As the Chief Operating Officer and Editor of the Salt Lake Deseret Morning News (originally hired as a newspaper consultant), John Hughes reversed a negative trend of subscription loss into a newspaper 25%+ circulation growth.

Hughes’ experience as a newspaper consultant comes from multiple angles.  Editorial prowess as a Pulitzer prize winner, and someone who has twenty years experience as an editor.

His experience as a newspaper consultant also comes from the operational and business side of the bottom line—delivering profit in a challenging world of print and digital convergence. 

Hughes draws experience from this operational and bottom-line side as a newspaper consultant for the Du Pont owned News Journal Company, as Chief Operating Officer for the Salt Lake Deseret Morning News, and currently The Christian Science Monitor facing bottom-line pressure like every newspaper.

Hughes is a Welsh-born Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, who also served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, and as Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Before his role as an editor, executive, and newspaper consultant, he began his career in South Africa for the Natal Mercury. He quickly began working for the Christian Science Monitor which took him to America, Africa, and Asia where he won his Pulitzer prize, reporting on Indonesia's political coup and government-endorsed killing of over 200,000 people in Indonesia.

In his 24 years with the Christian Science Monitor, R. John Hughes was Editor for nine years, and ran Monitor Radio.  Hughes left to fulfill his dream of owning and running a newspaper on Cape Cod, where he built the Cape Cod Oracle into a five-paper enterprise which he sold to a conglomerate…adding to his own bottom-line experience as a newspaper consultant.

During the Reagan Administration, Hughes was tapped for his media expertise as a newspaper consultant and unbiased integrity to run the U.S. Information Agency’s Voice of America and was subsequently tapped to serve as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State and State Department Spokesman, and later tapped for the role of Assistant Secretary-General and Director of Communications at the United Nations.

R. John Hughes is a newspaper consultant, the author of two books, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, winner of the Overseas Press Club award for Best Reporting from Abroad for investigation into narcotics trafficking, and served as President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.