The Mormon Tribune was founded in 1870 by a group of businessmen led by former LDS Church members William Godbe, Elias L.T. Harrison and John Tullidge. After a year its name was changed to the Salt Lake Daily Tribune and Utah Mining Gazette, and was shortly thereafter shortened to The Salt Lake Tribune. The Tribune became known as an anti-Mormon paper that was highly critical of President Brigham Young.

In 1901 U.S. Senator Thomas Kearns, along with his business partner David Keith bought the Tribune, and began eliminating the anti-Mormon overtones of the paper. Upon Keith's death in 1918 the Kearns family bought out his share of the Salt Lake Tribune Publishing Company.

John F. Fitzpatrick, became publisher in 1924. In 1952, the Tribune entered into a joint operating agreement with the Deseret News, Salt Lake's daily newspaper (which was owned by the LDS Church), creating the Newspaper Agency Corporation in 1960 Fitzpatrick died unexpectedly from a heart attack and an emergency session of the Kearns-Tribune Corp. board elected John W. Gallivan, publisher. He remained in that position until 1984 and chairman of the board until 1997.

The Kearns family owned a majority share of the newspaper until 1997 when they sold it to Tele-Communications Inc., a multimedia corporation, which was later acquired by AT&T. The Tribune was subsequently sold to Denver, Colorado-based MediaNews Group which is partially owned by publisher William Dean Singleton.