Clark Gilbert

Forty-three percent. That was the share of the Deseret News workforce let go on August 31, 2010, more than 80 full-time and part-time people, at a Salt Lake City daily that belonged, through Deseret Management Corporation, to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The editor, Joe Cannon, and the publisher, Jim Wall, stepped down the same day. The remaining staff moved into the Triad Center with KSL television and KSL Newsradio, and a new unit called Deseret Connect was set up to take copy from remote contributors; more than a hundred had already expressed interest. The man announcing it, Clark Gilbert, had been president of the paper for less than four months. His statement to KSL began with the observation that changes in the industry had forced some newspapers to fade or close, and continued: "At the Deseret News, we choose to lead and innovate."

He had arrived the year before as chief executive of Deseret Digital Media, a new subsidiary created in 2009 to run the websites of the Deseret News, Church News, KSL and Deseret Book. The May 2010 appointment as president of the newspaper created a role above the editor and publisher rather than replacing either. It became clear within the summer why.

He was born in Oakland, California on June 18, 1970 and grew up in Phoenix. Two years in Kobe, Japan as a missionary from 1989 to 1991 interrupted a BYU degree in international relations, finished in 1994; a master's in Asian studies at Stanford followed in 1995 and a doctorate in business administration at Harvard in 2001. Harvard Business School kept him on as a professor of entrepreneurial management until 2006. There he worked with Clayton Christensen, advised the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project on how papers might survive the internet, and co-wrote Dual Transformation, published by Harvard Business Review Press, on running an existing business while building the one that will replace it. The newspaper job was, in effect, a chance to run his own case study.

Between Harvard and the newspaper came three years at BYU-Idaho in Rexburg, from 2006 to 2009, as associate academic vice president. His portfolio included online learning and a small program called Pathway, which began in 2009 with 50 students. Keep that number in mind.

The rebuilt paper was organised around six subjects that Gilbert named in public: family, financial responsibility, excellence in education, care for the needy, values in media and faith in the community, and the Salt Lake Tribune noted that business and city-hall coverage were cut back to pay for it. A national edition was launched aimed at readers outside Utah who cared about those subjects. The results were argued over. The Deseret News reported growth across all its circulation figures in 2011, Salt Lake City Weekly disputed the print numbers, and a year later Gilbert told an International News Media Association conference that Sunday print circulation had doubled on the strength of national readers. Deseret Connect, the contributor network run by Matt Sanders, filled much of the homepage while the print paper stayed largely the work of staff, and in November 2011 it produced the episode that critics still cite: the mayor of West Valley City, Michael Winder, had been writing about his own city hall under a pen name, and Gilbert said the paper regretted that the mayor would misrepresent himself in that way. In October 2013 the Tribune described him as a key figure in the restructuring of the joint operating agreement between the two Salt Lake papers. On January 27, 2015, Russell M. Nelson, then chairman of the BYU-Idaho board's executive committee, announced that Gilbert would succeed Kim B. Clark as the university's sixteenth president. He started on April 13 and was inaugurated on September 15, 2015. Two years after that, on February 7, 2017, the Church announced BYU-Pathway Worldwide as a separate organisation grown out of the Rexburg program, with Gilbert as its first president from May 1, 2017 and Henry J. Eyring taking over BYU-Idaho.

The Pathway numbers are the ones he will be measured by. From 50 students in 2009, the program reached more than 50,000 in 152 countries by 2020 and 51,583 in 2021, the year he left, supported by about 2,500 volunteer service missionaries. Deseret News figures from that year put the graduation rate at 45 to 48 percent, against about 15 percent at American community colleges, at roughly half the tuition. Gilbert's own description of the market was that it served adult learners, first-generation learners and lower-income learners that traditional higher education had passed over. BYU-Pathway's site now reports annual enrollment of 88,937 across more than 180 countries, with degrees awarded by BYU-Idaho and Ensign College.

From 50 students in 2009 to 51,583 in 2021, at half the price of a community college.

Brian K. Ashton took over BYU-Pathway on August 1, 2021 and Gilbert became the nineteenth Commissioner of Church Education the same day, four months after being called as a General Authority Seventy. He held the post until April 2026. In 2022 all Church Educational System faculty and staff, BYU included, were asked to affirm the Church's teachings on marriage, family and gender as part of a new employment contract, and Wikipedia records that several attendees at a private gathering reported him grouping BYU faculty into four categories and vowing to move dissenting professors out, which drew criticism and some departures. He told the Deseret News that James Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light, a study of colleges drifting from their founding churches, sat on his desk the whole time he was commissioner.

The call to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles came on February 11, 2026, and Dallin H. Oaks ordained him the next day to the seat left open by the death of Jeffrey R. Holland. He is the junior of the fifteen. He had been a bishop, an elders quorum president, a counsellor in a stake presidency and, for one year from April 2020, an Area Seventy. He is 56. The book, presumably, has moved desks.