HenryBHough
Diamond Member
Interesting story I got from a former associate who once wrote for a different newspaper in a small city near Anchorage:
As she put it, The Anchorage Daily News once was a newspaper. Then the left-wing Californian chain that had owned it for decades was finally able to unload it on a carpetbagging extreme left-winger who ran it further into the ground. She published it as "The Anchorage Dispatch News" until the losses got so great she had to unload the "intellectual property". It was bought by a family from Fairbanks known (up to then) as conservatives. They restored the original name (Anchorage Daily News). By then all but of a handful of staff had been laid off leaving a few ultra-liberals. For some unknown reason the buyers kept the residual staff and allowed the faltering publication to slide further to the left. Circulation plunged; the printing plant was beyond repair and forced out of the building it had been renting. A deal was put together with a newspaper outside the city to have the few pages published daily printed on a size paper somewhere between a full newspaper size and tabloid size.
Readership and advertising has continued to decline - hastened by the out-migration of working people from Alaska as jobs are destroyed. Even under President Trump many Obama era attacks on the state remained ongoing. The mining industry had been mostly destroyed; oil companies were selling out and leaving; the timber industry was long gone and "the virus" killed off the tourist trade.
One wonders if there was some contractual deal that led a family once known as conservatives (one had run for governor as such some years ago) to allow the ship it bought to sink at the dock. If so perhaps there's a time-limit on it but unless there is and it's a very short limit it apears "The ADN" will soon be extinct.
