Alaska Dispatch Staff
Alice is publisher and owner of Alaska Dispatch. From 1985 to 1997, she was chief financial officer of U.S News and World Report. She served at The Washington Post Co. as assistant to publisher Donald Graham, and she was the creator of the Post's National Weekly Edition. Earlier in her career she served in President Jimmy Carter's administration as special assistant to director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Alice is also the founder of Arctic Imperative, a lecture series dedicated to raising awareness of circumpolar north issues. And she is co-founder of a number of other organizations, including the Alaska Native Arts Foundation. One of her duties as Dispatch’s publisher is piloting her Cessna 206 in search of great stories and photos around Alaska.
Tony is the executive editor of Alaska Dispatch. He grew up outside Chicago, graduated from Marquette University and worked for newspapers in Wisconsin, Idaho and California before heading to Alaska in 1999. He was a newspaper reporter in Anchorage until 2005. Over the next few years, he freelanced stories on such topics as dying villages, corrupt oilmen and Arctic development, his work appearing in Newsweek, The Walrus and other publications. He was a correspondent for Bloomberg News in the mid-2000s and is the co-author of "Crude Awakening: Money Mavericks and Mayhem in Alaska." In 2008, after watching the demise of the newspapers he once reported for, he founded Alaska Dispatch in his spare bedroom.
In 35 years as a journalist in Alaska, Mike has been an editor and reporter, including a stint as assistant managing editor of the Anchorage Daily News and his current job as managing editor of Alaska Dispatch. He was part of a team that won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for "A People In Peril," a series chronicling the effect of alcohol abuse in Alaska, and he supervised the Daily News photo department that was a Pulitzer finalist in 1990. He was also a photo editor at Sports Illustrated magazine
Scott is a lifelong Alaskan who hasn't always lived in Alaska. He has written and edited for newsweeklies in Alaska and Wyoming, has taught college and university composition courses, and was inducted into The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels for his dedication to adult literacy. His poems have appeared in New Madrid, Ice Floe, and Rough Draft, and he has been part of Alaska Dispatch since its inception. Since 2009, Scott has filled numerous roles at Dispatch, including editorial writer, Alaska Beat editor, commentary editor, and news editor -- his current role.
Eric dreamed of a life in Alaska long before he ever arrived here, falling in love with the idea of the Last Frontier while reading "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez in a California university classroom. He came up and spent a summer chasing northern lights and working for a few old codgers at The Salmon Bake in Denali National Park. He's since graduated from Cal State-San Francisco with a journalism degree and worked at The San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Maui Times, the NBC News affiliates in Anchorage and Portland, Ore., before landing a job as news editor at the Alaska Dispatch in late 2010.
Ben is an (almost) lifelong Alaskan and graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage who joined Alaska Dispatch as an intern in 2010. Though he started in features, he now reports on every facet of life in Alaska, from rural issues to politics, science, and even occasional forays into Alaska's mysterious paranormal phenomena. In 2011, he won first place in the best general reporting category at the Alaska Press Club and Best of the West journalism contests for his story on a controversy-plagued airport in the remote Aleutian Islands community of Akutan. He lives with his wife and two dogs in a home overlooking Anchorage's Chester Creek.
Laurel was born in Bethel and grew up playing in the woods in Fairbanks. When she was 16, she spent a year in a small mining town in New Zealand as a foreign exchange student. In 2007, she graduated Cum Laude from Clark University with a bachelor's of arts degree in international relations with a French minor. During her college years she was lucky enough to live in France for six months and travel across the northeastern U.S. She returned to Fairbanks after college and began developing her portfolio while working full-time, most recently as a legal assistant with the General Counsel’s Office at the University of Alaska. In her spare time, she enjoys writing, playing music, photography and traveling.
Jill has been a reporter in Alaska for a decade, first as a broadcaster for the CBS and NBC affiliates in Anchorage before jumping ship in 2009 to write for Alaska Dispatch. She reports on a wide range of topics, from rural Alaska to businesses to politics to social issues. Although she thinks the title investigative journalist is overused, Jill enjoys digging through documents, nosing through public databases, and even writing her own court filings to obtain information. Covering the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is an annual favorite of hers, as is traveling beyond Anchorage to take in the rest of the state. Jill lives and works in Anchorage with her family, two dogs and a menacing cat.
Even though she was born in San Francisco, Suzanna is an Alaskan to the core. She grew up in Wasilla, where she was an outdoor junkie with an enthusiasm for writing and the news. While at University of Alaska Anchorage, she spent four years reporting for The Northern Light, including one year as the paper's executive editor. Suzanna spent two years at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, where she covered the city's vibrant arts community and spent two very cold winters covering the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. Along the way, she has won a handful of awards for her work, including several Alaska Press Club awards.
Alex is a veteran reporter who rose through the journalism ranks in a career launched at age 10 flinging The Houston Chronicle newspaper. A journalism-school product of the University of Texas-Austin, he reported for the university paper before joining The Austin Chronicle weekly. He moved to Alaska after commercially fishing for Bristol Bay salmon in 1997. That was the worst season in years, so he stuck with journalism. He became editor at Alaska Newspapers Inc., focusing on rural issues while living and traveling extensively in off-road Alaska. He did time as rural affairs reporter at the Anchorage Daily News, and joined Alaska Dispatch in 2011. He often focuses on business- and oil-related topics.
Craig arrived in Alaska in 1973 broke and at the wheel of a dying Opel station wagon. He’s still broke, but he’s had a storied career in Alaska journalism. A graduate of the University of Alaska, Medred worked in Fairbanks, Juneau and Anchorage, and won piles of awards everywhere. His coverage of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race netted the prestigious best deadline reporting honor from the American Society of Newspapers editors, and his work has been reprinted in several editions of “The Best American Sports Writing.’’ But he might be best known for once shooting a grizzly bear off his leg.
Jerzy Shedlock is a reporter and editorial assistant. A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage, he worked at the Peninsula Clarion before coming to Alaska Dispatch.
Katie has worked at Alaska Dispatch since 2012 as a writer and is serves as the calendar editor. She was born and raised in Anchorage and has also lived in Washington state, Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada and California. Her interests include the Arctic, social justice, modernity, audio and visual stimulation, snowy owls and the philosophy of mind and science. Katie holds a bachelor's in philosophy and U.S. social history and a master's in liberal arts. Notable adventures include learning to drive a dog sled at the age of 6, trekking the Italian Dolomites, sailing the coast of New England and studying abroad in China. Currently, she enjoys sipping coffee, isolation, backcountry hiking and an assortment of cold weather activities.
Aaron was born and raised in Colorado and holds a degree from the Art Institute of Colorado. After graduation, he married an Alaskan and settled in Anchorage. He started his career with the Anchorage Press and has worked for various magazines and publications. He helped create Alaska Dispatch in 2008 and serves as the new site's art director, overseeing its design and illustrating stories. He's won numerous design and illustration awards over the years.
Loren is a native of Anchorage. The only child of an archaeologist and anthropologist, he studied philosophy before completing his master's in photography at Ohio University's School of Visual Communication. Before joining Alaska Dispatch, he spent six months teaching photography and English in India, and interned with former National Geographic photographer J. Bruce Baumann at the Evansville Courier & Press.
After graduating from Willamette University with a bachelor's in English in 2005, Tom moved back to Alaska, where he began his career in sales. In April 2010, he joined Alaska Dispatch as a sales executive. After one year, he was promoted to sales director, where he and his staff have been breaking new trail in the future of online advertising. Tom also helps with marketing Alaska Dispatch to Alaska, and he's the company's morale booster, a crucial role that both he and his dog Allie take very seriously. In the two years since becoming sales director, Alaska Dispatch has seen record growth in sales thanks to the hard work of his incredible team.
Graduating from the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., with a degree in advertising design, Joy has lived in Alaska for 21 years, building a successful advertising and marketing career. She is the sales manager for Alaska Dispatch. Before Alaska Dispatch, she worked for companies such as First Alaskans, Alaska Newspapers Inc., Camai Printing, The Tatitlek Corp. and Alaska Print Brokers, serving in a variety of roles, including special publications director and advertising executive. Joy is passionate about the forward changes in the publishing industry and how online marketing can help businesses.
Jenny is the business manager for Alaska Dispatch. She is a CPA and studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara and received a master's in accountancy from the University of Notre Dame. Jenny began her career at Ernst & Young in Denver, where she performed audits of small to Fortune 200 corporations. She also served as the senior accounting manager at the Vail Valley Foundation before moving to Alaska in 2012. Jenny is an avid outdoorswoman and in her spare time can be found shredding powder or on one of her bikes. She also practices yoga and enjoys sharing her baked goods with the office.
David has built his career around sales and marketing. He has worked with companies large and small to develop SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to increase online productivity and conversion rates substantially. David has frequently been recognized for his achievements in the world of online marketing by companies like Amazon.com. In addition to his knowledge, David is an outgoing, sales driven individual who has always made it his goal to build a better company by building a strong team around him.