We live in a state whose narrative is still unfolding, a place of bitter cold and pockets of warmth where they're least expected; of soul-diminishing greed mingled with gestures of generosity strong enough to break hearts; of huge riches and abject poverty - a bastion for imagination and apathy. We came to Alaska and later founded Alaska Dispatch because good journalism can still make a difference here. This is a great and wild state, and to remain so, it needs as many eyes on it as we can give it. And so now we enter a new phase at Alaska Dispatch.

You've probably noticed a few things have changed at this site since we first launched last year. Alaska Dispatch has once again been redesigned. New bylines are appearing daily. We're posting more news stories, including articles filed from rural Alaska, the heart of the state, which so often goes uncovered by media. You may have also heard there's a new owner behind this sudden expansion.

The current incarnation of Alaska Dispatch began this summer, when a friend invited us to meet a woman named Alice Rogoff. We must confess we had no idea who she was. Alice, of course, has played a quiet but instrumental role in promoting Alaska and Native artists, as well as seeking out economic opportunities for rural Alaskans. Over beers and buffalo burgers, Alice shared her story, one that stretched well beyond her first impressions of Alaska (more on this later). A former CFO of U.S. News and World Report and publisher's assistant at The Washington Post, Alice knows good journalism, and she knows how a place lacking it can suffer.

Alice told us her vision for a publication that would tell this state's story to the world, from Alaska to Beltway policymakers to that audience that became captivated with the Last Frontier when Sen. John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate almost a year ago. This new publication would be young, fresh and smart, and would take rural Alaska as seriously as people here have taken the oil industry and the chummy politics that run this state. The key was that this new media venture would exist only online.

We were stunned. As in so many places across America, local journalism in Alaska is at a low point these days. You just don't hear talk of such big dreams much anymore. Alice's vision was very much aligned with the values and goals we'd set for Alaska Dispatch when we created the site in summer 2008.

We didn't necessarily have a mission statement back when we launched Alaska Dispatch, but we did know that we wanted it to be more like a magazine, offering more analysis than a typical daily paper or TV newscast, and that we didn't fear point of view as long as everyone who wrote for us didn't have the same one. We believed the news reporting would eventually come as we grew. Meantime, we'd ask people to share their own stories. We wanted to hear from Alaskans whose voices had been smothered by vast distances and cultural divides. Alaska has more than its fair share of bellicosity, and those voices tend to drown out the more thoughtful ones that really need to be heard.

We reveled over the idea that we might get an Inupiat man to write about a whale hunt, a fisherman from Kodiak to describe the choppy seas, or an oil worker to send us a few paragraphs about keeping a family together with a two-week-on-two-week-off schedule. These would be real stories, unfiltered by editors like us. The catch-phrase for this is "citizen journalism." And we wanted to try it on a massive scale, from one end of the state to the other.

So we spread the word, and the stories began coming in. With a few of those contributions, and with our own stories to share, we launched the first version of our site on Aug. 13, 2008, designed by Tony's brother, Todd Hopfinger, a computer programmer from Michigan who remains our webmaster today. Aaron Jansen, a former art director for the Anchorage Press who is still with us at the Dispatch today, came up with the logo and the design of the site. It was slow that first two weeks, but readers began to respond.