Coming back into the country

What could be better than a summer night in the Super 8 on Minnesota Drive, drinking decent red wine, eating good pizza and watching really bad TV? (Bradley Whitford, you should be ashamed.) And it's not even raining.

But I digress.

I'm a reporter. And I'm coming home to Alaska after 20 years. I thought I'd escaped The Last Frontier. But I could never really let it go. So here I am (again), hunkered down in a (relatively) cheap hotel about to start a new yet strangely old assignment at the Alaska Dispatch, a hard-charging entry into the new world of news. The online-only site aims to carry on the tradition of excellent and meaningful journalism in an economic environment that has put traditional print newspapers on an elevator straight to the crapper.

I started my journalism career in 1975 at The Anchorage Times. I was 21 and celebrated my 22nd birthday at the Woodshed with people who have gone on to become some of the most successful reporters, writers and policymakers in the state and the country. "Alaska's largest newspaper," the Times' front page flag used to boast. But the stodgy evening newspaper closed in 1992 after losing ground to the fiercely competitive upstart Anchorage Daily News, a morning paper. It turned out people would rather watch cop dramas and sitcoms when they got home from work than sit down a la Ward Cleaver with a paper full of news they'd already heard on the radio. Legendary founder Bob Atwood sold his beloved newspaper to VECO's Bill Allen in 1989, a year before he died. But Allen wasn't interested, as RBA was, in building Anchorage into a great city. He was all about the money, which just wasn't there anymore. He's sitting in prison while Atwood's Turnagain mansion (where new reporters were required to chug a beer, sneak the can onto the front porch and then run like hell) is a historic site.

In 1984, I jumped ship to the Daily News and the Kay Fanning/Howard Weaver/Pat Dougherty vision of great journalism. The seven years I spent there were the best of my career. Howard and Pat were (and still are) among the best in our business anywhere. We had freedom to report and room to write. The tiny paper had the cash to cover the entire state, and we won a Pulitzer in 1989 doing just that: shining a very bright light on the terrible alcoholism and self-destructive behavior among Alaska Natives, in Bush villages as well as urban centers. Mostly, I covered the oil industry. The wreckage that was the Exxon Valdez, which has come to mean so much more than just the name of a tanker, was the pinnacle of years spent working sources and understanding the complex web that schizophrenically entwines Alaska with the business of pumping crude out of the ground in the most extreme of environments while hollering about protecting that same environment. Hello?

Now the Daily News finds itself in the familiar territory once occupied by the Anchorage Times. It's the one circling the drain now, being forced to give way to the talent and dedication of journalists like Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne at the Alaska Dispatch, and to other online sites that, thanks to technology, are free to publish their vision of investigative and in-depth reporting much more cheaply and efficiently than the Daily News, which is constrained in large part by the cost of delivery trucks and news print (surely everyone has noticed how shrunken, skinny and thin it is). It doesn't matter that the Daily News still employs great reporters and editors, many of whom are my oldest friends. It doesn't matter that the Daily News by itself is still reportedly profitable. It doesn't matter that the Daily News website is still unmatched in terms of content and hits. Alaska is still losing the expertise of its veteran journalists as the paper downsizes to help mend the McClatchy corporate bottom line.