The paper also carried world and national news. When the Spanish American War erupted in 1898, the story occupied the Standard's entire front page. Local news included articles about Utah's booming mining industry, notes from the local police blotter, and such nuggets as the Christmas Eve 1907 account of a hapless man who accidentally killed his friend in a failed attempt to shoot his cowboy hat off with a pistol.

In 1920, the paper merged with the Morning Examiner, becoming the Ogden Standard Examiner. Today, the Standard-Examiner is the third-largest daily in the state.