In June 2024, Emily Hellewell was named vice president of marketing and creative services at Deseret News. In this role, she leads the marketing and communications efforts for the Deseret News, Deseret Magazine and Church News as well as several other teams.
Hellewell joins this episode of the Church News podcast to discuss how her extensive background in public relations and her faith in Jesus Christ prepared her for this role. She emphasizes the importance of humanity in storytelling and how truth-seeking journalism can help cut through the world’s clutter to connect Heavenly Father’s children to one another.
Listen to this episode of the Church News podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, bookshelf PLUS, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
Transcript:
Emily Hellewell: I’ve been given great talents and great gifts by my Heavenly Father, and because of that, I should do something with it. We all need something a little bit. Sometimes it’s friendship, sometimes it’s an opportunity to work, sometimes it’s help developing our skills and talents so we can feel fulfilled. And so, if I come to work and I can help a reader or a viewer understand a piece of their worldview a little bit better, that feels really satisfying to me. And the reason why all of that matters to me is because I have a Savior who has done the ultimate version of that for me and for all of humanity, that when we are looking for ways to help those around us, hopefully I’m honoring that ultimate sacrifice that Christ made for me, in a very small, small, small way.
1:08
Mary Richards: This is Mary Richards, reporter at the Church News. Welcome to the Church News podcast. Today, we are taking you on a journey of connection as we discuss news and events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In June of 2024, the Deseret News appointed Emily Hellewell as vice president of marketing and creative services. At the time, Deseret News publisher Burke Olsen said, “Emily’s extensive experience in marketing, communications and media makes her an invaluable addition to our team.” He went on to say that “in addition to leading the marketing and creative teams, she will add her important voice to our leadership team. And we look forward to the impact she will have on the Deseret News and all our brands.”
In this role, Emily is leading the marketing and communication efforts for the Deseret News, Deseret Magazine and several other products, including Church News.
Welcome, Emily, to the Church News podcast.
Emily Hellewell: Thank you, Mary. It’s so lovely to be here today.
2:09
Mary Richards: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you grew up, and let’s learn a little bit more about you.
Emily Hellewell: Fantastic. Thank you. I grew up in Oregon. I love the Pacific Northwest. I love being able to go there. My parents still live there. And after I graduated from high school, I went to BYU, and I ended up studying communications and public relations. After I finished my degree, I moved to Washington, D.C., and I worked at NPR, National Public Radio, for several years in the communications and marketing team there. I also spent some time while I lived in D.C. working for a tourism association for Alexandria, Virginia.
And altogether, I spent about a dozen years in D.C., and then I came back to Utah and took a job at BYU, working in university communications. And after that, I moved up to Salt Lake to work for a couple of different roles at Deseret Management Corporation. I started at Deseret Digital Media, worked at Boncom advertising agency and now Deseret News.
3:18
Mary Richards: Yeah. For those listening, the Deseret Management Corporation is a global operating company, and it manages the for-profit entities affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And so, of course, that includes those you mentioned: Church News, Deseret News, Deseret Digital, Boncom and those.
So, you’ve had quite all these experiences. I want to walk through and break some of those down, your time at BYU first. Some people go in, and they know exactly what they’re going to do. They know what they’re going to major in, they know how they’re going to change the world; from the first semester, they’re set. My niece is there right now. She’s set.
It took me a little while. It took you a little while, didn’t it?
3:54
Emily Hellewell: It did, yeah. I went to school, I had some ideas of things I maybe thought I liked to do. I took my generals, GE classes, and I got towards the end where I was running out of classes to take without having a major. So one night, I’m at my apartment with my roommates, and we pull out the list of majors that BYU offers. We just went through the list, and I narrowed it down to three or five that seemed the most interesting to me.
And then I looked at the introductory class of each of those majors, and one of them fit into my next-semester schedule. It was Introduction to Public Relations. I go to class the first day, and I just fall in love with the profession and the industry and haven’t looked back since.
4:41
Mary Richards: That’s a field of storytelling and promotion and, in a way, of putting best foot forward. Describe a little bit about public relations.
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, so public relations is a piece of communications which is adjacent and related to marketing. So, it’s all a very similar, large field that you can go into, and you come at it from all different angles. Events, social media, executive communications, working with leaders to help create their message.
And what I’m doing now at the Deseret News is taking this product and all the ones that you mentioned — Utah Business and Church News and Deseret Magazine and other things — and trying to find ways to explain what we do so that an audience is interested in it, and tell them about the great journalism that we have and the great stories that we’re telling, the great products that we have, the places you can find us; and to tell it in a way to attract their attention. No one is starved for attention right now. There’s so much coming at us all of the time, so it’s also a lot about cutting through a lot of that clutter, trying to find the people who really want to hear what we have to say, want to hear about the reporting that we’re doing in a way that they can understand it at the time and the place that they need it.
You also have to think about things like people’s schedules. We’re not coming into the office every single day, we’re not commuting, so we’re not listening to the radio in the same way. This hearkens a little bit back to my NPR experience. And so, how does that change your news consumption habits if you are spending more time on social media than looking at a printed product, a newspaper or a magazine that comes to you? How do we stand out in those mediums?
6:31
Mary Richards: Yeah. Oh my goodness, this is so interesting. As a mother of teenagers — who I don’t really allow on social media yet; I’m like, “When it’s time” — but my niece, at family dinner, my sister-in-law — I was grateful; she was promoting Church News — she said, “Emily, did you see that great story that Mary wrote?” and everything. And then Emily’s like, “Was it on Instagram? If it wasn’t there, I didn’t see it.” I just thought, “OK, noted.” We’re on small screens, we’re on big screens, we’re on medium, all these different forms.
Emily Hellewell: And you’re on them at the same time. So how, if you’re watching something on streaming and looking at your phone on Twitter, how are we standing out in that space?
7:10
Mary Richards: That’s a good point. Let’s talk about — you mentioned radio and your time there. We have some similarities there with my background in radio as well. But you were in Washington, D.C., for this time. Tell me about what it was like living in Washington, D.C.
Emily Hellewell: I loved it. It was very formative for me. A lot of people say college or teenage years is formative in a certain way. For me, my postcollege 10 or 12 years of life has really set who I am now, the person I am now, in a lot of ways. I moved to D.C., I knew one person, I think. I had an internship at NPR, so not even a real full-time job.
And so it was just trying to figure it out. I knew that was a good point in my life to make a dramatic change like that. I’d always wanted to live on the East Coast. Sometime during my senior year of college, I just got mesmerized by D.C. and wanted to be there, and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I felt really fortunate that I ended up in a job, in a role, that I was able to thrive in and set that stage for my career.
Washington, D.C., is an incredibly interesting place. There’s a lot going on in terms of museums and entertainment and history and interesting people doing interesting things. So it was lovely to be around that. And then also, I felt really fortunate that I ended up with a friend group and a social circle piece of it that was other members of the Church, and that helped me, gave me better ways and examples of how I could both live my faith and do these pursuits that I wanted in my life and in my career, and really marry them. I don’t see them as really separate; they’re who I am and part of who I am.
8:57
Mary Richards: Going from Provo, Utah, to Washington, D.C., you were saying that was a little bit like a mini Provo in a way?
Emily Hellewell: Yeah. I don’t know if they still call it that, but at the time, sometimes people would say, “Oh, this is little Provo” because there was a neighborhood where it just attracted a lot of LDS people in my same situation, young professionals out of college. And so it was really fun. It was easy to have roommates and to have neighbors who also had that same faith tradition and who were actively trying to figure out how to pursue it and how to bring that into their lives.
9:28
Mary Richards: How did you learn and grow in the gospel there?
Emily Hellewell: I felt really fortunate. I was in a great ward, a singles ward, like you mentioned, and it gave me opportunities to serve. It gave me opportunities to get to know other people. It was, as you can imagine, a very social situation. Sometimes you had to go home and be like, “I need a little second to break from this.” But it was great in that way. It was a perfect thing to do in that time in my life.
And as far as in the Church, I felt great opportunities. I felt really lucky to have some opportunities to serve and to be in callings. For a while, I served in a Relief Society presidency. I was a counselor and then the president. For me, it was such a refining experience. I didn’t serve a mission. There was a lot of intensity to it. It was a large ward. It was very active. There was a lot going on and a lot of opportunities to get to know really incredible people.
I also felt really lucky that I served with a bishop, Bishop Wellington, who was very fundamental to me and my understanding of how the practical day-to-day of serving in the Church works. He is so kind and tender-hearted and really sought out everyone’s best thinking on what we should do, and so it didn’t matter who I was or my background or what I brought to the table. He found value in that, and that taught me a lot about that’s how we should see others, both in Church service and outside of that, that everyone has something to offer, and if you happen to be in the privileged position of being in a leadership role, that it’s your job to find out how to pull that out of people and give people the opportunity to show that.
11:18
Mary Richards: The phrase came into my mind that we are all needed in “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27). And in that way, he taught you that, and you saw that too.
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, absolutely.
Mary Richards: Yeah. Coming back, then, from that experience back to Provo and BYU communications, you could see the mission of the university and how that would be reflected in its communications and marketing that you were working in?
Emily Hellewell: Yeah. So, my role at BYU was similar to other communications roles; you’re on a part of a team that’s trying to advocate for the mission of the university and doing that in big and small ways. I worked on the inauguration of President [Kevin J] Worthen, the inauguration event around that, lots of big university events, I was a small piece in that, as well as promoting things like devotionals and “Why does it matter to go to devotionals?”
I started a series while I was there, focusing on reaching the campus community to shed some more light on why we do these devotionals and why they’re important. And the direction that I gave for it is highlighting the individual speakers, so learning more about these professors and faculty members who are speaking to us, and what’s their background and what’s creative, interesting things about how they spend their Saturday morning, and also why they are there at the university.
Because I think that adds a lot of value that, yeah, you may or may not want to go to the devotional, or you may have time to go to the devotional, or you might not. That might vary from week to week, but if you know the person, you might be more interested in going. So I think that’s what I bring to a lot of the communications and marketing work that I do, that it’s so much easier to be connected when you’re personally connected.
13:05
Mary Richards: Yes. We are so interested in other people, in their stories, “Who are they? What makes them tick?” Was there a little bit of a “What’s in it for me?” when getting students to go to devotionals or, “Oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that about that professor. Now I want to go see what he has to say.
Emily Hellewell: Exactly, yeah. So, give them a connection and identity with the person who’s speaking, beyond just — we know they’re going to say something really spiritually uplifting, but “I feel a personal connection to them” as well.
13:33
Mary Richards: Yeah, that is so interesting. We do have that curiosity, as humans, about other humans and their background. That’s why I keep asking you more questions about you.
So, then, from BYU, you come up to Salt Lake City, and you’ve probably worked on almost every floor in this building here in Triad Center. Talk a little bit about some of your different positions here at DMC.
13:55
Emily Hellewell: Sure. After I left BYU, I came up to Salt Lake, and yeah, I have worked for several DMC companies. Most recently before the Deseret News, I worked at Boncom. It’s an advertising agency. You might know them. They have done a lot of work for the Church on projects like Light the World and the Come Unto Christ website and many, many other things, including projects around the state of Utah. They’ve also worked for the Smithsonian, done really, really incredible creative visual work.
Mary Richards: The “Hear Him” campaign is one that comes to mind too.
Emily Hellewell: Exactly, yes, yes. So, after I spent a couple of years at Boncom, this opportunity at the Deseret News came up. So yeah, so I’ve had a few other jobs in between there. And yeah, I’ve worked on different areas of the company here.
14:44
Mary Richards: But all learning and building and growing. And who helped you along the way? Who are some of the mentors that you would like to mention or that you can think of?
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, I would say that I have had some incredible, incredible mentors. Back when I worked at NPR, I was there for about 10 years and came across a lot of really, really great people who are so smart and intelligent and very curious and really open to giving people opportunities.
So, my direct supervisor at NPR taught me everything that I know about communications. Her name is actually Emily as well, and she showed me how the humanness matters in all of this, that we’re not just talking to an audience like a big block of people; we’re talking to individuals, and the more we know and understand them, the better we can help communicate that message. I worked with some members on the executive team there as well who taught me a lot about how we can take the intent of our message. Companies and executives are trying to get messages across, and we can figure out how better to communicate that as we know that audience we’re trying to reach better.
So, those were such formative — I felt very accepted there. I might go to a happy hour or a party or something where maybe alcohol is being served, and I wasn’t different from anyone else, especially now. So many people, everyone has something that they’re not eating or drinking or doing, because they’re trying to work out their addictions and trying to figure out what is valuable and not valuable. And so I felt like that was just my thing, where I chose not to drink, or whatever it was, and felt very part of that, because I think there were some bigger values there. We are curious about people, and we are looking to learn more and find truth, which is the same as what we’re trying to do at the Deseret News as well. So, I had such a great experience in all of that, and great people along the way to help with that.
16:58
Mary Richards: Yeah. I think about how I see some parallels to the gospel in what you’re saying. You talked about talking to individuals, and I thought about how the Savior ministered one by one. And you talked about trying to discern truth and sift through to find something trusted, and how in John 8:12, we read Jesus said unto them, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
I was at a training with Sister Kristin M. Yee of the Relief Society general presidency, and she mentioned the need — at least in our gospel teaching, but I think this also applies to our careers, our lives — about the three primary sources: the scriptures, the words of the Prophet and then personal revelation, the Holy Ghost.
Do you see yourself relying on primary sources as then you are working in your career in communications?
17:53
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a little bit hard to actually pull out each of those threads, because yeah, I’m trying to do the best I can with the gospel. I am trying to participate in my ward and help in different ways, try to give service or minister, trying to keep that personal study up. Some days are easier than others. And also, I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the personal revelation part of it. Why they don’t seem different to me is that I feel like personal revelation is informed by the information that you are taking in.
So, partly it’s your exposure to people and to what they are doing in their journey. Part is the time I’m spending in reading the words of the prophets and leaders and reading scripture, and the time I spend worshipping in a community, and on top of it, my own experience, what I’m learning about me, how I’m learning to be the better version of me — all of those I feel like inform personal revelation. So, I don’t know that I could say that it comes more from one place or another, because I think it comes from all of those places.
19:13
Mary Richards: Intertwined, exactly. Well now, tell me more, then, about your role here as VP of marketing and creative services.
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, it’s an exciting role. It’s a really, really exciting time to be in this role. The Deseret News and all of the products and brands that you mentioned earlier have such great opportunities. The teams and the people there are doing such incredible work to try to find the truth in the news cycle; trying to find the truth in the business community, with Utah Business; find the details and the interesting pieces that’s going on in the Church ecosystem, for the Church News and others.
And so, I see my role and my team’s role as marketers and communicators and designers and all the different roles we’ve got on our team to try to find the best of that and put it out there. Because if we’re trying so hard to create, to investigate and put forward the truth of what happened at the basketball game versus what was announced in this corporate announcement or something, such varied pieces of information, what really came out of that? How did people react to that?
All of that is going on, and it’s working, it’s being put out there, and our job is to really shine a light on that, to showcase the people and individuals who are putting this together, the work that has gone into that, as well as showing those articles that they’ve written, or the video or the social post, and putting that out there in a way that an audience can find it. Because I believe there’s so many people who are looking for that truth.
And we can talk about, “What does truth really mean?” And that’s a bigger question. But they want to know what happened and what people said so that they can understand it and interpret it according to their values and their beliefs.
21:06
Mary Richards: Yeah. You probably also study algorithms. And I tell people who don’t realize there’s things involved with search engine optimization, and there’s things that are designed to show up in front of your eyes, versus something that you might need to go hunt and find yourself, and then hopefully it’ll then rise to the top in your feed more.
Can you talk a little bit about some advice for consumers in that way?
21:27
Emily Hellewell: Yeah, so it is complicated and confusing, and there’s so much out there. There is no shortage of places you can find information. And it’s very much we’re in a phase right now, or a time of our lives, where being a conscious consumer of media and news is our responsibility as individual consumers. And so, being educated and understanding where are there people and newsrooms and journalists and others and content creators. It’s not limited to traditional media organizations.
There’s a lot of individuals out there putting out some really great stuff. But the idea is that there’s intermediate places like Facebook and all social platforms, as well as Google and search platforms and YouTube and things, and those also can be really great tools for us to use. We just have to be smart about understanding how those things work, and they do rely on things like algorithms and virality and what other people are liking.
And so sometimes you do have to search a little bit more, and often it’s compare and contrast. You’ve got a piece over here and a piece over here, they might be talking about a similar topic, and you should read both of them or watch both of them and see what is really sticking out for you. Truth is going to overlap in that situation, and it’s OK to be skeptical. It’s OK to read things and be like, “I just don’t quite know, so I’m going to read and learn more.” And it’s our job to present as best we can and try to work through all those algorithms to try to get that information out there. It’s the consumer’s job to double-check it and fact-check it, and we want them to do that.
23:11
Mary Richards: Oh, I love that. That’s good advice.
Well, our tradition at the Church News podcast is to let our guest have the last word. And so, Emily, what do you know now, after 20 years of experience in media, communications, organizational strategy and such?
23:32
Emily Hellewell: So, I’ll tell you a story. A couple years ago, I had the opportunity at the end of my MBA program to travel to India. And in one of the stops, we saw all the sites. The purpose was to go visit some businesses, so we did that. And one of the organizations we went to was the organization called Jaipur Foot. It’s a nongovernmental organization that provides prosthetic limbs for people; arms, legs, things like that. And we got to go there and look through all their operations and how they work and where they get their funding and how they get their product and how they distribute that to the people who really need it. They provide this service at no cost for the patient.
And so, we walk in, and it’s crazy and complicated, and all the things you would expect from what you’ve heard about India. It’s also really beautiful in complicated ways. So, we go in, and we’re walking around, we’re looking at their whole operation. They’re showing us the legs they’re making and the technology that they have for that. And we’re in a big group and in the back, and I can’t totally hear what’s going on. And I look over to my right, and we’re in this space that’s both laboratory and fitting room and waiting room and all the things at once. I look over to my right, and there’s a man there who’s putting on a prosthetic limb.
And I don’t know his story. I’ve made up a lot about his story over the years, but what I do know is that that was a life-changing moment for him. And I also knew enough to know that India doesn’t have all the paved sidewalks that we have in America, and so getting from place to place is going to be hard if you don’t have two legs. I also know that there’s a lot of manual labor. Those are the jobs, a lot of the jobs; not every job, but a lot of them. And so, if you can’t move and physically move your body in a traditional way, you might not have a job. If you don’t have a job, you can’t eat. And if you can’t eat, you can’t feed your family, and all these things.
So I looked over, and I was watching this happen, and I was thinking about all of these things and imagining what this person’s life might be like. And I realized that it was life-changing for him and that in that, I was literally standing on sacred ground right there, and that was probably one of the more spiritual experiences I’ve ever had.
And I took from that that I have such privilege and such opportunity and great chances for mentorship and experiences and to try new things, and I’ve been given great talents and great gifts by my Heavenly Father, and because of that, I should do something with it. Because there are people who have helped me when doing things that I couldn’t do for myself. There’s people like this man that I saw, and there’s a million other spectrum in between, all of that. We all need something a little bit. Sometimes it’s friendship, sometimes it’s a prosthetic limb, sometimes it’s an opportunity to work. Sometimes it’s help developing our skills and talents so we can feel fulfilled and feel like we’re doing the thing that we want to be doing in our lives.
And so, if I come to work and I can provide that opportunity for the people around me, if I come to work and I can help a reader or a viewer understand a piece of their worldview a little bit better, if they can make better decisions because of that, that feels really satisfying to me because I know what it’s like, because that’s happened to me, too. So, the reason why all of that matters to me is because I have a Savior who has done the ultimate version of that for me and for all of humanity. And so, a tribute and a testament that when we are looking for ways to help those around us, when I’m looking for those ways, that hopefully I’m honoring that ultimate sacrifice that Christ made for me, in a very small, small, small way.
27:57
Mary Richards: Thank you for listening to the Church News podcast. I’m Church News reporter Mary Richards. I hope you learned something today about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had your faith in the Savior increase by looking through the Church News window as a living record of the Restoration. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so it can be accessible to more people. And if you enjoyed the messages we shared today, please share the podcast with others. Thanks to our guests; to my producer, KellieAnn Halvorsen; and to others who make this podcast possible. Join us every week for a new episode. Find us on your favorite podcasting channels or with other news and updates about the Church on TheChurchNews.com or on the Church News app.
