If you can write, if you have a heartfelt sense of commitment to an informed society, and if you harbor a burning desire for adventure, the Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska has the bargain of a lifetime for you.
Chair Larry Persily – the former editor and publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel in the state’s Panhandle, a one-time Deputy Commissioner of Revenue for the state, a former editorial page editor for the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) and the present owner of the Skagway News – is looking to give away that iconic, small-town biweekly.
Yes, that’s right. If Persily thinks you can cut it as a small-town, Alaska journalist, he is willing to sign the newspaper over to you.
“…The business is available for free for the right person(s) who wants to live in a small Alaska town, write and produce the newspaper, which publishes every other week, and build up its online presence,” he wrote in a solicitation to journalists and friends on Monday. “I bought the Skagway News this past spring from an absentee owner, wanting to rebuild its quality and restore its finances. The paper has gotten better, but what it really needs now is to return to the traditional model of a small-town paper, where the owner is the general manager is the editor is the reporter and photographer. That’s not going to be me — I am 68 years old and have already done that twice. I am looking for someone with the energy to take over and produce a quality newspaper (print and online).”
As always with a deal seemingly too good to be true, there is a catch or two or, in this case, more.
You must be skilled in spelling and grammar. You must be willing to accept that you’re not going to make a lot of money. You must want to become part of the community. And you must, in the words of the present owner, relish “being the voice of news and reason, education and information in a small town in Southeast Alaska.”
The emphasis in the last line would be on “small.” Skagway is a very small town except for a few months each summer when you must be able to deal with life in a city overrun with mobs of tourists dumped out of cruise ships to explore the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, the community’s main industry.
The smallest town in Alaska with a regularly published newspaper, Skagway is too small to warrant a physician. The nearest doctor is a 14-mile boat ride away in Haines. It’s a nice trip when the weather is friendly. If it’s not, you get to learn why roads are a wonderful luxury.
A community of about 1,000 year-round residents, Skagway does happen to be one of the rare Southeast Alaska communities connected to the North American road system. You must understand, however, that the nearest place to which you can drive is Canada, and there isn’t much to be found in Canada until you reach Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, about 110 miles to the east.
Hello, Sgt. Preston
A frontier city of 25,000 with an international airport (how many cities of similar size can boast that?), Whitehorse is a virtual metropolis compared to Skagway. While awaiting the visit of England’s Duke and Duchess of Cambridge there in 2016, Ben Barrett-Forrest of The Globe and Mail of Canada was moved to observe that contrary to the views of most Canadians “Whitehorse is a creative, cosmopolitan hub full of hip cafés and shops, with gold-rush era history and a vibrant arts scene.
“It is a long trip to get here – a 2.5-hour, 1,500-kilometre flight from Vancouver,” he conceded, “but the remoteness and rugged landscape provide creative inspiration.”
Barrett-Forrest also confessed to a little bias. He grew up in Whitehorse, and then he got out.
Skagway in summer is a cosmopolitan tourist attraction with crowded shops and cafes, and in winter its remoteness and rugged landscape can be inspirational to the tune of overwhelming.
Once these were attractions, Persily said. He and his late wife Leslie Murray were lured north to Wrangell, another remote Pandhandle city, from Chicago in 1976. They were a pair of adventurous, twenty-something urban journalists who over pizza one evening noticed the Sentinel for sale in Editor & Publisher, a once well-known trade magazine.
“There was a newspaper in Alaska for sale and it was only $8,000 down,” Persily said Monday. “We had $8,000.”
Before video games and virtual reality, Alaska was where twentysomethings went for adventure. So it wasn’t long before Persily and Murray found themselves the publishers, editors, reporters, photographers, janitors and more for a weekly newspaper in an isolated, rough-and-tumble Alaska mill town. They ran the newspaper for eight years before handing it off and moving on.
Persily would now like to find a younger version of himself and Murray to take on the historic Skagway operation that he bought earlier this year to save it from going under.
“There’s got to be someone,” he said. “It’s just finding them.”
Help!
Barring the appearance of the magic couple, Persily, who now lives in Anchorage, said he needs to hire a new reporter/editor to keep alive the operation he has been subsidizing since he took it over.
He plans to keep doing that until he can find a new owner.
Though the newspaper has a yearly circulation of only about 500. Persily said the revenue stream is enough to support a committed couple willing to lead a simple lifestyle.
The newspaper now largely supports the one, full-time reporter/editor and a three-quarter-time bookkeeper, advertising salesperson and newspaper layout assistant, he said.
“This is a good time to turn over the operation to someone, or a couple, who will fill both roles and pay themselves instead of paying employees,” he said “Or keep one employee, as needed.”
Persily estimates the revenues would allow a newspaper couple to “easily pay themselves $50,000 to $55,000.” That’s not a lot of money, but given the tax advantages of running your own business, it can be made workable in these tough times for journalism.
The state’s littlest newspaper is in better shape than the ADN was only two years ago when then-owner Alice Rogoff took it into bankruptcy, and in better shape than the ADN’s previous owner – The McClatchy Company newspaper chain – which is now reported to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Finding housing in Skagway can be difficult and someone with lots of kids or lots of dogs would “make it tougher,” Persily admitted, but what’s an adventure without a little struggle?
Whatever happens, he said, he has to find someone.
“I have to have someone in town,” he said. “I can’t do it from here (in Anchorage). They don’t have to be great writers, but they have to be able to spell and use the right words. They have to be able to cover everything from volleyball tournaments to the (local) assembly.
“Somewhere there’s got to be somebody willing to do this,” he said. “Just like we did in Wrangell or the Paulsons in Sitka or the Williamses in Ketchikan.”
The Paulsons are Thad and Sandy who took over the Sitka Daily Sentinel in the island community of Sitka in 1979 and have been at it ever since. The newspaper celebrated its 75th birthday in 2014 with their son, James, now the staff photographer and pressman and a couple general assignment reporters among the staff.
The Ketchikan Daily News is another island newspaper. The late Lew Williams Jr., whose father owned the Sitka Sentinel in the late 1930s, took over the News in 1976. As a publisher and columnist, Williams’ voice grew to be way bigger than the newspapers 4,000 circulation. He was well-known throughout the state in the 1970s and ’80s.
Just because a news operation is small doesn’t mean it can’t have a significant voice. Persily is offering the platform.
And despite his own history as a cheechako from Chicago, he said he would like to find “find an Alaskan to takeover – someone who knows the ferry system has nothing to do with Tinkerbell and that the Yukon is a territory in Canada not just a big river.”
OMG! Give the paper away?! Are you kidding!? Alice Rogoff would probably pay millions for it!
Charles Kuralt, where are you when we need you?
Generations ago, basically in the aftermath of the Great Depression and the big Democratic Party surge, tens if not 100s of thousands of super-LED brilliant little spots of intense Blue appeared in little towns and mini-cities all over the (still heavily rural, conservative) continent.
The vast majority of these tiny newspapers were jarringly out of synch and out of touch with the community in which they had embedded, and stayed that way. No matter, never mind.
Before the Great Depression, a previous phase of this embedded counterculture project goes directly back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Port Angeles, the main town in my area, selected by President Lincoln as the 2nd National City (in case it turned out the North needed one), was founded as several Communist communes … and this was very typical & ordinary, during those times.
The big leftist flowering of the later 19th C was spearheaded by newspapers – especially in small places – with editors who quoted Marx chapter & verse.
Technology played a big role in enabling this long-running undercurrent … as notably continues today. Specifically, small-town publishing had more lives than the proverbial cat, as new tech-breakthroughs in printing snatched their cultural paradigm from economic & cultural extinction, over and over and over … and continuing today in fora such as this one.
Dead tree rags, not so much. Skagway might have the name (and cruise ships) to be an exception … but most such are going digital as fast as someone can get on top of WordPress.
Buy a roll of toiletpaper, it would be cheaper and serve the same purpose.
Example:
” If you watched the impeachment hearings last week, you may have noticed a disconnect between what you actually saw and the mainstream media accounts describing it,” Nunes said. “What you saw were three diplomats, who dislike the President’s Ukraine policy, discussing second-hand and third-hand conversations about their objections.”
“Meanwhile, they admitted they had not talked to the president about these matters, and they were unable to identify any crime or impeachable offense the president committed,” Nunes said.
“But what you read in the press were accounts of shocking, damning, and explosive testimony that fully supports the Democrats’ accusations,” Nunes said. “If these accounts have a familiar ring, it’s because this is the same preposterous reporting the media offered for three years on the Russia hoax.”
“You must be willing to accept that you’re not going to make a lot of money.”
Now that is the understatement of the year…
The first thing that I would say is: “Show me the books.”
Chances are this paper is the same as all other “newspapers” and dead in the water financially.
The U.S. Economy is not what it was 20 years ago.
Hot businesses today are “autobody” chiropractors and pay day loan sharks.
Not too many millenials care about “community news” unless it shows up in their FB lead…and even fewer would pay for advertising with CL and various other sites like FB Marketplace.
Writing about current events is boring and tends to always gravitate towards politics.
Better for young writers to engage in free writing exercises about people and experiences than trying to regurgitate the “news” to a mass of sheep that rarely leave their comfort zone these days.
It does seem true that Larry Persily is holding a few cards in reserve, on this Skagway newspaper give-away. His motivations for buying it in the first place, hanging onto it briefly, and then offing it in a flourish have gaping holes that only a Professor would think others don’t see.
But then again, Skagway is not just any other town, and thus neither are the prospects of its paper. Tens of millions can name-drop it, in context, and yeah that’s a huge difference from all the others.
The strength of the US economy is a big worry for the Resistance and the Democratic Party, to the extent that they aren’t the same thing. Twenty years ago the country was in a big (manufactured?) bubble, which collapsed about halfway through. Lot’s of good news now on the economic front.
It may well otoh be true that some businesses & sectors aren’t what they used to was, but that’s not about the economy overall, which is the #1 thing working for the GOP & Trump, and a bummer for their detractors.
Writing online, which for sure is an infinitely more common venue that being caretaker for a journalism museum piece in Skagway, is hardly the province of any particular demographic. You can write all you want, online or on dead trees, and you might occasionally influence people & even events … but make money at it?
It happens, but rarely. Most should keep their day-job. But JK Rowling eg was a welfare mom in a tiny flat, and used a used (manual) typewriter to fight off depression and keep herself off the streets … and her shtick turned into a billion dollar empire. Which tells us Two Things. Don’t fully embrace cynicism, and don’t discount the prospects of writers with tastes that a dog wouldn’t roll in.
Ted,
Larry is a retired state bureaucrat just like another media personality in AK.
A short search on ADN says this:
“Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal jobs in oil and gas and taxes, including deputy commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue 1999-2003.”
The real question is how much “news” that we are fed daily is really just propaganda (like many of Larry’s pieces on the PFD)?
https://www.adn.com/author/larry-persily/
Steve S,
Good research. The closer I look, the more Larry Persily the Unelected Representative comes to the fore, while the Newspaperman & Journalist becomes resume-decoration.
He warrants his own Wikipedia article (#1 hit). Small, simple and terse, but dense & pointed. He’s an Obama appointee. I bet his office didn’t write it … and it sees significant editing in the near future. Not a word about journalism.
Much bigger & badder figures than Persily have seen their political careers permanently sidelined, messing with the Permanent Fund. He talks like it’s a General Fund revenue source, which is explicitly what it’s not. He might think the ADN is a safe platform from which to taunt that electoral sow with cubs.
But the real deal is, far better it be Persily than anyone who relies on the ballot box & Democracy.
Right now is probably not a good time to be making a political sortie against the Fund. Not since the price of oil dropped back down … and the giddy high price days were really too close to just ‘days’, preceded & followed alike by long years of sagging production, and weak prices.
Tough times in Alaska tends to thin out the element that would like to see an end to the Permanent Fund, and Rural Preference. National trends currently mitigate against that as well (if 2020 goes Right, PFD reform talk will likely die down). Unexpectedly high urban support for these basically rural thumbs on the pan is what has historically clipped the politicos reform-wings.
Too many Anchoragites are fond of knowing just how long a drive it is to Alaska.
Wow, half the town pays $100 a year to receive 26 papers a year? That would be a good part time gig, if you are deemed acceptable by Mr Persily.