“In 2014, when Alaska Dispatch purchased the Anchorage Daily News, the first thing we changed was to make all our digital content free. We believed then — as I still believe — that publishing the news is a public service, and we wanted our new, broader content to be accessible to all Alaskans and everyone in the world who wanted to know more about this wonderful place,” she wrote in an editorial only a month ago. 

“I still feel that way. Publishing the news is a way of contributing to a ‘civil society’ and I still want our news to be available to anyone who wants to be better informed about Alaska and the issues that affect us.”

Whether the January statement was delusional or disingenuous only Rogoff knows, but it ran entirely contrary to what followed in the editorial: the announcement that the news important to “civil society” would NOT be “accessible to all Alaskans and everyone in the world.”

Henceforth, it would be available only to those with the means to pay. There is nothing wrong with this. It is capitalism at work, and capitalism is not a perfect economic system. It is simply the one that conforms to nature. It recognizes the world is driven by the desire of all animals to get fat.

Capitalism is an inherently unfair system, but there is no fair system. Every economic system has its flaws. Given those flows, capitalism is arguably the best system because it harnesses the power of competition to make the world a better place. You are reading this on a computer screen today because of the power of competition driving computers and, later, the internet to where we are now.

Profit motive

As a profit-driven, capitalistic move, Rogoff’s decision to place ADN content behind a paywall might be a good decision or a bad one. Some online news operations have found the paywall works. Others have tried a paywall and abandoned it after losing viewers. Advertisers need viewers.

Advertisers can’t sell you things unless you see their advertising. The old Alaska Dispatch was built around the advertising model. The old Dispatch also recognized it was never going to bring in the sort of advertising revenue a newspaper brings in. So it countered by keeping costs low and productivity high.

It also lost money as it worked its way toward profitability. That is way things work for internet start-ups.

The Dispatch never reached profitability though it was moving in that direction when Rogoff ended the experiment and paid $34 million to buy the Anchorage Daily News from  The McClatchy Company. Her financial advisers told her it was a bad investment. The price was too high, but she  believed the purchase was going to enable her to soon begin making a profit.

She was still singing that tune as late as last year when she wrote an editoriall “To quote (Washington Post owner) Jeff Bezos, we’re in ‘investment mode’*” The asterisk led to an explanation at the bottom of the editorial explaining that Bezos “was distinguishing between operating at a financial loss versus making a planned choice to invest in future growth.”

The editorial itself focused on all the news things Dispatch was doing to try to make money. “We’re continuing to develop new lines of business— new features that provide value to you, our readers,” it said.

Obviously, those news lines of business didn’t produce enough value to the Dispatch to fix its financial problems. Reliable sources now say Rogoff has lost more money – significantly more money – in the three years she has owned ADN.com than in the six years of Dispatch.

Thus she faced a choice as 2016 drew to an end: She either had to seriously reduce the costs of producing her product or find a way to increase revenue. She voted in favor of the latter and put up the paywall. Her argument as expressed in that January editorial was this: