In the world of Southeast Alaskan journalism, all roads seem to lead to Larry Persily, whose story starts — serendipitously enough — with a classified ad.
“In 1976, my wife and I were both working for newspapers in Chicago, and in a trade journal, saw a classified ad, back when they used to have classified ads, that the weekly newspaper in Wrangell [AK] was for sale,” Persily said. “And we sort of looked at it and thought, ‘wonder what it’s like,’ so we called, and figured out we could actually afford it, and it sounded like kind of an adventure.”
Five weeks later, Persily and his wife had uprooted their lives in Chicago and taken ownership of the Wrangell Sentinel in Alaska. Since then, Persily has sold and repurchased the Wrangell Sentinel twice, rescuing the paper once from bankruptcy, and once from a creeping deterioration in both quality and profitability.
There’s a reason Persily has been called the “fairy godfather of local journalism”; aside from his habitual ownership of the Wrangell Sentinel, he has worked for the Juneau Empire, financed The Skagway News, and filled in as the editor for the Chilkat Valley News and Petersburg Pilot. He’s also on the board of an organization that provides grants to Alaskan newspapers.
“I don’t like seeing small town newspapers die. I can’t save every little newspaper in the state or in America, but if I can save a few in Southeast Alaska, that seems like a good purpose in life,” Persily said.
The world of Alaskan journalism is a small one. Only 28 newspapers are registered with the Alaska Press Club, compared to the 116 newspapers that are currently published in Washington state, Alaska’s closest neighbor. Though independent papers exist as far north as Fairbanks and Nome and as far west as Kodiak, Alaskan journalism tends to cluster in two locations. Most newspapers operate in and around Anchorage, the state’s largest city. Seven dot Southeast Alaska, where the capital city, Juneau, and a series of small, remote communities are connected by the Alaska Marine Highway System, a well-developed flight network, anda troop of devoted Alaskan journalists devoted to maintaining the strength of Alaskan journalism.
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The national news industry’s decline is well-documented. As the landscape of information consumption and advertising has changed, data compiled by the Pew Research Center in 2020 tells us that everything from the number of daily papers circulated and revenue to newsroom employment is diminishing for papers across America.
Though the Biden administration has made the climate for journalists friendlier than it was under the Trump administration, the United States ranks only 44th of 180 countries in the 2021 World Press Freedom Index. Well-established newspapers are increasingly being bought by hedge funds and large newspaper chains. For outside owners, maintaining their bottom lines often takes precedence over delivering quality news to subscribers, and newsrooms find themselves gutted as a result.
Alaska occupies a strange position within the larger national story of the newspaper industry’s decline. “In Sitka, we’re going through the same crisis that virtually every newspaper in the country has gone through or is going through,” said Thad Poulson, who, alongside his wife Sandy Poulson, has operated the Sitka Sentinel since 1969 and owned it since 1974. “It is existential, suffice it to say.” According to Poulson, competition posed by other news sources, the online revolution, and declines in advertising have destabilized the Sitka Sentinel and other Alaskan newspapers.
Poulson said he was fortunate that he and his wife have no long-term debt and have put away savings both for the Sitka Sentinel and themselves. Because they aren’t financially dependent on the operation of the newspaper, the Poulsons operate it primarily as a community service.
“But there is no doubt about it that it is not a financially sustainable operation,” Poulson said. Though he and his wife have had the paper listed with a national newspaper broker for two years, the offers they’ve received for the paper have been either from companies that have a reputation of running papers into the ground or people who have unreasonable expectations of financial success. Because they haven’t found a satisfactory buyer, they’re considering transitioning the paper to a community-based nonprofit, so they can afford to keep a daily newspaper in the town.
Though Poulson is confident that Sitka could, in theory, maintain a for-profit, weekly newspaper, he fears that the loss of an in-town daily would turn Sitka into a “news desert” because of shipping logistics. This would leave those who live in Sitka without effective ways to publish, among other things, obituaries and news about the activities of local government — the sorts of things larger papers might not necessarily pick up.
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Ron and Anne Loesch, the publishers of the Petersburg Pilot, have owned their newspaper since 1976. During their tenure, Loesch has noticed a “continuous growth” in the paper until about five or six years ago, something he attributes to an aging consumer base and competition from the internet. Expanding and updating the Pilot’s digital offerings, such as their website and Facebook page, have been a key part of the paper’s adaptation to an increasingly digital landscape. Younger people skilled in navigating digital processes have been vital for this transition, but attracting talent is becoming increasingly difficult.
“We’re experiencing the same problems as other newspapers when it comes to attracting talent. Back in the ’80’s and ’90’s, when we advertised for a new reporter, we would have fifty or sixty job applications for a single opening,” Loesch said. But the last time they posted a job opening, they only got three applications.
Increasing pay is one way to make newspaper jobs attract more applicants, but increasing reporter salaries only exacerbates financial strain for small papers.
Still, Loesch seemed confident in the Petersburg Pilot’s path forward.
“Newspapers our size, and probably every newspaper in Alaska,” he said, “have the huge advantage of having readership, advertiser, and community loyalty. That is what’s gonna keep us moving forward.”
Kyle Clayton took ownership of the Chilkat Valley News, which operates in Haines, Alaska, after time spent working in Bethel, Petersburg, and Anchorage. Like Loesch, Clayton has noticed fairly stable community and advertiser support for his paper, in part because there’s no real competition for local news.
“There’s no option but the public radio station and the newspaper,” he said. “Remoteness protects us from a lot of the trends that are happening down south [in the lower 48 states].”
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Melinda Munson and Gretchen Wehmhoff, the owners of The Skagway News, took ownership of the newspaper from Persily in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. They call themselves a two-woman show; Melinda writes, and Gretchen is primarily in charge of business affairs and paper layout.
The pandemic has defined their tenure at The Skagway News. Their newspaper is printed in Whitehorse, Canada, and when borders between nations were closed, they were unable to negotiate transport or shipping of print newspapers to the town. Their attempts to distribute the paper online were stymied by a simple lack of information; they had community members’ physical addresses, but not their emails.
Even when the newspaper is operating normally, distribution is at the mercy of weather. The Klondike highway, which connects The Skagway News to their printer in Whitehorse, is “closed more often than it’s open” due to icy roads, avalanches, and other weather phenomena.
And, without a typical cruise ship season in the region, they lost their primary source of income. Traditionally, The Skagway News earned four-fifths of their revenue from a visitor’s guide. This is printed annually, and distributed on the docks to tourists. But the pandemic completely decimated the 2020 tourist season, and the 2021 tourist season was still limited. Even when Munson and Wehmhoff were able to distribute the visitor’s guide in 2021, they distributed only one-tenth of their pre-pandemic numbers, even after slashing the price by 75%.
Municipal grants, stories provided by Persily and shared by newspapers in the region, and a town full of talented artists and photographers willing to share with the paper has helped them weather the pandemic.
All of the newspaper owners The Politic interviewed emphasized the irreplaceability of community papers.
“Nobody’s paying attention except for us,” Munson said. Aside from the occasional chain story (usually focusing on Skagway tourism) and brief public radio stories, The Skagway News is the only entity writing regularly about local politics, people, and events. This is also true in Haines, Petersburg, Sitka, and Wrangell; Juneau, as Alaska’s capital city, will have state and national event coverage as long as it remains Alaska’s political center.
“Small-town papers are probably covering more local news than even the largest paper in the state [the Anchorage Daily News] can now,” Wehmhoff said.
This means that Southeast Alaska’s independent papers have primary responsibility for keeping communities connected, through simple services like event round-ups and obituaries. Beyond providing critical services, newspapers take on a symbolic weight as well.
“We cannot fail. And I don’t mean that we’re not capable of failing, but we cannot fail,” Wehmhoff said, “Because if a newspaper goes down in a small town, it says something about the whole town. Like, ‘one more thing is gone, what’s happening to our town?’”
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Ben Hohenstatt has been with the Juneau Empire for about four and a half years, and currently serves as the newspaper’s editor. When he arrived in Juneau, the paper had recently been purchased by Sound Publishing Inc., a subsidiary of Black Press, after a flurry of changes in ownership.
During his tenure with the Juneau Empire, a combination of layoffs and attrition has shrunk the newspaper dramatically. The publication used to have eight full-time reporters in the newsroom, and now only has four — one of whom works only part-time.
This means making tough choices about what to report on in the Juneau community.
“I would say as far as ‘needs,’ I think we have those addressed,” Hohenstatt said. Yet “the line between need and something you want very badly as a news room can get pretty fuzzy. We can definitely cover the important taxing bodies, we can definitely figure out how to cover breaking things and crime, but how often do we get to make it out to a local sports game?”
Despite the limits imposed by staffing realities, the Juneau Empire benefits from a deep sense of community ownership, something Hohenstatt said comes from Juneau’s status as a “bottle community,” or a “de-facto island.” The city is accessible only by boat or plane.
“Everyone says they don’t read it, but everyone can discuss every article,” Hohenstatt joked. “Everyone can call it a fish wrap, but they also remember the police blotter from three weeks ago.”
Hohenstatt hasn’t faced the same recruitment challenges editors and owners of other papers have faced, noting that there was “no shortage of applications” when they recruited to fill a full-time reporter position, and that the paper consistently receives emails from people asking about job opportunities even when they aren’t actively hiring.
As the only Southeast Alaskan newspaper owned by an outside publishing company, the Juneau Empire is inherently affected by the health of its sister publications, which are primarily located in Washington state. Though the COVID-19 pandemic presented reporting challenges for the Juneau Empire, Hohenstatt felt that the Empire rode the shock of economic contraction better than some other papers owned by Sound Publishing Inc., likely due to extraordinary community investment in the paper.
Hohenstatt finds the corporation unobtrusive, and pointed to the opportunities provided by interconnectedness. These include access to articles written by other papers and staff devoted to design, website maintenance, and data visualization.
Hohenstatt also looks forward to the return of Southeast Alaska’s tourism industry, a major economic driver in the region.
The same forces fraying the national news industry are clearly wearing away at the ropes of Southeast Alaskan journalism. But the strands that make up the rope in Alaska, it seems, may just be thicker or better suited to the elements.
Highly dedicated owner-operators, like those found in Southeast Alaska, are one strand. When speaking to newspaper owners, the depth of their investment becomes clear. Producing good work and serving their respective communities is a large part of what has kept long-time paper owners in the journalism game for so long, and what makes newer owners determined to succeed. Persily, who has made the resuscitation of Southeast Alaskan papers almost routine, exemplifies the devotion that is quietly present across the region.
Community support is another. For all the disadvantages of producing news in small, remote communities, Southeast Alaskan papers benefit from unusually tenacious subscribers and loyal communities. Assertions of community independence have become a Southeast Alaskan cliche almost out of necessity, because outsourcing anything is such a hassle. Journalism is no different, and the service hometown papers provide would be nearly impossible for outside newspapers to absorb. As my grandfather would say, the Juneau Empire makes for a good fire starter, if nothing else.
Revenue difficulties are troubling, even for optimistic owners with relatively stable bank accounts. Advertiser withdrawal, which has happened in response to changes in the advertising landscape and the pandemic, is only likely to accelerate. Digital journalism is less profitable than print journalism. Journalists are expecting larger salaries for the work they do. As balancing checkbooks becomes more difficult, Southeast Alaska newspapers benefit from a relatively slow rate of change that allows them to adapt — whether that means transitioning to a non-profit model, seeking funding from outside grants and creative partnerships, selling to large conglomerate publishers, or overhauling the way they approach journalism.
The elements will continue to wear away at Southeast Alaskan journalism, but the rope is strong. And as long as it remains intact, it is a sign that independent, local journalism can endure.
The print version of this article misattributes the quote beginning, “We cannot fail.” The online article has been updated to reflect that Gretchen Wehmhoff said this, not Melinda Munson.