Today’s front page
A little chaos in the news
The conservative news website Must Read Alaska – long a pain in the side of the mainstream media’s Anchorage Daily News (ADN) – unveiled a new look today in the wake of the unexpected departure of founder and editor Suzanne Downing.
News was out. Commentary was in.
Leading the webpage was a column by Dave Donley, “senior contributor” and a former Anchorage representative state House and then Senate, explaining “Why I Am Running” for the Anchorage Assembly and a post by “senior contributor” Greg Sarber ruminating on hunting, hiking and the hard life in Alaska.
“Even getting the kids off to school or going to the grocery store can be a challenge with deep snow in the driveway, frost-covered car windows, slippery winter driving conditions, and the potential of encountering a moose in the street or parking lots,” he wrote, apparently having spent no winter months in that “Bold North,” otherwise known as Minnesota.
But getting back to Downing. The main page did display a couple of days-old news items, including the one that has been “trending” since Tuesday: Suzanne Downing Resignation.
Jeff Landfield at the liberal Alaska Landmine picked up on this resignation about two minutes after it happened Monday and wrote that website founder “Downing grew Must Read Alaska into one of the most widely read news sites in Alaska. Conservatives are the main audience, but many progressives also read it as a guilty pleasure or to see what she will say next. Many Republican elected officials often fear what she may write about them and have been known to adjust their behavior or votes accordingly.”
These were rather kind words coming from a website that has regularly been critical of Downing and Must Read.
“We have all come to expect dishonesty and vitriol from Suzanne Downing’s Republican propaganda blog, Must Read Alaska,” Landfield wrote back in March of 2019. “But something she wrote in her newsletter today truly marks a new low.”
The “new low” was a reference to Downing joking about Landfield getting punched in the face while in a Juneau bar. She did not name him, but those in the know did not have a hard time figuring out who was the subject of these four sentences:
Landfield did not see the humor and took it personally, as most probably would. He shot back that “this is not the first time she has criticized me for my weight and baselessly accused me of misogyny” before going on to detail earlier back and forths with Downing.
Being seen
A few cynical news observers, of course, suggested Landfield was outing himself as the Juneau punchee to attract attention. In that regard, al that can be said factually, for certain, is that he is not a man known for avoiding attention.
And in the news world of today, Landfield well understands that if you’re not being noticed, you’re losing. He has long sought to attract attention to both the Landmine and himself by stirring controversy.
Downing sometimes did this as well, but Must Read’s strength was in actually supplying readers with a significant amount of old-fashioned news, plus occassional gossip, something Landfield recognized in noting Downing’s departure from the website.
Downing, he wrote, was “known for posting copious amounts of content on Must Read Alaska….Finding someone with the knowledge and skills to run Must Read Alaska like her, and who wants that job, will be an extremely difficult task.”
That might be an understatement. Downing is something of what is now known in the news business as an “aggregator.” But she is a news aggregator of the highest order, the kind that scours the web and a vast array of contacts for news, then adds value to the information she has collected by rolling in perspective, context and history.
Aggregation itself is not something new. The Wall Street Journal was basically doing this more than 50 years ago when it ran a stick of news summary down the middle of its front page that offered a quick but scant outline of what was in that day’s news inside the paper.
The internet allowed people like Downing to take this a step further in the form of a whole bunch of short stories that could be read quickly while still providing a wealth of information. Writing these sorts of blurbs is way, way harder than you might think if you’ve never done it.
Before Downing, the best at it in Alaska was Scott Woodham, who compiled the “AK Beat” at the old, all-online Alaska Dispatch. The late Tom Condon, a well-known Connecticut journalist, recognized Woodham for that work in 2013 when Condon served as a judge for the Alaska Press Club Awards, back before press awards became something of a self-parody.
In the years that followed, Woodham, sadly, grew up, wised up, got married, bailed out of the news business and left the 49th state. Why Downing, a woman in her 60s, is still here doing what she does is baffling.
Just digging up the volume of information she uncovers in a given day is difficult. Turning that information into readable copy only adds to the work. And daily spreading all this effort knowledge across multiple topics?
People who can do this are hard to find. Woodham at least had some help in that there were a few others working for the Dispatch who tossed tidbits his way, and he could sometimes steal items from the Daily News, which was trying to do what he was doing but wasn’t capable of doing it nearly as well.
It was always interesting to see how he could take a tidbit that could have been interesting in the ADN summary, but wasn’t and turn that tidbit into an interesting item in the Dispatch. He did benefit from having grown up in Alaska, as did Downing; having worked in journalism for a while; and having paid attention all along the way.
Downing has those same advantages, plus years and years more experience than Woodham had in-country. All of this was enough to make Must Read good enough and valuable enough that Homer businessman Jon Faulkner put together an “Alaska Gold Communications” collective to buy it in 2024 with Downing staying on as the content provider.
Counting Faulner’s wife, Sara, there are five other shareholders involved in the Gold Communications limited liability corporation, but Faulner is the president and man in charge. Fifty-six, point two-five shares of the company’s stock are owned by the Faulkner family trust, according to state corporation records.
What now
By all accounts, the Harvard University-educated Faulkner – owner of the successful Land’s End Resort at the end of the Homer Spit and the father of Olympic gold-medal winning cyclist Kristen Faulkner, a Harvard-trained computer scientist – is a smart guy. But you need more than smarts to make something like Must Read work.
It will be interesting to see how this story plays out going forward.
And for those wondering why Downing quit, the answer to that is pretty simple. Faulkner wanted her to do something she didn’t want to do: Kill a story about former Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor who is planning a run for governor.
The story wasn’t some big exposé. It was a pretty matter-of-fact story suggesting Taylor had been setting up a run for the governor’s job while still working as the AG. Taylor reportedly didn’t like the story and talked Faulkner into killing it.
Instead, it appeared on Must Read on Saturday and two days later there appeared a “Dear Reader” story announcing that “our Board of Directors is saddened to announce the sudden resignation of our esteemed editor, Suzanne Downing, as she embarks on a new journey.
“Suzanne has been an integral part of our organization, bringing unmatched passion and dedication to her role. Her commitment to delivering insightful coverage of Alaska’s news and issues has profoundly shaped our publication and earned the trust of our readers.”
And yadda, yadda, yadda.
Those less principled than Downing might well have gone with the flow and taken down the Taylor story.
ADN editor David Hulen actually went one better in 2015 when he first killed a story about why Roland Maw, a friend of sitting Gov. Bill Walker, had resigned from the Alaska Board of Fisheries, and then assigned a reporter to the story who wrote that Maw’s resignation was the result of “Kenai River fish wars.”
The truth was that Maw resigned because he’d been caught claiming to be a resident of Montana and was about to be investigated for stealing Permanent Fund Dividends (PFDs), an offense for which he was eventually convicted.
As for Hulen, it has never been clear whether he killed the story because he was told to do so by then ADN publisher Alice Rogoff, a good friend of Walker’s, or because he feared angering Rogoff if a story implicating a friend of Walker’s as a potential PFD thief upset her.
Hulen was, it must be noted, a “journalist” who once described his best skill as being a “survivor.” By nature, Downing is much more a fighter.
As for Must Read Alaska, there is no telling where it goes with its founder gone. The “Dear Reader” post identified Todd Lindley, the Gold VP, as the man now in charge of day-to-day operations. He is an engineer for the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.
He has been an off-and-on contributor to Must Read’s opinion section, where he has written primarily about climate issues and oil and gas. He doesn’t appear equipped to devote the time to Must Read that Downing did; the website was in many ways her life.
And there are no indications from what Lindley has written to data that he has anywhere near the chops to do what Downing did. Much the same would have to be said for the website’s grab bag of columnist, although some of them can be entertaining.
Downing herself is promising her coverage will be back as soon as non-compete with Must Read expires. Meanwhile, she is in Skagway enjoying being a grandmother and posting on Facebook.
Craig, Suzanne is already up and running at SuzanneDowning.com, and is already outperforming MRAK. I don’t always agree with her, but I’m glad to see her aggregating national news for now. She’ll be on the local beat again in six weeks.
Seems you’ve made note of Downing’s side of the story, but not Faulkner’s.
Sometimes there is more than one side. Sometimes there is no side. The story was mainly about Must Read, which appeared to be a successful news business based on its product. I’m not getting that product in my news box anymore. That’s pretty much what the story was about.
Downing is being pretty guarded as to the details of how that came to be. Faulkner has said nothing and appears to prefer to say nothing. He’s failed to respond to past emails. I probably should have tried harder to reach him this time. But I didn’t try very hard becuase I didn’t expect him to add much more than Downing added, which wasn’t much.
They had a disagreement over whether a story should or shouldn’t run. She thought bowing to a request from the person who was the subject of that story would open a door on a world of problems. Faulkner obviously thought otherwise. Time will tell whether that happens.
But the heart of the story was about the problem facing Must Read with Downing gone. It is led today by a story about tomatoes, a two-month-old column about the National Forest roadless rules pulled from the Independent Women website, a column about McDonald’s that is a veiled swipe at Downing written by a member of the Alaska Gold Communications Board, and an Alexander Dolitsky column outling why the Pro-Palestinain movement in this country appears to be a “far left death cult.”
It’s the most interesting thing on the home page, but it’s not exactly a must-read ALASKA story. It’s more a national story, and he is a little heavy handed in dismissing Pro-Palestine activists. Some of them are well intentioned, but fail to understand that HAMAS has a much different world view than they do.
To HAMAS, it is good that people are Palestinians are dying in Gaza. It gives them martyr status and thus they are blessed by Allah and given immediate entry into paradise. https://islamqa.info/en/answers/8511/what-are-the-rewards-of-a-martyr What more could one ask for?
She does it for the money, pure and simple. Right wing propaganda pays well in this corporate / lobbyist government in America. After Citizen’s United, we are spoon fed more propaganda than ever. I think MRAK has a chance to go in another direction and select better journalists who actually go out interview random citizens and “report”. The way it was once done in America…long before DARPA invented the “Internet”.