Editor's note: Ten days after we reported that the Anchorage Daily News was planning to close its Juneau bureau to save money, an editor said Dec. 17 that's just a "rumor" and that the paper will cover the legislative session.

As its parent company struggles to stay afloat, the Anchorage Daily News is shutting down its Juneau bureau and again scaling back its print version, managers told employees last week. The cutbacks come on top of dozens of layoffs, wage freezes and other attempts this year to trim expenses, such as reducing reimbursements on cell phone charges to reporters.

McClatchy Co, the owner of the Anchorage Daily News, is suffering from a mountain of debt and a weak stock price. The company is now looking to sell one of its prized assets, The Miami Herald, according to The New York Times.

"The bid to sell The Herald continues the fallout from McClatchy's $4.5 billion purchase in 2006 of Knight Ridder, the newspaper chain that had owned the Miami paper," according to The Times article. "Largely as a result of that deal, one of the biggest in the industry's history, the company has about $2 billion in debt, payments on which eat up much of its cash flow."

For Alaskans, the Herald's potential sale raises questions if McClatchy will offload more papers, including the Anchorage Daily News. In the business community, some have speculated the state's largest newspaper will eventually be sold, and perhaps an Alaska-based company, such as a Native corporation, will buy it up. The Daily News and McClatchy have given no sign they plan to sell the paper.

McClatchy's stock has been trading as low as $1.45 a share recently. (Monday morning it was trading around $2.45 a share), and some analysts predict the company is headed for bankruptcy. On Monday, newspaper giant Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy protection.

There are many reasons for the downturn - a weak economy, the Internet, etc. But one explanation that often goes unmentioned is the generally poor management within the newspapers themselves. It's surprising how many editors, publishers and executives have been allowed to keep their jobs as their papers crumble around them. In any other business, these managers would be replaced. Instead, failures are blamed on "markets" and "ad dollars" and "the Internet," instead of lack of vision and poor leadership.

One example is the Daily News' decision to shutter its bureau in the state capital. The paper had been staffing the bureau during the legislative session, and it used to have a full-time reporter in Juneau a couple years ago. At a time when Alaska's governor has become a national rock star, when the biggest corruption scandal in state history continues to unfold, when low oil prices threaten to lead to budget deficits, why would the Anchorage Daily News close its Juneau bureau entirely?

There are interesting parallels between the demise of America's automobile industry and newspapers. If executives from McClatchy, the third-largest newspaper chain in the country, and others came to Congress seeking subsidies and loans, it's not hard to imagine they would be grilled by congressional lawmakers over years of incompetence to change their business model. Just like cars, newspapers are a vital American industry. And just as with automakers, some of the newspapers companies may deserve to fail.

But not all agree with this assessment. One former Alaskan who helped build the Anchorage Daily News and McClatchy was defensive a week ago on his blog about management's role in the demise of newspapers. Howard Weaver, a former editor and Pulitzer winner of the Daily News, has been vice president of news at McClatchy's headquarters in Sacramento. Here's what he had to say: