Sen. Lisa Murkowski (left) sits for an interview with Arctic Today publisher Alice Rogoff/YouTube
Unbowed by her more than $30 million business failure and what the fallout from a high-profile bankruptcy might have done to her credibility, former ADN.com owner Alice Rogoff is back in business as a journalist.
The daughter of the late Mortimer Rogoff, who pioneered the technologies that led to the Global Positioning System (GPS) that enabled the oil tanker SS Manhattan to negotiate its way through the Northwest Passage in 1969, Alice has long dreamed of fulfilling her father’s dream of Arctic shipping.
Murkowski assured Alice that progress is being made on an Arctic port.
What Alaska really needs, Murkowski added, is a system of ports along the Bering Sea.
When Royal Dutch-Shell abandoned plans to develop oil in the Chukchi Sea three years ago, any real economic reason for Alaska Arctic port developments disappeared with its drilling rig. But Murkowski suggested a “national security” push might reignite interest.
“Look as what’s going on on the other side of the Bering Sea,” Murkowski said.”Russia is not sitting still, and then who is coming through? This is something we can’t take, we can’t take the attitude that we will get to this when it’s convenient for us…..They have moved beyond us.”
Family passion
Alice has long been interested in her father’s Arctic vision. In a Mortimer biography Alice helped write, she refers to herself as the son he never had, and she has gone to great lengths to attract national and Alaska state leaders to the family cause of Arctic shipping.
An online news site started by Amanda Coyne and now ex-husband Tony Hopfinger, Dispatch was Alice’s first foray into Alaska journalism. She bought a controlling interest in 2009, and put Hopfinger in charge of building a news organization to challenge the then vastly dominant Anchorage Daily News.
(Editor’s note: The author of this story was a reporter at the Anchorage Daily News who took a buyout in 2009 and later volunteered to help Hopfinger and Coyne with their new enterprise. He eventually became a staff reporter there and regularly hung out with Hopfinger, Coyne and Alice.)
By the end of 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review was describing the Dispatch as a “regional reporting powerhouse.” The Dispatch News that year helped reveal troublesome flaws in the character of Joe Miller, who’d defeated the incumbent Murkowski in the Republican primary.
Medred was gone a year later after he ignored orders to stop investigating Roland Maw, a member of the Board of Fisheries who turned out to be claiming residency in both Alaska and Montana to save a few bucks on hunting and fishing licenses. Illegal in both states, the action caused big problems for Maw in Alaska.
Indicted for illegally receiving Permanent Fund Dividends as a non-Alaskan, Maw has spent years trying to dodge those charges on technicalities, but he is now scheduled to be tried in Juneau in November.
Friendship dead
Hopfinger, once the best of friends with Alice, was gone from the ADN within a year of Medred’s departure. Hopfinger and Alice had a falling out over Hopfinger’s repeated warnings the newspaper and website had to cut costs to avoid a business collapse.
Hopfinger is now scheduled to meet Alice in court in Anchorage in November. After he left the ADN, she refused to pay him the final $900,000 of a $1 million agreement she’d made to buy out his interest in the company he’d helped start. The contract was penned on a now famous cocktail napkin.
“I agree to pay Tony $100K at end of each year (beginning ’14) for 10 years,” it said; it was was signed “Alice Rogoff” and dated “4/18/14.” Hopfinger demanded something in writing because Alice appeared to be balking on formalizing an earlier promise due to the fact Northrim Bank, which lent her $13 million to help seal the Daily News purchase, was overseeing her spending habits.
The then-estranged wife of David Rubenstein, one of the richest men in the country, she long ignored the fact the Alaska Dispatch News/ADN.com as she had renamed the Anchorage Daily News/ADN.com was bleeding money.
A little more than a year later, in late summer of 2017, Alice took the Dispatch into bankruptcy. Some familiar with the organization’s finances later questioned whether Alice ever wanted to run it as a business or simply intended it as a political platform. She was an early backer of Gov. Bill Walker and an inside player within the Walker administration early in the governor’s tenure.
At one point during Walker’s campaign against Republican incumbent Gov. Sean Parnell, she killed a Parnell newspaper advertisement to benefit Walker, according to former employees at the newspaper.
Arctic Now and Today
When Alice walked away from the wreckage of the Dispatch News leaving creditors holding about $2 million in debt, she took “Arctic Now,” an ADN creation, with her in apparent violation of bankruptcy law and later renamed it Arctic Today.
It was a big turn around for Alice, who had long held to the view that the Alaska Dispatch News owed her $16.6 million in reimbursement for cash she poured into her newspaper enterprise to keep it afloat.
Had that claim stood, Alice would have been entitled to more than 90 percent of any dollar paid Dispatch News/ADN creditors.
As part of the settlement, however, she abandoned the claim and agreed to make a payment of $1.5 million. About a $1 million will go to the creditors. The payment was backed by Rubenstein, who is now divorced from Alice.
The newspaper and ADN.com are now owned by the Fairbanks-based Binkley Company LLC.
Categories: News
What a pair? Both hieress’s, trying to make names for themselves but really just living off daddy’s reputations. The republican sellout who didn’t like Kanaugh’s “temperament”, and the billionaire who ruined the daily news. Two peas in a pod!
Even the Leftist Daily Mail admits this is all Bravo Sierra: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2738653/Stunning-satellite-images-summer-ice-cap-thicker-covers-1-7million-square-kilometres-MORE-2-years-ago-despite-Al-Gore-s-prediction-ICE-FREE-now.html
The Northwest Passage may be ice free someday. But it wasn’t this year. Folks I know (ship named Sauvage) were taking charter clients from Greenland westward this summer, but turned around with other boats due to heavy ice.
Sullivan and Murkowski keep the Cold War fear factor up by telling us the Russians are building new ports, etc, etc. But why can’t they show us? With Google maps you can see Russian Navy ships in Murmansk. So surely all these new military ports can be seen also. So Dan, Lisa … how about some Google maps URLs that show these new Russian ports?
Tim,
I do not feel “cold war” is the primary concern with Russia’s current success in the Arctic, but more that the U.S. economy will be left out of the emerging trade deals and business opportunities as partners like China align with Russia for LNG and shipment of Crude…
Even though the tourist ship you mentioned may have encountered ice on NWP the Russian fleet is well versed to breaking through shallow ice…and there are different routes from the various Russian ports.
As for the specific ports they have, you mentioned the main one in the Arctic, but you can google that yourself (about half a dozen come up when I tried) and many are considered as “admits ice-class vessels throughout the year”. Not sure how that appears from satellite data we are allowed to see?
There is also a good new documentary on Amazon Prime titled “Ice Race”…
I highly recommend it..the Russian “Delta” class subs have up to 200 “warheads” on board and circle under the water all year!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/06/russia-and-china-battle-us-in-race-to-control-arctic.html
Have you ever listened to Senator Dan Sullivan talk about the arctic? His views are not rooted in emerging economies. He is strictly focused on US defense buildup. Cold War fear mongering. My point, again, is that instead of hand waving about Russian threats, he should be able to share with us where these new military ports he is talking about are. That isn’t asking too much.
Tim,
I agree with you 100% on Dan Sullivan.
That is the problem with milatary officers moving into politics…they need war to continue for “economic stability” in their business model.
Not too mention Sullivan pushed for SB 21 for the oil industry.
I guess when we elect a guy from Ohio (sponsored by Koch brothers and GOP super PAC from DC) then we as a state are getting what we deserve.
Also, his family is in the commercial seafood exporting and distribution business as well in Ohio and they sell Alaskan Salmon.
Hopefully the voters do not make the same mistake with Dunleavy or our local economies will continue to fail and our prisons will fill to capacity.
“What Alaska really needs, Murkowski added, is a system of ports along the Bering Sea.”
Actually, what Alaska needs is political leaders who are not “talking heads” for corporate lobbyists and the oil and gas industry.
How is it that Russia with a tenth of our milatary budget can build a half dozen new bases in the Arctic and has several dozen ice breakers at their disposal?
The Russians are even operating a floating nuclear power plant (which is very dangerous) and successfully pumping crude out of the Arctic.
Alaskans have watched the last several administrations waste Billions of dollars on failed studies and planning attempts for the “future”.
The time is Now!
From KGB bridges, to Susitna dams, to Chinese gaslines….
Recently Walker just wasted more money studying a commuter rail line to Anchorage, when we all know there is not enough commuter traffic to support this proposal…
The global community is not going away and neither is the “race for the arctic”.
Alaska needs future leadership that is committed to working with countries like Russia, Norway, and Canada before conflicts or disputes rise in the far North.
Right now the U.S. and Canada cannot even agree who owns the rights to the NWP route….
After watching a recent video on the amount of Russian submarines in the Arctic and how Norway is attempting to track them, Alaskans should demand more milatary bases in the Arctic.
Over 60 ships now use that route annually and if an oil or gas tanker were to run aground, we are poorly situated to respond to a disaster up north.