Alaska Dispatch

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:

Unlike so many of our poorly informed critics, I do not believe our current circumstances are primarily the result of mistakes. They are, rather, the simple and inevitable result of being in a mature business that has been overtaken by transformational change that would have turned us inside-out no matter what we had done.

You will hear digital triumphalists and grave dancers hurl charges like "Why didn't newspapers invent Google?" or "Why didn't newspapers start Craigslist?" Many of them look to the enormous power and promise of the networked world and admonish us to abandon print publishing altogether, a nonsensical notion that illustrates both the depth of their ignorance and shallowness of their analysis.

And with that, Weaver announced last week that he's retiring from McClatchy.

He and his wife, Barbara Hodgin, plan to remain in Sacramento, where Weaver said he intends "to think and try to write and go camp in the desert." They also hope to spend time in Alaska, according to a McClatchy statement.

Here's the rest of the press release on Weaver's departure:

The Anchorage-born Weaver began his journalism career as a high school sports stringer for the Anchorage Daily News. He joined the paper full time as a reporter after graduating from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1972. He also covered Alaska for various national publications.

In 1975, Weaver was the writer and reporting team leader of "Empire: The Alaska Teamsters Story," which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for public service. He left the paper in 1976 to help start the Alaska Advocate, a statewide weekly newspaper. When it closed in 1979, Weaver rejoined the Anchorage Daily News, which was purchased by McClatchy that year. Weaver became managing editor in 1981 and served as editor from 1983 to 1995. In that position, he led the paper to a second Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1989 for "A People in Peril," which explored the high incidence of alcoholism and suicide among native Alaskans.

In 1992-93, he attended the University of Cambridge in England, earning a master of philosophy degree. In 1995, Weaver moved to McClatchy's corporate offices as assistant to the president for new media strategies, advising senior management on the digital advances taking place and the potential impact and opportunities for the company. In 1997, Weaver joined The Sacramento Bee as editor of the editorial pages. He returned to corporate in 2001 as McClatchy vice president, news where he oversaw the McClatchy Washington Bureau, administered the company's President's Awards for journalism, and spurred McClatchy newsrooms across the country to embrace the change and opportunities presented by the internet and new digital platforms.

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