Episode 17: Rashah McChesney; From Texas To Alaska: Building Trust Through Local Journalism

A local newspaper can feel quaint until you see the bill: thousands per month just to print, plus a supply chain that depends on flights, couriers, and weather. We sit down with Rashah McChesney, owner and publisher of the Chilkat Valley News, to talk about what it really takes to keep community journalism alive in Haines, Alaska when the old ad-driven model is collapsing and every “easy” fix comes with trade-offs.

Rashah shares her winding path from East Texas to Alaska, from music school to photojournalism, from a draining metro newsroom to the kind of small town reporting where you can actually close the loop with people. We get candid about student loans and higher education costs, why “objective journalism” is more practice than promise, and how trust breaks when communities stop engaging and only one side will talk. The conversation also goes straight at the modern media ecosystem: social media outrage, national cable incentives, and why local news gets unfairly blamed for the worst behavior of national platforms.

Then we zoom in on the business decisions that decide whether a paper lives or dies: newsletters, subscriptions, community events, print frequency, and what happens to accountability when the watchdog disappears. If you care about local government transparency, civic engagement, and the future of small town newspapers, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who says “the media,” and leave a review with your take: what would make you support local journalism?

Transcript

Welcome And Meet The Publisher

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, thanks for joining us for this episode of Doug Has Questions. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe. We're available if you want to watch us on uh YouTube or if you just want to listen to the podcast version on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and each episode goes live on Thursday morning. So I hope you enjoy this episode and we're happy to have you listening. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Doug Has Questions. Today my guest is Rosha McChesney, the owner, editor, reporter, Chilcat Valley News.

SPEAKER_05 0:36

Ad salesperson, salesperson, pretty much every every job.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

It depends on who's in the office of a given week. Exactly. Yeah, so a typical small business owner.

SPEAKER_05 0:46

Exactly. I'm learning. This is my first small business.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

First small business. Welcome to the crowd.

SPEAKER_05 0:50

Thanks. It's hard.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Yes, yes. Probably could have told you that before you took the leap if you wanted.

SPEAKER_05 0:57

I probably could have asked literally any small business owner, and instead I asked a bunch of journalists, and everyone went, That's a great idea. You're gonna have so much fun. And now I think I pulled the wrong group.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

But are you still having fun though?

SPEAKER_05 1:10

I'm having a great time. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

It's just so they weren't wrong.

SPEAKER_05 1:13

No, they were not hard. They just didn't add it with, and also you will never sleep, and there will be anxiety, and money is important, and you know, just the whole laundry list of things you worry about as an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Those are all just side things compared to you're having fun. Oh, yeah, that's true. I agree. Those all those all come later. Don't know when. But eventually. That's what they tell me anyhow. Eventually. So you're having fun, it's all good. The rest will come later.

SPEAKER_03 1:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

I haven't gotten to that later part yet, so we'll see.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Oh, good.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Yeah. No, it's not that bad. Okay. It'll get better. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Great.

Texas Roots And A Moving Van

SPEAKER_01 1:46

So so you haven't been in Haynes that long, so let's let's go back and start. You grew up in Texas.

SPEAKER_05 1:50

Yeah, I was born in a um a little town called Big Sandy, Texas, which is in deep East Texas, pretty close to Louisiana. Um, and everybody talks like they're from Louisiana. Um, and we grew up there, and I I was there till I was about 12, and then my family, my dad lost his job. Um what'd your dad do? Well, a couple of things. So um the the job that he lost, he was working at a university campus in the town we were in, um, as a leading the welding shop. And before that, he had been a paramedic, and before that, I mean I I think he held down a lot of jobs. My parents had a lot of kids, and so I think he was always looking for a job that would like help him take care of the kids because my mom stayed at home with us, and that last one was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back, I think. And so we moved back in with his parents in San Antonio for a couple years. Okay, clear other side of the state. Oh, yeah, it was great. It was like an eight-hour drive. Um, the thing I remember the most about that drive, uh, aside from the fact that it was my 12th birthday and no one remembered.

SPEAKER_03 2:54

Because we were too busy driving across here.

SPEAKER_05 2:58

Yeah, so aside from being offended that it was my birthday and no one remembered, we had this um like goldfish tank or something that uh I think my dad probably would have left him behind if he hadn't had six kids going, we can't leave the goldfish behind. And so we had this big, like one of those big orange water coolers that you have at like sporting events. We'd put the fish in and we'd have taken turns aerating the water for like that eight-hour drive. So I remember being in the van and cradling this this like cooler with fish in it and like aerating it so that my fish would make it. And that um, yeah, I don't know why that's the thing that sticks, but it does.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Um taking what was the what was your goldfish's name?

SPEAKER_05 3:39

Um, we had a number of goldfish, but the one that I remember the most was I I couldn't stop naming goldfish like Greek god names, so I had a lot of like Hercules and Hera and and just I I don't know, I had fine fancy fish names.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

You didn't name any of them Gil? No. Mm-mm. No, I I have a that's one that's one of my favorite movies. What about Bob? Have you ever watched What About Bob? No. Oh hi speaking of taking a goldfish on a road trip and everything, you'd I I highly recommend What About Bob. It's with Bill Murray, okay, Richard Dreyfus.

SPEAKER_05 4:13

Well, I like Bill Murray.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Yeah, it's out it's it's one of my favorite movies. And his his goldfish gill that he takes with him. Survives? The gold the the goldfish survives, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:24

We didn't do a lot of TV, so I'm missing a whole chunk of I think the 80s and 90s of cinema and just sort of television in general.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

And it comes up a lot. I think this is I think this is in the 90s. And yeah, it's it's it's it's one of my it's one of my favorite. I I like Bill Murray. I think his sense comedy is great. But yeah, him and his the way he talks to Gil and is concerned about Gil's well-being. Okay.

unknown 4:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Now as soon as you start taking talking about taking your goldfish across Texas, it reminds me when he gets on the bus with Gil in a plastic bag, going up to Lake Winnipesauke.

SPEAKER_05 4:58

So he's in Wisconsin or uh no, I think he's out in New York.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

I think Lake Winnipesaukee's up in northeast U.S. somewhere. Okay. I'm not sure exactly where. I've heard of it since then. But uh yeah, he goes up there to see his therapist, Richard Dreyfus, and he's got then when he gets there, he's he's looking for, he's like totally stressed out because Gil needs water, fresh air, because he's been in this plastic bag the whole bus ride. Uh-huh. And so he freaks out.

SPEAKER_05 5:21

But I am gonna go watch this movie. I like this premise.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

I I I highly recommend it. I I look forward to seeing if you enjoy it as much. I hope I hope it lives up to what I've given you the hope for in this, but it's it, it's uh I I like it.

SPEAKER_05 5:36

Yeah, so we okay, so we moved um to my grandparents' house in San Antonio for I think about a year, and then we moved down to Houston, where my parents and my whole most live of my family lives now. Um and my dad restarted a business, or actually they started their first business down there and had the last um two of my siblings. And um now you're up to eight. Yeah, so there's eight of us, five boys and three girls. And you're where in the I'm the oldest girl, which means I'm the oldest, which means I'm in charge.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

You're in charge.

SPEAKER_05 6:07

And any oldest sister or youngest sibling will tell you this is the way.

SPEAKER_01 6:11

I I have an older sister, I'm very well with it. Yes. She is in charge and I need to do what she says. Exactly. Yes.

Family Business And Learning Work

SPEAKER_05 6:17

Um, and so yeah, so they had the last two of us and they started their own small business. I could have asked my parents, is what I'm saying. What's it like to run a small business? Did not. Um and and a successful one. I mean, they've done a really good job.

SPEAKER_03 6:30

I can't believe what are they doing?

SPEAKER_05 6:32

Um, my dad's still a welder, but he does like um city water system repair. So we take the um roofs off of ground storage tanks for water and we do replacement for those and valves. And uh he did for a short period of time bid a bunch of jobs with the Army Corps of Engineers um doing dam repair and replacing those big gates on dams, which was really cool when I was a teenager because we were working on this like massive scale, and you had to get like security clearance to go on certain job sites, and like that was a pretty fun thing. But now it's all just city water systems.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Didn't you siblings work with your mom and dad?

SPEAKER_05 7:09

Yeah, actually, um both of my sisters are welders and work with my dad. I am um not really a skilled welder.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

Both of your sisters are the welders, but not the brothers.

SPEAKER_05 7:21

No, my brothers all sort of like everybody kind of cycled through working for the business, but my brothers all kind of spread out. One's an electrician, one does like electrical engineering, you know, they they all kind of spread into different things, but both of my sisters and my baby sister, I think might be the best welder in the family, which is so funny to see. Uh, because she's just she was just stacking dimes immediately. And it took me so long to learn how to be a mediocre welder, and then here comes the youngest one, just so people just have that natural talent for it. That's so annoying.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 7:56

I think the oldest sister should be able to choose which attributes everyone else gets so that no one's better at her than anything. No, no, I get it. That's that's not allowed. Um, so nice dream, but it's my dad and my two sisters, and they are they're killing it, they're doing a really great job. Awesome. And uh, of course, there's like no shortage of work now because every city 40, 50 years ago that built tanks now needs them to be replaced. Yeah, there's a lifespan on that stuff. Exactly. So they'll never be out of work. Um I don't remember where we were. They moved to Houston and that's what they do. They have the successful business like south of Houston.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

So did you graduate high school out of Houston then?

SPEAKER_05 8:37

No, um, you know, I've been wondering if I should tell you about this. And I think I'm going to. Um, I did go to high school in uh in Alvin, Texas, which is where we're from, and I um I struggled a little bit when we got to high school. And there's a number of reasons for that, but the biggest one is that I had been in sort of gifted and talented classes since the third grade, and then by the time we got where we were, none of those records sort of kept up, and I ended up in a lot of like classes doing stuff that I had been doing for years prior, and I got really bored, and I was a discipline problem to the point that I got expelled sweet my sophomore year, and I'm always curious if I should tell people about that because you don't want to tell kids like you can get expelled and still end up doing the thing that you love the most in the world. But why not? I don't know, it just feels like it feels like there could have been an easier path to get where I got. I feel like I brute forced my way into college when I could have, you know, maybe just been slightly less of a problem and gotten there differently. But that challenge is what got you to who you are today. I I get it. I hear that. I just think it could have been slightly easier.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

But um I I do that all I do that all the time. Do you? Oh, it's I I second. You put your head down and punch, but I don't think I well, no, I just you you look back at so many things like, man, that would have been easier if I would have done this. This would have been easier if I did this. But that you're second guessing based on the information you have at the time, you're reacting at your age with the stuff that's going on in your life at that time. You're bored because somebody else screwed up the paperwork, you're not in the same class you were before. That's how you react in the time. But unless you go through things like that, you don't learn how to react differently.

SPEAKER_04 10:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

And so you can either get stuck in that or you can force your way through it, like it sounds like you did. You made your way, found your way into college, regardless of that, because that's what you wanted to do. But I I try and tell myself that more often that we're not always going to make the perfect choices, we're not always gonna do the perfect thing.

SPEAKER_03 10:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:46

But that leads us, that develops us who we are, who the people we hang out with, it's our life experience.

SPEAKER_05 10:53

Yeah, but I try to think if there's a slightly better way to do something, maybe that's the thing I should be passing along to people. Although they can't hear you at that age anyway.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

You can. You can tell them this is my story, and looking back, it would have been easier if I would have done this, this, and this. But even if everything doesn't go exactly as planned, you can still get to where you want to go.

SPEAKER_05 11:16

Yeah. Can't yeah, that is the overriding lesson.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Can't that be a a part of that?

SPEAKER_05 11:20

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 11:21

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

And you're right, most of them that age aren't gonna listen anyhow. They're just gonna say you're old and you don't you don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 11:30

So yeah, so I went to high school there, and then I got expelled. And I actually, you know, now that you say that, it is it's it's very lucky that I got expelled. Um, the year that I got kicked out of high school was the year that Columbine happened. And I think that was a big that played a big part of the role of why I ended up getting kicked out of school was because administrators all over the country suddenly realized that groups of students that were maybe mildly juvenile juvenile delinquent were actually dangerous. Um and and I got kicked out, and I ended up um graduating through a correspondence program for high school and going to college early, and ooh, did I do so well in college? I did I did really well in junior college. I went from like being a huge discipline problem to having a 4.0 for my first two years of junior college because I was just so fed by what I was doing.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

What junior college you go to?

Music School Dreams And Reality

SPEAKER_05 12:24

Um, Alvin Community College. Yeah. And it's a really good community college, and also I majored in music while I was there, and so I was just every day I was getting to get up and go do something I was passionate about and be in classes that were really challenging and learn new things. So I think I think having to spend two years in junior college instead of my last two years at a high school where I'd burned every bridge that I could was really good for me. So yeah, so I yeah, I went to junior college early and then I went to university and then I uh and I studied music and then about three and a half years into that I decided that it wasn't really for me for a number of reasons.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

What what music when you said you're studying music, composing, no, vocal performance. Vocal performance, okay. You're a singer.

SPEAKER_05 13:10

And and you one of the hardest things about music school, at least where I went, was that you have this full um an entire semester where you're doing like individual vocal performance and choral vocal performance. And when you're majoring in classical music, one of the reasons for that is that they want to see if your voice will hold out long enough to get through an entire rehearsal season and performance season. And mine wouldn't. I got like laryngitis at the end of every semester. So I would have so much fun during the semester, and then when juries would come around to get you into the next semester, I'd be croaking like a frog, which meant just I'm not meant to be a professional opera musician, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Um and can I can I can I dig a little deeper on that? Sure. When you were looking at that, was that you wanted to get into being a classical opera singer?

SPEAKER_05 14:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:00

Just because you loved it, or did you think there was actually money to be made in it?

SPEAKER_05 14:04

I have never once in my life picked something because I thought I could make money at it. That has never happened.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Did that that didn't worry you at all that you're like, I'm gonna go down this route and I don't know how many jobs there are out there in this field?

SPEAKER_05 14:18

No, I I didn't. I mean, I attribute it maybe to a lack of foresight, but I grew up, we were so poor when I was a kid, and money just like wasn't the center of any conversation really, except to say, hey, you know, we can't give you this five bucks to go do this thing at school or something. Uh it just never really occurred to me that the things that I wanted to get in life needed money to do them because I was so happy when I was a kid, and I I kind of learned I think to chase the things that I feel passionate about and that that I can be a good person doing. And just money never really was part of that conversation. So I never really thought I'm gonna be a highly paid professional opera musician.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

But be beyond that, I think what the reason I was asking that is I think that's one of the issues we have with higher education, is a lot of people go to college for jobs that there there might not actually be enough jobs out there to take all the people that are so you've got students that are coming out of college with a great degree that they're a hundred thousand dollars or more in debt and there aren't any jobs.

SPEAKER_05 15:25

Or so you've been backgrounding me or the job.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

No, not I did I just you just see it. Yeah, you look at all these people that are talking that I can't pay the bills with my college degree. What'd you get the degree in? Oh, 19th century French literature.

SPEAKER_04 15:41

So first of all, you can learn a lot from 19th century French literature.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

You can, but if that's what you want to do.

SPEAKER_05 15:50

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

And I and I had a friend several years ago, they really wanted to be a veterinarian, and they're struggling to get into vet school, and then they changed, they went up into a different field, and I said, What made you change your mind? I said, Well, I didn't want to go$200,000 in the debt for a job that starting out was gonna pay$50,000 a year. It's like, yeah, they should have taught that math before you were trying to do that. And and so that that that's why that was the thought that went into my head is these schools that are taking money from people to go to get to a certain degree, achieve a degree, when they probably know full well the number of students they're graduating, a very, very small percentage of them are actually going to get a job in it.

Student Debt And Higher Ed Fixes

SPEAKER_05 16:32

It's it they absolutely know full well because they are required to report, every single program that you're in is required to report the graduation rate and the there's like a measurement of how many people in that field get jobs in that field that they are required to report to you. That is data that we have. And no, no one ever sat me down and said if you spend this much money on a music degree or you spend this much money on a journalism degree, your average wage, you know, when I when I moved to the state, I was making the equivalent of$15 an hour as a reporter. I I have no business having the student loan debt that I do for a job that pays that much. And I really wish there's a lot of things about the higher education system that we could address, but the biggest one I think I wish that someone would have had a money conversation with me earlier. And I think that you should only be able to borrow up to the amount that you're likely to be able to repay with the degree program that you're in. I think tuition within reason. I think.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Tuition, in my in my regard, it should be a different way.

SPEAKER_05 17:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Tuition should be based on the average starting income of the profession.

SPEAKER_05 17:36

Listen, what if what about that? Hear me out. Okay. What if we educated the population for free and then they were able to launch into the world with an expertise that I mean, I know I'm I'm I'm saying a lot of things right now that people don't like to hear, but I do not think we should be charging as much money for higher education as we are, and I find it sort of morally repugnant that we're charging six to seven percent interest rate on student loans and balancing portions of our budgets on the backs of brand new workers. Like I just don't think that makes any sense. Like, if you want veterinarians and you want doctors and you want lawyers, why not make it easier for them to get through school? Maybe not free, but easier and cheaper for them to get through school so that they're not spending all of their time getting out from under student loan debt instead of buying houses or contributing to the economy in different ways.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

I I agree with that, but I think I would have different solutions to it.

SPEAKER_05 18:37

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Because I I think part of the thing with paying for education is if the education is anything that's given out for free is taken advantage of and people don't value it as much. In that do you limit it to a certain amount of time. So if you're gonna pay for people's college education, there's some people out there that it takes them six, seven years to get through a four-year degree.

SPEAKER_05 19:10

But we do that now. You have a maximum amount of credits that you can get for student loans.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

Yes. But and and I would so going back, I would say one of the issues with higher education is when I think it was under the Obama administration, most of the student loans now are all federal backed. And instead of have and so and and I understand the reason behind it because there was a lot of um uh people that don't look like me that were being discriminated against when they go to a bank. That you have lower lower income, you have uh whether it was racial, ethnical reasons that banks weren't low uh uh loaning to people that had a good chance, and they went from that to anybody that applies pretty much gets a student loan.

SPEAKER_05 19:56

Were they I I don't know much about the history of the student loan program, and all of mine were federal. Um like I qualified as a low-income person, and then could but was there a period of time where people were getting more private loans than public loans?

SPEAKER_01 20:08

There were some private loans. State of Alaska used to have I don't know if they still have it, but all mine were through the state of Alaska for for student loans. And they would they limited how much you could get each year, um and you had to stay in school or whatever parameters were on it. But I think so and I don't think it was necessarily the federal government's problem with that, but I think what you if you look at, I've seen a couple articles on this, is that once that happened, tuition started going up incredibly, but the cost didn't go to paying teacher salary, it was mainly administration. You started getting a lot more administrative bloat on a lot of these colleges, and so the cost of tuition went up, but what the kids were learning wasn't necessarily any better. The professors weren't necessarily making more money. Um, a lot of it was going into infrastructure for nicer dorms, which based on where I stayed in college, that would have been appreciated. I mean, we lived through it, but and so I I think there's a lot of ways to to tackle that without doing it for free.

SPEAKER_05 21:13

I remember tuition going up sort of skyrocketing during my time in college previous to the Obama administration. But I my was going up well before that because I I think my so I was I was able to borrow, I think it was$5,500 a year. Oh really?

SPEAKER_01 21:31

That's how that's how much I was allowed to borrow.

SPEAKER_05 21:32

Yeah, we I could get up to like I think I was up to like$6,500 a semester we were allowed for student loans.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 21:39

So my freshman year barely covered.

SPEAKER_01 21:41

My freshman year, my tuition was five thousand dollars. My senior year, it was seventy five hundred dollars for out of state tuition. For the whole year. I'm old. I'm I'm old, Rosha.

SPEAKER_05 21:52

I went to a state college and it was like fifty five hundred a semester.

SPEAKER_01 21:57

That was out of state tuition at the University of Washington. Again, I'm old.

SPEAKER_05 22:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

So it's gone up dramatically since.

SPEAKER_05 22:04

You're that much older than me. How old are you?

SPEAKER_01 22:05

56.

SPEAKER_05 22:06

Okay. I'm 42.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah. So if that that inflation if you if you take that over another 14 years, that'd get to pretty much what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 22:16

That's a wild amount to be paying to go to school.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

And I my dad still talks, or doesn't now, but he would always tell us about how he paid for school. He he paid one semester with one fart one hide that he got was enough for him to pay because it was like$100 and some dollars a quarter for him to go to school.

SPEAKER_04 22:35

Wow, that's wild.

SPEAKER_05 22:37

I do wish that there had been an option. You know, I had a full-time job and an internship and a student job, and I was, you know, I was hustling all through college to get through college, and I still had to borrow money. And I, yeah, I think there has to be a better way, and I think it's probably some combination of reducing the cost of tuition and maybe limiting the amount that you can borrow. But I also just think and have thought for a long time that we have to, as a country, have a really firm conversation about the things that we're willing to subsidize with our tax dollars. And should education be one of them, because you only benefit from having a more educated populace. I I don't know if it's higher education, I don't know if it's just secondary school. I mean, I don't, I'm not really picky about type of education. I just believe that when you cut off a large portion of your population from having access to education, you end up with an intellectually poorer nation because of that. And maybe it's because I'm a journalist, but I I need more people to be reading more often and able to grok what they're reading. Uh so I yeah, I I tend to be a person who thinks, you know, jack up my taxes and get people through school.

SPEAKER_01 23:46

But most most uh institutions, secondary institutions are heavily subsidized by the government.

SPEAKER_05 23:53

Oh yeah, for sure. And I don't think maybe it should go through the current secondary institutions that we have because I think all the time now, like, you know what I didn't need? A journalism degree. You know what I needed was to be parked in a newsroom with experts who knew how to do journalism and learn from them because I learned more practicing journalism than I ever did in school. And I I wish that we had more trade schools like that.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

And because most of the people that are teaching it couldn't get a job to do it.

SPEAKER_05 24:22

Uh that's a glib thing. I don't know that that's true.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

I just think there is some fact to that.

SPEAKER_05 24:28

Maybe. But I also think well. It depends on the subject. Journalists are making so little. My retirement plan is to teach any. Is to teach any.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Yeah, so yeah, maybe it's and and I I think it'd probably be topic specific as well. Because there's there's some people that Yeah, I got my degree in history. Somebody, what are you gonna do with a history degree except teach?

SPEAKER_05 24:52

Tell everyone else what we have to be guarding against repeating.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

My my smug remark is uh people say, What do you do with a history degree? And I said, I watch what you do and then I'll tell you what you did afterwards.

unknown 25:04

Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 25:05

Give me a couple weeks or a couple of years, and we'll revisit that and I'll tell you what you screwed up.

SPEAKER_05 25:10

Love that. Love that. And did you start as history? Because I I started as music and then went to journalism, um, which we're so far apart that none of the credits transferred, and I'm pretty sure that's a whole other conversation.

SPEAKER_01 25:23

But I started in business.

SPEAKER_05 25:25

Did you? And then switched to history.

Finding A Major And Chasing Football

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Uh it was a it was a it was a little bit more convoluted than that. So I went to in for business school and University of Washington, you're they they want to weed out everybody, so you've got like micro introduction to microeconomics. Kane Hall is like 700 people in there. And then you go to your teaching assistant with twice a week. You got your quiz sections with TAs, and at that time, the TA that I had, I couldn't under they're from the Orient somewhere. I could hardly understand what they were saying. I was having a hard enough time understanding microeconomics to begin with. And between that and the large, the large class size in a lot of those, I was coming from Haynes where you got 15 to 30 people in a class, and there were really weren't that many classes with 30, and so their help was available quite readily, and I I floundered immediately at the University of Washington where you just had these huge classes, and and it became readily apparent part way through my sophomore year that there was no way I was gonna get into business school. And so it was either I just didn't have the grades for it, and so it's either come up with something different or go to a different school, and I didn't want to go to a different school because the football team was too good. True fact, yeah, it tells us tells my school on the most important thing. We had a good football team.

SPEAKER_05 26:48

You know, when I left music school, um, I ended up going to journalism school in Iowa. So I went from Texas to Iowa, yeah, and I was so excited to go to Iowa State um because there was this photojournalism professor that's my specialty. Um, there was this photojournalism professor at Iowa State who um had like graduated from college, I think in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and had gone over to the Soviet Union and worked in Poland for 15 years and had this Pulitzer, and and then his wife, I guess, one day just said, Hey, I want to raise our kids in the US, and he just like, I don't know, basically threw a dart at a map and ended up in Iowa. And so he was just like hiding out at Iowa State, and he was this phenomenal photojournalist, and he was working in Eastern Europe, which is an area I have a really big passion for. And so I felt like I had sort of made out like a bandit ending up in a program with this guy. And when I got to Iowa State, everybody kept sort of amping up this like Iowa State, Iowa game, and what's real football, and you're gonna wait and see. And I I gotta say, like, no shade to my Iowa friends, but y'all do not know how to play football. And like coming from Texas, I was just so stoked to go like see some real brute horse, like football. And it wasn't until like maybe two years into my time at Iowa State when I saw Nebraska play that I was like, well, okay, all right, I'll allow it. But the Iowa State game was just sort of like all right, I guess not everybody is can play football like Texas, and I know I'm probably making enemies, and I'm fine with that, but I just that was an anchor memory for me, just being like, what is happening? Do you guys hit each other? Do you need some help?

SPEAKER_01 28:23

So my my senior year is when the Huskies shared the national championship with Miami.

SPEAKER_05 28:27

Oh yeah, and so that was what you probably had a great time.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

I had it we had a great time going to games. Yeah, absolutely phenomenal.

SPEAKER_05 28:34

Iowa State's football program boosted maybe two years after I graduated, and they had a really great run, and I haven't checked in in a while.

SPEAKER_03 28:41

But yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:42

If I'm gonna watch football, I'm watching, I'm watching something happening in Texas and maybe Alabama. I know it's it's the Southern thing. It's just when you're from the South, you just have an allegiance to big hitters.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

I disagree with that, but anyhow, I'll let you have I'll let you have your fantasy about the South being better at football. I'll allow you that. But yeah, so I I'd always wanted to be like a sports broadcaster, and so I thought I'd go into communications. And uh like my second class, we had to do this uh video project or whatever, and I was doing with these guys, they're all in the Sprat, and we've did the film, and I was doing part of the voiceover, and for our grade on it, the professor told me what I was talking to him about it, and he goes, I he said, I hope you'd he said you need to focus on print journalism because you do not have a public speaking voice. And so I was like, All right, I'm not doing this then. Yeah, I'm gonna find something else. And that whole time I'd been taking history class because it was something that always interested me. And kind of the same thing with you, I was really lucky because I was taking a class on the history of the Soviet Union when the Berlin Wealth fell down.

unknown 29:58

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

And our professor was going back almost every weekend to Washington, D.C. for these think tank meetings, like, what's gonna happen next? What's gonna happen next? And like on Monday, he's coming back, he's like, Okay, this is all this stuff happen. And so at that moment, you've got somebody that's deep into that, you're taking a class on it, and to see it kind of falling apart was one of the coolest memories of other than football. Yeah, going to the U.S.

SPEAKER_05 30:21

You were in college when that happened?

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Yeah, because I remember watching it on TV.

SPEAKER_05 30:25

It's not that old, it's just I I have a very clear memory of watching it on TV because we didn't have a TV when I was a kid. It's a few times that we actually like watched TV really stick in my head, and that was one of those moments that I remember seeing footage of the Berlin Wall coming down and not really understanding what was happening, but everybody around me really understanding it. This is a significant now that I have a lot of friends in Poland and a lot of friends in Germany, it's like man, what a moment to be alive and awake and really understanding how this geopolitical situation was about to just shift dramatically.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Yeah, it was uh you'd go back to the I think apartment at that time and you're watching this happen and you're hearing all these people talking about it, and but yeah, going to class and having your professor that he was yeah, was in Washington, D.C. and this is the things we're looking at and stuff. It was mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_04 31:16

Did you have like an era of specialty in history that you really enjoyed?

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Um basically the the Civil War through Vietnam.

SPEAKER_05 31:24

From the US perspective?

SPEAKER_01 31:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_05 31:26

Huh.

unknown 31:26

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

US Civil War. I I yeah, it was basically a very specific time period. Well I for some reason I like wars. And so I I focused a lot on the civil I took a lot of classes on the Civil War, World War II, and then also Vietnam. Those those kind of three, because I think both of all Korea had a had a major influence on US history, World War I, but I in my mind it was kind of after the Revolutionary War, it was kind of like the Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam were kind of these um social markers or whatever in my mind, and I really enjoyed studying those and the changes that came out of that.

SPEAKER_05 32:04

I looked at American history and was just sort of like boring and wondered totally in the but there's so much like more history in Europe that it took me a really long time to come back and find interest in American history. And I have since, you know, of course done a full 180, and now I'm digging in on all sorts of stuff in the South where my family is from and understanding risers of conflict. And our book club is reading a book right now about South America and like how the US was involved. And I'm much more interested in it now. But as a kid, I was just like, there's no castles, there's no moats, there's no chariots, what are we even doing? Like, just no interest.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

And one of my highlights was being able to uh I think it was in 2006, I had to um I went back to Washington DC doing some lobbying for the borough, and then I spent an extra three days, and I went to uh Manassas and Harper's Ferry and Antietam and Gettysburg and Fredericksburg and just a bunch of different Civil War battlefields, and it was spring, there was hardly anybody there, but just walking the sunken road at Antietam and at some of these places and just trying to imagine every all these troop movements and and and at Gettysburg looking at you know when they're coming across to open fields and they're coming. Here's the stone wall and the hills that they're trying to attack. It's like, oh my god, what the hell were these people thinking? It's just crazy that they're doing this. And they did it. The distances that they're covered, it's like everybody knows you're coming. Yeah. There's just the whole time. The whole time. There's no secret. This is where we're coming. Huh. But uh, yeah, I know those were those were highlights for me. I'd love to go back and spend some more time in that part of the world and check it out some more. But yeah, no, I usually when I travel, I try and find someplace historical that I can go and check it out.

SPEAKER_05 33:57

Same. I really like um I spend a lot of time in old churches. I love to see iconography and how a society worships, and I think a lot about how a society worships tells you how much they know about the natural world around them and how much they attribute to a higher power because they can't explain it themselves or for whatever reason, but I also just really love people's iconography. Like what's what's the object that you imbued all of this, you know, holy fervor that you have. Yep. Um, I was in Ukraine in 2015 and it was my first time in a Russian um Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And um, you know, you you go to the service and and it's this whole service, and then everybody goes down into the catacombs and you wander these catacombs with this really long line of people. And I realized as I got down there that like people were going to these very specific spots to, you know, pray in front of objects, but the objects were like the saint's toe, or here's an amulet, or this guy got, you know, walled in here and is somewhere behind this wall. And I'm always just really struck by how good humans are at like finding something to believe in and hanging on to it and then praying to it, and like we're sort of creatures of ritual and habit in that way, and that's my favorite thing to do when I'm traveling.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Go find people that are praying to toes.

SPEAKER_05 35:25

Yeah, I guess that's what I just said. It's more like go find how people are worshipping.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

No, I understand. I had to pick the most ridiculous one of those items.

SPEAKER_05 35:32

It's so ridiculous to walk by and be like, what are we looking at? Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

Like Well and too, when you're when you're in Europe and you go to some of these cathedrals and these churches that were built in like the 1500s.

SPEAKER_05 35:45

Oh, God. And to sing in them?

SPEAKER_01 35:47

It's just the div the the real divinity, I think. Well, it yeah, but just to for me, it's just going in and uh thinking about how they built that. By hand. Stacking, I mean, they're cutting all these stones by hand at hammer and chisel and hauling them up and the amount the decades it took to build these things and how well they've held up over the years, and just you can sense kind of the pride in them and the belief that uh they put into those structures.

SPEAKER_04 36:23

You're reaching for the divine.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

And the and the beauty behind them is it's just it's breathtaking.

SPEAKER_04 36:28

Yeah.

Eastern Europe Curiosity And Journalism Focus

SPEAKER_01 36:29

And I know a lot of it was probably slave labor or low income. Yeah, the kings like we're gonna pay this amount of money, go round up some people in the hills to build this for us. But the outcome of what those people did freaking amazing. Absolutely amazing. Doesn't doesn't say that the king should have been able to do that, but at that time that was allowed.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

Still allowed in certain parts of the world.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

Certain parts of the world it's still allowed. Yep. So you're in Iowa City.

SPEAKER_05 36:59

Yep, Iowa State.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Iowa Iowa State, Ames. Ames, Iowa. Ames, Iowa.

SPEAKER_05 37:02

Yep. Studying journalism, loving it.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Photojournalism.

SPEAKER_05 37:05

Photojournalism, and then you had to have like a you had to have a uh an area that you you had your area of specialty that you were sort of practicing, and then you had to have an area that you concentrated on, like a a uh type of journalism. And so mine was um uh the former Soviet, they call them the satellite successor states, and so all of the countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union that are now um bordering Russia. I spent a couple of years just kind of studying conflict and access to resources and how Russia interacts with those countries and how Russia interacts with NATO. And I I think I maybe thought, I never really wanted to be a conflict journalist, but I was very interested, and I am still very interested in writing about how countries interact with each other and specifically how what stories those countries tell each other about what happened, how they ended up split up, but kind of just Eastern Europe in general was an area of great passion for me. So I got really lucky with that professor. Um and I got to go. Um, he took us all to a class of us to Poland, which is the first time I went to Eastern Europe in 2008, and that kicked off a long, you know, relationship with a bunch of journalists there and working with journalists and based in Poland.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

And yeah, so were you were you thinking that when you graduated you were gonna go to Eastern Europe and be a reporter?

SPEAKER_05 38:25

Um, I think I was pretty interested. I mean, I I love to travel um and I love to live and work in another place. So I I think it had kind of occurred to me that I could maybe um work. I don't know that I ever wanted to live anywhere else so much as I was just really interested in in writing about the politics of a place or how a country develops you know, post something like the Soviet Union. So I I don't know that I ever thought, well, I'm gonna go to live in Ukraine or I'm gonna go live in Poland for an extended period of time. I just I'm nosy and that's where the nosiness was taking me.

First Newsroom Burnout And Ethics

SPEAKER_01 38:59

So then you graduate.

SPEAKER_05 39:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Where where do you go after graduation?

Why Alaska Community News Fit

SPEAKER_05 39:03

Um, so I graduated and I got a paid photojournalism internship, which was amazing and kind of rare at that point because journalism was already going undergoing kind of a seismic shift. Um, that was in 2010, and the bottom really fell out of um journalism, like the sort of economic model for newspapers, somewhere around 2008 to 2010, um, was when I think like Craigslist came online. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff happening that was upending that model, but I I got this paid photojournalism internship at the Quad City Times, which is a paper at the border of Iowa and Illinois, and it covers a couple of towns straddling the Mississippi River. Um, and I loved it. And then um I applied for a reporting job there and and they gave it to me, which which was really not common at the time. I think I was maybe the youngest reporter that they'd ever hired, and it was this big newsroom um that you know I was just really excited to work for. Uh and and I um and I hated it. Like I loved the the photojournalism part of the job and the and the the practice of journalism every day, but I really struggled with um a couple of things. They had gone already through two rounds of layoffs, and so I had I had a desk in this newsroom that had probably 30 desks in it that were empty. So it was a huge space and not a lot of people. Um and my colleagues, by and large, were uh they were great, passionate people about journalism, but they had also been in the trenches for a while, and they had, I mean, the last salary movement they had seen was a dip in their 401ks in 2008. I think they're just really tired and burnt out and jaded. Yeah, and I, you know, I think you don't go into journalism unless you're a person who has a lot of ideals, and oh, I have so many ideals. And so I know now that I ran into that newsroom just like and I slammed right into this wall of um cynicism that I still believe is very unhealthy, um, but I have a lot more compassion for it now. But at the time I was really unprepared for it, and uh it's a large-ish newspaper. I think at the time the circulation was about 50,000, and I part of my job was to be the weekend cops and courts reporter, and the quad cities was undergoing a lot of um social change at the time, but one big thing that was happening was that it's about two hours south of Chicago, and the way that the HUD housing worked at that point was that you could get faster access to housing if you agreed to leave Chicago, and so they were pipelining black people essentially down into the quad cities, and the unemployment rate was really high. There weren't a lot of like there there just wasn't a lot of space for people to get jobs when they got there, and also there were just like a lot of factors at play, but what that ended up meaning for me was that I was in a newsroom where on the weekends it was my job to go cover like gang violence or shootings in communities and write about black people and then come back and put it in a paper that was predominantly being sold to white people, and at no point did I ever get to close the loop and go back and see if the things I was writing about were doing anything for the communities I was writing about. You're sitting in an ER and you're talking some woman into telling you the story of her kid that just got shot, and then you're writing that story, and it felt like something should happen after that, but I was just really young and I didn't really understand what should happen. It just felt wrong. And I remember I had taken this class in college about um how to kind of look at the ways that your your um news organization was covering a community, and one of the things that she taught us was like you should go through and like circle every time you mention a person of color or you like take a photo of a person of color and see the context in which you're reporting on them. And I went through like a month, months' worth of paper worth of paper, and I came back to my editor and I was just like, Did you know that we are only mentioning black people in the context of crime stories? Like that it seems like there's like a gap happening here, and I got just really kind of brutally shut down about why would that even matter? And I I don't mean to impugn that editor, I just think that that wasn't a conversation that we were willing to have at the time, and a lot of my ideals were slamming up against an economic reality that was probably really hard for her to deal with, watching her newsroom get dismantled around her. Um, but they just really just didn't care. That was the news that sold was like the car crashes that I was shooting and the people I was writing about who had been involved in gang violence, and I I There for about 18 months and it just was like really draining, and I didn't understand why. But then I read this book, umuse, Luce, and Egnar, which is a collection of short stories uh from small town um America, just like small town newspapers. And you gotta understand, like I I really like came alive in Houston, right? Which is a city of seven and a half million people. And then I went to Iowa State and I was in San Antonio, like and only at that point really understood living in towns with millions of people in them. And I read this book and I was like, what if I go to a town of 5,000? What what kind of journalism do you get to do in a place where you know everybody? Um, so I started applying for jobs all over the country, and one of them was um at the Peninsula Clarion on the Kenye, um, which I had pictures of at that point because my grandparents used to be stationed um in Anchorage in the 50s. And so I have pictures of the Kenai like when the roads weren't paved yet. And I kind of was like, ah, the Kenai Peninsula, probably I could go there. Um, and I sort of called and bullied my way into that job, um, which is maybe a story for another time. But I packed everything into my ranger, um, which had 250,000 miles on it when I left Iowa and drove all the way to the Kenai, and um, I've just sort of been here ever since doing community journalism specifically, like in a town of 5,000 and then Juno for a little bit, and then here, and that was definitely the right size for me was a town where you close the loop with people. I got I you told me your story, I wrote the story, I come back to you with that story, you can tell me if it worked for you or didn't, or if I missed something, or I needed that, and I got it here.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

So, what what kind of stuff when you were in Kenai? What were you what were you reporting on in Kenai?

Becoming A Fisheries Reporter By Force

SPEAKER_05 45:52

Oh, if you ever want to go down like a really embarrassing YouTube rabbit hole for me, um, I I thought that I was gonna be reporting on oil and gas. And um when I got there, the city editor who was a guy who was like, I think my age, um said, No, you're gonna do the fisheries reporting. I don't want to do the fisheries reporting. And I had never fished and I didn't know anything about salmon. I remember picking up a children's book about salmon and being like, whoa, salmon have teeth? And everybody in the room looking up at me and just going, um, and so I was the fisheries reporter, and it also meant that I did a weekly Tight Lines fishing report um for the Kenai, which had to be videoed. So there's like a bunch of videos of me on YouTube, just like very excitedly talking about fishing, and it's mostly just like parroting what fishing game told me that week or whatever local fisherman I could hunt down to tell me. I mean, and bless my heart, I go back and I've seen those occasionally and just been like, oh, Rasha. That's you could have just put the camera on someone else who knew what they were talking about. But I was really stoked and I was having a lot of fun. And if you're gonna learn to be a fisheries reporter, the keenite is the best place to do it.

SPEAKER_00 47:02

Awesome spot to be a fisheries reporter.

SPEAKER_05 47:04

It's the best place to be fishing, but also the fish wars are stunning in the the user group battles between like sport fishermen and like setnet fishermen and drift fishermen and the board of fish and like the sort of there was these allegations of corruption at that level. I mean, it the whole thing was just so engaging, and I to this day think that if I got to sort of walk away from everything I was doing and just be a fisheries reporter in this state, I would be so happy. It's it's such an amazing beat.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Well, there's there's all the somewhere in the state, there's always a fisheries-related controversy of some kind.

SPEAKER_05 47:41

Yeah, for real. And it's so important to so many people. I mean, it it's the industry. I don't think fishing in this state's history has ever been the thing that brought the most money into the state, but it has several times been the thing that employed the most people. Yep. Um, and it is like the regional economic driver in so many places, and people are so passionate about it, but also they're so religious about it. There's like a mysticism about where you go fishing or what you like why you caught this thing when you did, or I mean, and and subsistence fishing is something that I had never encountered, you know, before I moved to the state, and coming to understand it as like a a thing that people survive on and a way of life for people was just really revelatory.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. So, how long how long were you in Akenai then?

AP Wire Speed Versus Accuracy

SPEAKER_05 48:34

Uh, three and a half years. Okay. And then I took a job. Um, the Associated Press used to have a temporary legislative reporting position. Um, we could cover a session in Juneau. And I was at that part, at that point, kind of starting to think about money because I wasn't making very much money. And I was sort of in this phase where it was like picking which bills I got to pay the month that I was paying them, which you know you can do, but ultimately started to feel a little bit untenable as I got older. Um, and I need some needed something to subsidize my book habit. And so I took this job for the AP covering the legislature, and I moved to Juneau in 2015, which is the year that Walker cut the dividend. So I landed in Juneau to just this insane legislative session where it's like dividend, and that's also the year we passed SB 91, which is the big criminal justice overhaul that has since been repealed. But it was the most interesting time. There was a lot going on there. There was a lot going on, and no one knew what they were doing. It was just a bunch of people going, Whoa, we careened off this cliff and we don't have any money. What if? And so I got to run around the Capitol um covering that, and I did that for a whole session. Um, struggled with that a little bit because the Associated Press is not a small town news organization. That is a global newswire. So you the process there is that you report your story out and you write it and you send it off into the ether, and some copy editor from whatever desk is awake in that time zone, so Arizona or anywhere else in the world gets a hold of it. They never come back to you and ask you if the things they're editing make sense. And so a number of times stories went out with my name on it that I'd read it and just go, oh no, like I can't, I gotta hide, like that.

SPEAKER_04 50:24

Seriously, they would they would edit it. They would just add things. It was like a smorgasbord of like, oh, things that sound like Alaska.

SPEAKER_05 50:34

So you'd be like, in off-the-road system Kenai. No, like, or you know, just you know, people who aren't from here, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:42

Um it it just is a and I can understand the editing process, but why wouldn't they like, hey, we just want to confirm this is correct, right?

SPEAKER_05 50:51

Well, I mean, one thing about the Associated Press, um, uh which I fully support, but makes it hard to operate, is that like they have desks at every single, you know, in every single time zone, and also um, you know, they only let you work eight hours a day and you're unionized, so like they can't contact you after hours. I mean, there's no, there's you get your role done, and then it gets to the next person who does their role. Like it's a very efficient machine. It's just sometimes that machine introduces errors because parts of it aren't talking to each other very well. I think the most, the single most embarrassing, and I cringe at least once a month thinking about it, um, was that there was this um kid whose name I'm gonna feel terrible for getting. Uh he was a he was a Yupit kid who was making a lot of music and getting really, really popular. Uh, in do you remember this kid, Sam?

SPEAKER_01 51:51

He's uh I Sing You Dance.

SPEAKER_05 51:53

Yeah, I Sing You Dance is yeah, so he was getting really popular, and I convinced my editors to let me go do a story about him, even though it wasn't really on the legislative beat. And I wrote this story and I sent it off, and the next day it ran with the lead, um, he's the Justin Bieber of Alaska. And I was just like, I am dying. I will never be able to show my face anywhere in Western Alaska again. That is not what this is. It was really, it was really embarrassing. Uh so yeah, it was just it was I I wasn't sad to go on move on to another job.

SPEAKER_01 52:28

And and so my first thought when you're describing that business model and how they're doing that, yeah, is one of the reasons small, big, I don't know, why people don't trust some of the larger media places is because if you've got stuff going out there that is incorrect because they haven't circled back to check with the reporter on it, you if it even if it's not happening very often, regardless of what the the paper or the TV station or whatever, that they're in such a hurry to get it printed, yeah, that they're not making sure everything is factually correct in there, that leads to some distrust.

SPEAKER_05 53:09

I yeah, and I don't disagree with you. I feel really strongly that that one oh my god, we could just talk about this for hours. The Associated Press serves a very specific function, um, which is that it they're getting news about something happening in a certain part of the world out to as wide of an audience as possible, right? So we rely on the Associated Press for global updates on things and to be experts about conflict all over the world in places that we would never be able to, our our news organizations would never never be able to afford to go in on their own. So it's it's a very specific, like a wire service is a very specific function. And it's the first draft of history, it's almost never perfect. I don't think anybody ever introduced an error that I felt like, wow, that foundationally is gonna give people a mistaken understanding of of what the facts of the situation are. I think it was always something that just made me kind of cringe and go, wait a tell everybody I'm not from here. Or man, if you had just checked, I could have helped you with that. But ultimately, like every single one of those stories ended up getting blown out into a global wire. And and that's I mean, that's what it's for, right? They're not supposed to be doing deep dives on stuff locally in Juneau, Alaska. I I don't disagree with you that the model can be flawed.

SPEAKER_01 54:30

I would I would think that they should be striving for correctness over quickness. That's not how a wire service works.

SPEAKER_05 54:37

I mean we're all we're all striving for correctness.

SPEAKER_01 54:39

But it but I and I think so I it's an imprecise model. I would I would say that it depends on the story. Because when you have a breaking event, like a natural disaster or a war or something like that. That they're there, and if everything's coming back, you're not seeing the full picture, there's a lot going on. Yes. I can understand that.

SPEAKER_05 55:01

You're writing a story about kid from western Alaska.

SPEAKER_01 55:06

You'd think something like that can have a little bit more so I it yeah, there's there's times that you just need to get whatever information you have out there, and there's gonna be follow-up information coming behind it. But there's other stories, it's like it's not that time sensitive. Let's make sure you should be making sure, in my opinion, as a non-journalist, you should be making sure all the facts are there before that goes out.

SPEAKER_05 55:29

Yeah, I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you. I just I think I have a lot more patience for um a media ecosystem that has a lot of imperfection in it because it always has, right? Like our media ecosystem has always had a lot of imperfection in it. Um I just think with the internet and the sort of ability of people to go fact-check on their own, and with the way that media attitudes have shifted in this country, we're a lot more likely to point out the faults in our local journalism production than we are to understand like the role that journalism can and has always played in society, which is to give you the message and get it out there in whatever way we can. And sometimes we screw it up. I've done it, I've done it so many times over the course of my career. Like stories that I get.

SPEAKER_01 56:23

You're saying you're human? So is that what you're saying?

Bias And The Myth Of Objectivity

SPEAKER_05 56:26

I'm saying I'm human, and I'm saying that I think for a really long time, like where I think, in my estimation, where a lot of contemporary journalism kind of went awry, is that we cultivated some picture of ourselves that was like designed to make people think we weren't human, that we somehow were the moral arbiters of what truth is, and that we were somehow the I mean, we were the only source of information for so long that whatever we said was just w what people accepted as the, you know, the correct version of events, and it and it never has been. It was just the role we got to occupy, and now that people understand, not only has it never been, but it's always been imperfect in some very key ways, and that imperfection has done real harm to people in some ways. Like, it's a hard thing to swallow to go from being able to say, I can watch Peter Jennings every night and feel like I know what's going on in the world, to man, I could watch all three or four or five major news networks and a couple of YouTube videos and read a newspaper story, and I'm I still may not really have a balanced look at what's going on. That's I I think that's just hard.

SPEAKER_01 57:38

So I was gonna delve into this later, but since you're going down that road, we're gonna if you don't mind, we'll go into it. We'll veer in that direction. We'll go into it now, we'll veer in that direction now. We you and I have had this discussion, just kind of an off the chance at the store here, I think it was last summer, about the the role of journalism and how there's there's some people that get into journalism or have been in journalism and they want they want to tell the story that they want to tell that fits their own narrative.

SPEAKER_03 58:05

For sure.

SPEAKER_01 58:06

There's other journalists that kind of want to like, okay, here's the facts as we know them, you make a decision off of that. How how do you as a journalist, how do you blend that because everybody that's gonna be talking about something, we do this when we talk to our friends about something that's happened. We have our own inert biases that we all have on how we're gonna view something. We all have gotten our information from different sources, and so to take that and put try to present a level playing field or whatever for the readers and not have that personal bias, is it possible to do that? Do you even try to do that?

SPEAKER_04 58:46

Yeah, oh yeah. I mean, I think I would have told you.

SPEAKER_01 58:51

Because there's some people, there's some people in Haynes that don't think you do.

SPEAKER_04 58:54

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 58:55

Anybody that writes at the paper can have a particular event. They think it's like you've got the you're trying to push this narrative, you're trying to push this narrative.

SPEAKER_05 59:02

Absolutely. Um to answer that question, I'm gonna go back a little bit and say that like immediately out of journalism school, I think I would have told you 100% totally possible to be super objective. And I can definitely be a person that walks into a situation and takes in this and takes in this and combines it in some way, and I have all these little practices that I follow to make sure I'm not inserting myself into it. And yes, I am a professional journalist and I am a professional objective person. And as I've gotten older and learn more about myself and learn more about other journalists and just sort of how this process works, then I no, I don't think it's possible to be completely objective. I think um, and I think anybody who tells you that they can do it is lying or maybe their brains aren't fully formed yet. Like as a 22-year-old journalist, I was certain, and as a 42-year-old journalist, I'm like, ooh, I think you know, there it just takes a lot, I think, to learn what you don't know. Um where I think we've sort of lost communities, and where I think the conversation most often goes for me now in communities like this one is that people used to believe that I was reaching for objectivity, and they um would give me as much information as they could, and then they would trust me to cook and come out with something that was fair, and they don't do that anymore. Um, and so I'm often operating on significantly less information than I would have gotten even 20 years ago in my career. I used to be able to show up in a situation and people would go, Oh, that's the journalist, and tell me all of the things. And then if I got something wrong, you know, they'd be in my office saying, Hey, you missed this, or this fact is really important, or whatever. People aren't really doing that anymore because they've lost trust, and so it makes it that much harder to reach for that kind of objectivity because so often now when I'm trying to tell a story, just maybe one person who has one perspective will talk to me about it. So I think the job has gotten harder, and I also think that um my understanding of what it means to reach for objectivity has changed over the course of my career. I think before I was doing all of these little practices that I was told in journalism school made me objective. I didn't make friends with anybody that I was gonna be covering ever. I I didn't obviously you still don't really date people that you're gonna be covering, but you you kept yourself separate from the community that you were covering because there was some idea that if you were separate from them, then you could somehow come in and be objective. And I don't think that's true anymore. And I I don't know that I think that it was ever true, and I think that it's done a ton of damage, and so I'm spending a lot of my time now trying to lean into communities in a way that I never did early on in my career, and I can tell you that it has changed my journalism, I can tell you that I've learned a lot of lessons about my own personal biases that I did not know that I had. Um and I can tell you that every day that I'm practicing this job, I'm I'm practicing, I'm reaching for objectivity. And some days I walk home and I realize like oh I didn't quite get there. And some days I can come out of a situation where I've interviewed a bunch of people and I can go, I don't agree with you. And I think that's a really important point, you know, and I and and that is the thing that I know about myself that I've gotten better at is holding on to other people's ideas that uh I am adamantly internally opposed to, and being able to put them down on the page and say, This is what this person is trying to do in this situation. And I did not have that skill set when I was in my early 20s. So I think I think it's a practice, and I think I'm getting better at it. And I think a lot of journalists are trying to do the same, but at the end of the day, I'm only as good as the information people will give me and the trust that they'll put in me, and I can't force people to believe that I'm trying to do the right thing. I just have to keep doing it every day and hope that they're gonna come along for the ride.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

So the next question Yeah do people actually want objective journalism? Yes, and no or what per what percentage of people actually what I'm referring to is you look at the national media landscape and it's getting more and more polarized that you know if you want to see left wing, you go to this stage, if you want right, you go to these stages. And it's it's they've they're they're playing to certain markets and they're extremely profitable doing that. And so that, like you used to say, you could go to Peter Jennings and see. I don't know of a national news figure right now that you can watch and go, okay, I from night in to night out, is like, okay, I know what I'm I know I'm getting the full story on this because just about every network is slanted to one direction or the other.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:20

I took a class in college about this, and we learned this really interesting sort of model that I think you and I talked about, which is that for a period of time, television news, which has always had the largest part of the sort of media market share since it became a thing, um, they were all reaching for this sort of central part of the political spectrum. And then um, the way I learned it, uh, Rupert Murdoch with Fox News came in and said, I'm going this far to the right. And then, you know, I don't think it was CNN at the time, I think it was maybe CNBC or MSNBC shot over in this other direction. Like they they sort of the the profit model overtook whatever internal moral compass there was. And I kind of hate to ascribe morality to a corporation, but the there was a marked shift in the late 80s and early 90s with television news where they realized they could make just as much, if not more, money, chasing a partisan audience. And I think that's what you're seeing sort of reflected is is that there was a there was a change. Um, I keep saying Peter Jennings because he's the first guy I remember seeing Peter Jennings and like Walter Cronkite. Um, you know, but post that time there was a shift where people started to really value, or some people started to really value seeing a a pundit on air more than getting that sort of straight reach for the center news. But I think that's a little bit of a it's not a red herring because it's a thing that did happen, but I don't think that's the whole story of what has happened in our media landscape. And I can tell you that, like Yeah, on social media and on television news and in a lot of our media ecosystems, it really does seem highly polarized. But the feedback I consistently get in this town and that I was getting in Juneau, the feedback I have consistently personally gotten is from people going, man, that was so even-handed. Thank you so much for doing that. Or wow, I really didn't realize that that person was trying to reach for this thing, and I don't agree with them at all, but you know, I understand how they got there, and that's been my personal North Star the whole time in journalism is to draw connections between people. And so I do think that people want that. I I really do.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:44

But and I think there's I think there's percentages on that. You know, there's there's a certain people that want their point of view on whatever side of it is. But I I I would agree with you. I think the majority of the people want all sides represented. Yeah. And then give it give us information on all these sides.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:01

And we'll figure it out what our opinions are. We'll figure out what our opinions are. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:05

But a lot of what you see with social media is we're more in these silos. Yeah, but just we're just not. It's it's not. But it does push that, that it's caught it's almost pushing people, in my view. I'm I'm not trained in this, I've not studied this, but it it seems to have pushed more people into the extremes that this is the news we want. And if and because X people are saying this on social media or whatever, then this must be the one true, and I can't look at the other one.

Polarization And What Locals Want

SPEAKER_05 1:07:36

It's my 100% so far favorite thing about Hanes that um people here contain a surprising number of multitudes, and I'll hear something just really partisan come out of someone's mouth, and then maybe five minutes later, after I've engaged them in conversation, they come up with they're telling me about something else that they like or something else that they deeply believe in that's diametrically opposed to that first thing. And I I don't know why it's happening here, but I feel so lucky that I ended up here because I was definitely hitting a point in my career where I was asking a lot of these questions you're asking, which is like, do people want what I'm trying to give them anymore? And I the answer I think is resoundingly yes. I'm not saying that I'm doing it perfectly, I'm saying that I think a lot of people from of all ages are very hungry for a source of news that even if it's not a complete source of news and information for them, they know that they can trust that source of news to do to provide as much balance or factual information as possible. And I I get a lot of feedback in this town specifically on that kind of journalism from people who, when I first moved here, were like, I don't talk to the newspaper, you've messed up. Three previous owners ago pissed me off 30 years ago, and you're all a liberal rag, and then somebody else will just say you're way too conservative, you don't pay attention to science. Like people have very strong opinions about that paper, that paper in this town and the legacy of that paper in this town, and invariably those same people have come back to me within eight months or 12 months or you know, more than a year and said, You're doing a really good job. And the only thing that I've done is try to include a mix of like hard news and feature stories about the community, and in every single story that I write, go in trying to make sure that I'm drawing ties between parts of this town that are yelling at each other. And I, you know, I think people want that, and I think they're I think they're kind of tired of turning on their television and getting yelled at by someone who's making money to tell them how to think. Yeah, I don't turn on my television for that anymore. Yeah, I tell people all the time don't don't watch your news, read your news. Yeah.

Public Radio Years And Podcast Work

SPEAKER_01 1:09:57

So you were in June, we'll back up now. Yeah. So you were in Juneau, did the legislative thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:02

And then where where'd you because that was 2015?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:05

Mm-hmm. So um I uh on a whim picked up a job at um KTOO, the local public radio station there. And I knew nothing about radio before that.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:15

So we went from ra you went from print to radio.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:19

And it was just supposed to be a temporary thing, it was supposed to be um they just were going through a phase where they didn't have any reporters in the newsroom, and so I said I'd cover them for a couple of months until their new reporters got there. Uh, and then there was this um uh collaborative newsroom effort. They got a huge grant um from the corporation for public broadcasting, which doesn't exist anymore, to form a statewide collaborative between um a newsroom in Alaska and one in Anchorage and one in Juneau, and they called it Alaska's Energy Desk, and it was um they were hiring 12 reporters to cover all of these energy and environmental issues in the state. And I loved radio. I took to radio, I wasn't perfect at it, and there are parts of it that I didn't really like, but I definitely the part where you could just talk your news instead of writing your news. Um I'm I'm much better at that than I am at writing. I'm a much better speaker than I am at radio. So you didn't write out you didn't write out your scripts for you do write out your scripts, but when you're writing out a radio script, really good radio, you write your story out and then you walk around and you rewrite it based on how you would tell it. So you deliver your story the way that you talk. And I think anybody could have told you that I'm a talker. I mean, my dad used to call me Mouth when I was a kid. Like, come on, Mouth, you're going 90 miles an hour, but no one in journalism school ever said, Hey, did you consider radio? And I got into radio and oh, I just took to it. And um, and it's a lot like photojournalism in that when you're piecing together um a good radio story, kind of like when you're piecing together a good visual story, you have to really think about how and what a person is gonna interpret about what they're seeing. You have to build scenes for people in radio. And you know, when I first got into it, you put the headphones on and you have this microphone on, and you can just close your eyes and walk around and record things and try and figure out wow, does that sound even sound like what I know it is when I'm hearing it? It doesn't. I gotta find a sound that sounds like that so people who are listening to it can see what I'm thinking. And I mean it was it was a it was a blast. Um and so I stayed in radio for nine years. Yeah. Got over to KTOO, did statewide energy environmental reporting, so I got to stay at the Capitol for a while. Um and uh did a couple of podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:38

I was gonna that was gonna be the next question. Is this when you started your podcast?

SPEAKER_05 1:12:41

Yeah, we did um we did one called Midnight Oil, which is um a story about how Alaska became an oil state, because you know, of course, at that point the PFD is a huge topic of discussion, and we're looking at being a post-oil state, and so we wanted to look at the things that got us here so that we could look at where we might go next. So there's two seasons of that. We did another podcast, which I like to say was my baby of a podcast and had like a very enthusiastic like audience of like 60 economists. Like no one else cared. And so that one was like maybe four episodes or maybe five. And I did that with um Nat Hurz, who now has the Northern Journal and you know is a statewide reporter and a guy named Andrew Kitcherman, and it's called paying dividends. And we um I think we started that the first year of the Dunley V administration, and we were the idea was like understanding the dividend, how the dividend works, regional economic drivers, just like how is the state figuring out its budget now that it's not an oil state? But like it was just really nerdy. And it, you know, the first 20 minutes was me like interviewing some state revenue something or the other, and then there would be a story, but it just like it didn't really have the audience. Um I still think it was good. And when we canceled it, I sort of famously heard from like three economists who were just like, oh no.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:05

So it had a niche audience.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:08

Um and then we produced one in Juneau, the local KTO, the radio station did one called um Cruise Town, which was you know the first year that Juno broke a million cruise ship visitors, which we of course thought was like crazy huge, and now they're at like a million and a half, they're gonna be like 1.7 next year. Um so yeah, we we were doing podcasts at that point, and I was traveling around doing like um I did a like three years of reporting on the Alaska Gas Line Development Corporation and the gas line itself, um, and got to learn a lot about the sort of economics of Alaska and mega projects, our history with mega projects. Uh and then I um was the uh local newsroom editor at KTOO for a couple of years and doing a lot of the Juno local reporting and getting to do I I you know I enjoy statewide reporting, but I think ultimately my heart is in community level reporting. Um so I did a lot of I did a lot of crime and courts reporting in Juno um and I um shaped a lot of local, just like coverage of utilities and coverage of just the daily news flow of like what's happening in this town and how do people need to know about it. Um and then I um got a call out of nowhere from a woman named Priska Neely who had just um started this group that was part of the same model that we did with Alaska's Energy Desk, where you, you know, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds these collaborations between stations. And hers was called the Gulf States Newsroom, and it was Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and NPR had funded part of it, and CPB had funded part of it, and the idea was to get stories out of this part of the country that like were not really you're not seeing them in a lot of places. You don't get a lot of coverage from rural Mississippi anywhere, and specifically not at NPR. And Priska it, you know, had heard from a couple of people that I might be a good um deputy editor, and she called and I went, ugh, the deep south, because it's hot. And I've firmly been in Alaska for a while. Um, but she made a really compelling argument about the communities that exist in that space. Do you need to answer that?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:23

No.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:24

I have no idea who it is, so um, she made a really compelling argument about um, you know, why I should work for her and what the job could be. And it was a real chance to kind of put into practice some of the things that I had been thinking about, how to build diverse newsrooms, how to work in a diverse newsroom, like how you actually cultivate a diversity of thought in a space that for most of my career has been predominantly white and predominantly people that have college educations or certain amounts of money. And um, you know, I said earlier that thing about my North Star being able to tie portions of the community together. I think I've always been on a quest to like make journalism that my dad would engage with his journalism, and he's this like real blue-collar dude who like generally he'll turn on the nightly news and watch it, and then you can always see this point where he just disconnects from something that the person is saying because he just really doesn't engage with like academic writing or you you just gotta work real hard to reach that guy, and and and I've been working real hard to reach that guy, and I think the way that you get that guy in every community is by having a newsroom that has a diversity of like political thought and social experience and economic experience, and in the deep south, yes, poorest parts of the country, and and some of the most racially diverse, but being covered by newsrooms that are not. And Priska um painted this picture for me of a way that we can make that different, and she was doing that, and so I've left Juno and I drove from Alaska to Alabama in 2022. Um Ranger? Uh no, no, I have a Subaru this time, but that Ranger is still alive and kicking. Is it? I gave it to my little brother when I moved him up to the state, and then he sold it to some guy in Anchorage, and I saw it a few years ago, and yeah, that thing is just going.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:24

It's still going like crazy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:26

Um, and yeah, so I ended up working for the Gulf States newsroom for 18 months, and I loved it, and it's the best job I've ever had. Um, but Alabama was not the best place I've ever lived.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:37

Where in Alabama were you at?

Deep South Newsroom Then Homesick

SPEAKER_05 1:18:38

I was in Birmingham, and I was traveling around Mississippi, around Jackson, Mississippi, um, New Orleans, and Birmingham where the where the three stations were, and then we were traveling in groups, you know, into all of these little towns, and I wasn't prepared for the heat and um didn't really socially acclimatize uh very well. And I just I was really homesick, it turned out, that for Alaska. So I kind of bungeed back.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:08

And so that was was that when you came back and bought the CVN?

SPEAKER_05 1:19:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:11

So how'd you how did you hear about so you were here in 2020 for the slide? That was the first time we met.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:18

Yeah, that was actually, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:19

But I didn't to tell to tell you the truth, I don't I don't know if I've told you this before, I didn't rec I you came after you came back to Haynes. My mom and I were at the fireman's barbecue on the fourth, and you're like, hey Doug, like who in the heck is this for because the whole time because COVID, everybody had masks. There's a lot of people that came to town that I would not recognize them because the only time I saw them was I saw their eyes and whatever else because they were wearing a mask full time. So the first time, I'm like, who is this lady wanting to talk to me? Yep. And then you introduced yourself and I was like, okay, that's what she looks like without a mask on.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:53

This town was so interesting in 2020. And I had been here once before, but that was the first time that I spent any measurable amount of time here, and before I had come for a beer fest.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:01

How long were you here for during the slide?

SPEAKER_05 1:20:03

A week. Just a little bit over a week. Yeah, because um you remember um it was Claire Strymple and Henry Leisha KHS at that time, and they didn't have an editor, and they'd been working before the slide, they'd been working non-stop because there had been all that flooding. Um, and so uh once the slide happened, KTOO just said, hey, go over there and help them out so that you know they're not killing themselves. So I just came for a week to help them out. Um and saw Hanes that it's like 100% absolute best. And I gotta say, in this town, every time someone's just like, wow, everything everybody's so vitriolic, like you can't fool me. I saw you, I saw every single one of you in the store buying snacks for each other and helping each other out. Like, I I I saw it, you can't fool me. So that was like the best time to visit this town, I think. And terrifying, right? Because it's COVID, and that's also how I met Alecka for the first time, and um, and I had no idea I was gonna come back at that point, but I'm glad that I got to see Haynes at that point because I think that my first year here was really rough, and I would have struggled had I not known the heart of people here because the things that come out of people's mouths here are sometimes really demoralizing.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:18

You don't say so how did you hear that the paper was up for sale?

Buying Chilkat Valley News

SPEAKER_05 1:21:25

Ah, so I was in um Birmingham, yeah, and I um Priska, one of her her big things was like, you're not allowed to overwork, which is the first time I've ever had a boss that was just like, oh, it's been 40 hours, get out. Uh she really like cultivated I know I know, I know. And um, so she was really she was teaching me how to just manage myself a little better. And so, of course, I was just like, I have time to go to grad school now that I'm only working 40 hours a week. And so I sort of looked around and I um found this program at um West Virginia University um called Um Media Solutions and Innovation, and it was designed to um pivot news organizations into being more relevant for like legacy media organizations into being more relevant for the modern time. And I had already been thinking at that point that I would really like to get a little bit more involved with some of the newspapers in Alaska because I know a lot of newspaper journalists here, and I've also seen them just get squeezed harder and harder and harder the whole time that I've been here. And so I I kind of had a bouncing around in my head that it would be really cool if we could link the newspapers together in a network the way that the public radio stations are in this state. And you gotta know Alaska is legendary in the lower 48 for how well our public media stations communicate with each other, and it does not work like that in any other in any other part of the country, there'll be like three stations that work together, or like maybe two or cross-border, but in Alaska, almost all of our public media stations, when you're a brand new reporter and you come here, you get sort of like jumped into this like public media ecosystem that is covering the entire state. And I had it in my head that if the newspapers were just communicating each other with each other in that same way, we could have some of the strength of a network. Um, and so I went to grad school to study how to build a network like that. And one of the first steps in that was building a um story sharing, like a content exchange between the newspapers and Southeast. And so I was covering, you know, I was calling publishers, kind of just talking about what that could look like. Um and I was working with Larry Persley, who's the publisher of The Wrangle Sentinel, and like Alaska's news dad. Um, and I knew Kyle a little bit, you know, so I was calling him too, and we were putting this story sharing network together and getting people in the habit of trading stories with each other. And then I I don't remember really the order at which this happened, but at one point Larry and a couple of other people started decided to start a nonprofit, and we wrote a grant with some of the stuff that I wrote in grad school about how a network could work. We wrote a grant for an organization or a an effort called Press Forward, which is a large attempt to put money into media in this country and kind of maybe rescue some of the parts of the media ecosystem that are failing. And we got$100,000 and we started this nonprofit called the Alaska News Coalition, and we're trying to like link all of the digital and print organizations in the state together and find shared tools for them. And somehow in that process, I remember Kyle Clayton, the former owner, calling and saying, Oh, you want to like run a collaboration from within the collaboration because the paper's up for sale, and I, you know, he was about to have a baby and he was finishing up a grad school project. I think he just had carried this paper for five years through a pandemic and was ready to be ready to set it down. Um, and I thought, yeah, that sounds great. And also, I hate all the it's too hot. Uh, and so I just thought, oh yeah, that'll be a great foothold, you know, back into the state that I love, and also putting my money where my mouth is about how publishers should be pivoting their news organizations to meet the modern age. Um so we agreed, and I bought the paper as of January 1st of 2024, and Lex Trinan was here for that year, so he had another six months of being the editor, so I got a little bit of time to like pack my stuff up and drive myself back up in that Subaru from Alabama to Alaska with a little stop in Texas to see my family, and here I am.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:01

So he started off in print, went to radio, now back to print. Kyle goes from print to radio.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:08

We're all just bouncing around.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:11

So is it everything you thought it would be?

SPEAKER_05 1:26:15

Yeah. And and more. And more? And more. I was really um naive about why um so many legacy media organizations are struggling, and I had a lot of naivety about how to run a small business um that have really slammed right into the you know reasons that I was doing journalism in the first place, which is that I love storytelling and I love interviewing people, and I love, you know, getting to help people decode the world around them, and I have zero time to do that now. I'm having to like find a really cool story idea and then be like, Will, do you want to do this story? Like pass them off to, you know, other reporters because I just I'm just doing too much other stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:05

So, how much of your weekly time at the paper? I'm guessing you're working more than 40 hours a week now. Yeah. Yeah. How much of that is you doing your own stories, and how much of that is managing the the business side, managing the other writers that you have for you, and that aspect? How do you have to divide your time up on those?

SPEAKER_05 1:27:27

I'm at about 75-25. Uh 75 administrative tasks, running the business, figuring out where money's gonna come from, doing ad sales, trying to add new news products, um, figuring out just figuring out what this news organization is going to be. And about 25% of my time is spent reporting and writing, and that mix is not correct, and it's really bothering me.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:50

But frankly, where would you like it to be?

SPEAKER_05 1:27:53

Oh, 7525 in the other direction. Other direction? Does anybody want to come run a paper? I would love to just be doing. The storytelling. Um unfortunately, I think um, and this is not to impugn the last couple of owners of the paper, but um there was a period of time where it was okay to spend more of your time focusing on the journalism and telling the news, and you could just be reasonably assured that the money was gonna follow and it doesn't work like that anymore, and that place is gonna careen off a cliff, and and you could maybe argue it already has, and so I just don't have that luxury anymore. I don't feel like I do. Um and it kind of sucks because some weeks uh uh pretty often there are weeks that there are so many stories that I'm just like, man, I that belongs in the paper this week, or I wish that I would have had time to do that. And I'm learning how to do QuickBooks so that I can untangle what 10 years worth of finances of this specific thing means, and if we should continue doing it, because I'm haemorrhaging money. And and that is um, that's something a lot of publishers in the state are doing now, and I think it's really telling that at some point there was enough money in this industry. No one no one ever got rich doing this job, but there was enough money in this industry that you could be reasonably certain that that plane was gonna keep flying, even if you didn't sell enough ads this week or you didn't really make sure that your cost of doing business was locked tight and you understood it, but that time is not, that time is gone. Um so uh yeah, so it's it's it's been really it's been a I've learned that when I first started this collaboration where I wanted all of these publishers talking to each other, and I was constantly coming to them with new tools and more efficient ways of doing things, and then standing back and going, like, why aren't they doing that? Like, don't you want I thought they just weren't listening to me. And now I understand that what's actually happening is that most legacy media outlets didn't meaningfully technologically keep up with the world. It's not that just that they didn't like pivot to the internet, it's that their internal processes didn't get more efficient, and so most publishers that you're dealing with now are taking five to ten times longer to do every task to get a printed product out, which in and of itself is kind of inefficient. Um and they're not able to add another task, they're not able to pivot and learn a new tool, they're not able to think about a digital audience because they're still thinking about how to make the perfect newspaper, right? And they god, they make such good newspapers in this state, and then the websites are just sort of like oh no, that's not gonna work. So I've I yeah, I've learned a lot about um why legacy organizations are faltering, and um, I wish that more people understood that it's not because the people behind them aren't good journalists and they're not savvy, it's because they've inherited this like typewriter and they're supposed to be on a smartphone, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:13

No, that's and that's that hard thing because you've got as technology comes available, you have to make the decision at a t at a certain time when do I make this transition? And a lot of times it can be based on revenue, it can be a significant investment of funds. And where are you gonna get that investment of funds back when sometimes things are pretty pretty close to tipping the wrong way on the scales to begin with? And so you look at that, and then if you pause that for two, three, ten, fifteen years, and you don't go that route, and that's the actual route that everybody else goes, yeah, you're screwed.

Tech Debt Inside Legacy Newspapers

SPEAKER_05 1:31:59

Completely. And I will tell you that most of the newspapers in the state, um, I can't speak for all of them, but most of them are labors of love being financed by people who have the money to do it. I'm one of the youngest, if not the youngest publisher and of a printed newspaper. There's some digital outlets that are um newer and different, but um, and I might be one of the only ones that's like gonna lose my shirt if this thing fails. I'll go do something else. But I I mean I'm I'm reliant on this paper and this news organization to live. And um I that's not true of a lot of the other papers in this chain. They're being funded by people who got their money somewhere else and believe very strongly in what they're doing and will continue pouring their own personal money into that effort.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:47

Are there things that you've looked around the country and seen small newspapers do that you're like, maybe we should try that. Maybe we should try that. All the time.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:57

I mean, we can think about that all the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:59

So what do you do you have anything you could you want to share that would be like something that it's like, man, I wish we could do this?

SPEAKER_05 1:33:05

Or I want it what what or do you have any big projects coming up for the paper that you don't have to discuss anything if you don't want to, but no, I'm just you know the thing that I'm most struck by is that like one of the things that make that's making papers specifically fail is that um a lot of them were bought up by chains. Like if you look at the Juno Empire, um I think the Homer News, uh they're owned by a company that's in Washington State, which is owned by an investment firm in Canada, which is now owned by a company in Alabama, which owns like 90 papers, and they're having the same economic struggles that I am, but they're trying to do these one size fits all solutions for markets, and that does not work. Like what's gonna work in Haynes is not gonna work in Juneau, is not gonna work, I think even in Scagway, because I looked at that paper for a while too and thought, ooh, should I combine these? No. Um, and I think at one time they used to be. They did. Yeah, it was called the Lynn Canal News, and I think the I think the Lynn Canal News might have been the second time they tried doing that. Um but the economics are totally different between our towns, right? Like look at something like um I think about this stuff all the time. Look at my visitor's guide, right? I have a visitor's guide. People like it now, and maybe they liked it before. I don't know, I wasn't here before, but it's sort of tailored to um your independent traveler. I don't print that many of them, somewhere around 15 to 20,000. And and I really I'm trying to build a guide where if you come to this valley for three days, five days, two weeks, a month, you get to feel like you you know the place. You get to unplug from the rest of the world, you're learning how to be in the Chilclap Valley. Um, I could not produce that for Skagway. I need to produce a hundred thousand of a guide for Skagway's cruise ship tourists. Like the ways of making money on your visitor's guide are totally different between our two towns.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:54

Is there is there is there a way to develop an app to do the same thing?

SPEAKER_05 1:34:58

You'd think, but I invite you to remember that we have one cell phone tower in this town, and when a cruise ship lands here, everyone's phones slow down. And so if I give you an app to do something with the visitor's guide here, how are you gonna be certain that's gonna work for people when it needs to work for people here? We are a low bandwidth community. True. Like it, I I know that there's some visitor's guide. And it's either there's some visitor's guide rolling through here telling people about an app, and I'm just like, sure, an app would be cool if it worked. And if anybody who was driving here in an RV is the type of person to pick up their phone and download an app when they're going to a place.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:38

Well, and the the reason I'm asking that is I get people all the time that's like, Doug, you should do this. You should do this. And it's like, well, I've thought about that, but here's the six reasons why it won't. And so that's that's why I was asking that is what are the reasons not to? And it could have just been that's prohibitively expensive, but you're right, that and the and the ideas of putting more cell towers, you've reported on how well that's going. So I don't think we're gonna have I don't think that's gonna be solved anytime soon.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:06

Also, I'm not convinced that's what people want. I don't think people are driving all the way to Haynes, America, to stare at their phones. I think a lot of people end up here because they they have this idea of Alaska, they want to experience Alaska, they want to be Alaskans and they want to unplug. And do you want any people come here in the summer and like buy my paper for the summer and then they leave? Like they they sit down and they read a paper, like there's they're trying to unplug.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:30

And I, you know, that's that's one thing I miss from being in Seattle is getting the Seattle Times and just sitting and going going through and going through the whole section. I mean, it I there's times I didn't I didn't read it all every day. But look at the headlines and figure out what stories that I wanted to read, but just I do it on my phone now, but it was there's something really that deep visceral feeling of a newspaper unfolding the whole thing, trying to figure out how you're gonna fold it so you can hold it and read it without it falling apart and everything. But yeah, no, I just I just love that idea of reading the newspaper.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:07

And you absorb information better in a newspaper than you do on your phone. Like it and it encourages deeper thought. And that's what I want to do.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:16

Is there studies based on that?

SPEAKER_05 1:37:17

Absolutely. And also the medium with which we consume things totally changes our ability to engage with it in in deeply at any level. You think that like when you're scrolling through Instagram?

SPEAKER_01 1:37:31

Well, I'm not talking about scrolling through Instagram, I'm talking about reading a news article on a screen.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:34

Oh, you retain significantly less. I remember when the Kindle first became a thing, writing a paper about this, that um god, you you retain something like 40% of what you read on a Kindle, and that's a great screen to be reading on. I don't know if that has changed as people have become more digitally like native and grow up with it, but for our generation, we certainly retain this, reading this better than we do scrolling.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:00

I love my Kindle.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:02

Yeah, I haven't used it for a few years.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:04

The main reason I when I think my uh my family got me a Kindle for Christmas when they first came out, and the main reason is because I didn't I I loved it is because I was running out of space for all my books. And when I would travel, I would usually have three or four books with me. But in your backpack, you just have the Kindle, and it makes it a lot easier to just have one Kindle instead of three or four books.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:26

I use my Kindle for reading things that I don't necessarily need to retain for the long haul. Like a lot of PDFs and people's thesis, and if I'm working on a story about something, I use my Kindle for that. And then anything that I want to like really engage with really deeply, like I reread the Federalist papers every year, and I will never read them on my Kindle. I have that book in my hands, I'm holding it, I'm underlining it, I'm thinking about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:47

Like you read the Federalist papers every year.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:51

Yes. What brought that about? What how long have you been doing that?

SPEAKER_05 1:38:54

Uh my grandfather, um, I think my grandfather started the habit, and then um you know, I wasn't super interested in American history except Well, that's what I was wondering, because earlier you said you're like I wasn't super interested in American history except the founding of American history. It is, but it's the philosophical founding, right? It's not the it's the ideals behind what we sort of learned that we were trying to do, and I I am a sucker for philosophy. And so I started reading it with my grandfather, and we would go back and forth with it, and it's just like a habit that I've kept up. Um and I usually do it in the spring, it's usually in February. It's a little bit harder this year because we started this book club, the bookstore and the newspaper did, so I'm trying to get through those, but yeah, I mean, but those are meant, those essays are meant to be. You you think that if they were texting each other about what the commerce clause should be, they would have gotten even remotely close to what they Well, even anybody writing today is not writing at the same level. I would argue to you that it's not because they don't have the capacity, it's because they're not spending enough time. You're not spending enough time doing it. The ideas to really deeply.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:04

You used to think deeply into ideas and everything, and now everything has to be so quick. But yeah, no, just the the forethought and everything at that period of time was going back and reading first hand notes and stuff, is it's very impressive.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:19

Even with I I go back, that was one of the favorite things um for me is when you're reading about the Lincoln Douglas debates. Like three hours long, these guys are getting up there and talking. And you got these huge crowds. First of all, I'm like, how does anybody hear them? I mean, you got the people in front, are they whispering to the people behind them? And one of those people in the back, they're like, I what was that? It says we shouldn't have slaves. Purple monkey dishwasher here. But then just talk for an hour, and then the other one gets like an hour to speak. And it's crazy to me to think that that was and now you got it, everything's based on like 30-second sound bites.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:01

It's crazy to me to think that we have the capacity for that, and people are still on their phones thinking they're solving world problems with minute-long videos. And it and I think about that all the time. You were asking me about things that I want to do with the paper, and pretty often I can look right at something and think that might make me some money. But is it the kind of journalism that I want to do? Am I gonna be putting into the community the things that I want to do? Am I gonna be contributing to the community conversation, the things that I want to be contributing to community conversation? And I you're not gonna find me on Facebook, you're not gonna find me on TikTok. You'll occasionally see me posting information on Facebook, but I pulled the CVN off of Facebook last year because that platform is the an antithetical to local news. It stripmined us of money, it took away all of our potential for making digital advertising revenue. So already I'm feeding content into a beast that's stealing from me. And it's a platform designed to fill you with outrage, and that's what keeps you in it. And so the idea of taking local news in this town and putting it on that platform felt so irresponsible. This is not what I'm here for, this is not what I'm trying to do. Um, and it it's you just won't find us doing short form video in those places. Not that we couldn't, not that we wouldn't make money in that way, just that with the limited amount of resources that I have and what I'm trying to do in the world, that's not it for me. And I think I think that's the problem with a lot of journalism for me. That's the problem with a lot of journalism. I I'm calling them news products, just places that you can find journalism now is that there's been this real prioritization of things that make you money. And man, I I do need to make some money. And it's not that I think that that's not important, it's just that when you prioritize a profit mandate over everything else, the social responsibility that I feel like I have suffers. At some scale, it's gonna suffer.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:11

And that was one of the one of the things I took from my interview with Joe Hamilton with Vortex when he was talking about they didn't if if you treat your customers right, if you have a good product, you treat your customers right, the profits are gonna follow. If you put profit as your only metric that that's what we're going for, you're usually not gonna have a very long-lasting business. But if you put the other ideals forward first and make those your core mission, the profits generally follow.

SPEAKER_05 1:43:41

Yeah, spoken by somebody who's not printing their news on dead trees. Well, because we're facing headwinds in two ways.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:48

Yes, yes, you are. You've got to you've got a little, but I I will say that the the two things that I noticed recently from the CVN that I was a I've I was like, oh, that's new, was the book club, starting a book club, so you're engaging people in a different manner, and then also sponsoring the viewing party, uh, encouraging people to go down for the free ride.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:08

That was something that I haven't seen out of the newspaper ever.

SPEAKER_05 1:44:12

And so live events are something that a lot of community news outlets are doing all over the country that they're seeing a lot of um of success at. And I it's not immediately clear to me how one makes money from a book club or by sponsoring a live event, but it is how I re-engage with the community and get them in a space where we can talk to each other about things and I think sort of crucially get people thinking about the CVN as your community newspaper. Like, I'm not some people here look at me and they see the things they hate about the news outlet that they hate or the national news that they hate. I say I'm a journalist and they just go, I don't talk to journalists, and I'm like, whoa, I don't know what you're picturing right now, but my office is above Main Street, and I and I'm just trying to carry on a tradition of something that's been happening for 60 years. And I think the way that you reconnect with people is by, hey, come read a book with me and I'll tell you my thoughts on it, or let's go watch these snowboarders.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:13

Like there's there's there's a lot of aspects of business that you do to touch people to connect with them in a way that are never going to make you any money.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:25

And the hard part is when you're not making any money to figure out a way to do those without losing more money. Yeah. It's but it it's it's a it's a it's an important part of that is how can you engage in the reader, the people that aren't buying the paper right now, people that aren't advertising, how do you engage with those people to make them feel like you're on their side or whatever, that this is this is a business worth supporting.

SPEAKER_05 1:45:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:53

And that you you remove some of that animosity. And I have no idea if the book club and the free ride is gonna change anybody's opinion, but sure. It's a it's a start, it's a change of doing something different.

SPEAKER_05 1:46:05

It is, and I also think the conversation that I'm continually trying to have with people is that a lot of people do support this paper. We have better market penetration in the Chilcat Valley. One of the reasons that I agreed to buy this paper is that the market penetration here, the volume of people buying a paper in this town, um, is really high when compared to the other papers in the state. My newsletter that I just started sending out has three times the open rate and the click-through rate that most people get on newsletters. Like the engagement with local news here is just people here are really, really, really interested. Um, the problem is not that people are not interested. And I'm really lucky that that's what I'm contending with because in other communities, other publishers that I'm working with, people have turned completely away from the paper. They are not, it is irrelevant to their daily lives, they do not care. Haynes cares so much, and they are mad when it's not working the way they want it to. The problem is that the business model foundationally does not work anymore. Um, it used to be that if you were a business owner in this town and maybe you bought a subscription to the paper, which is$56.97 for a local subscription, and you bought a couple of ads for the year, you could be reasonably assured that that was gonna keep the paper afloat. And my printing costs have gone up, you know, 30% two years running, and the like the cost of doing business is going up higher than the ability of the thing to make money. And I suspect that what we're gonna find is that it does not, it has never worked for people to just subscribe to a news outlet and you make enough money on that. We've never that's never been our bread and butter. It's been part of a you know stool that supports the thing. The print advertising has always been the thing that pays for the paper and that's going away and it's not gonna come back. And I think my responsibility is to take a community of people who already really want a local news outlet and help them understand that their support has to come in a different way. That if you want a news outlet, you have to pay for it, and it's not enough to occasionally buy a$60 ad or whatever. Like maybe I don't know, maybe you support it the way you do the public radio station, or maybe I have a donor program or something. I've been thinking a lot about what something like that would look like. Um it's not that people here don't like or want a local news outlet, it's just that it it the the world has changed and I gotta make money differently now.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:33

Do you charge for your newsletter?

SPEAKER_05 1:48:36

Not yet. No, I could. There's some places in the country that charge for newsletters. I've been thinking about what a newsletter product that I could charge for would look like. More likely I'm I um I'm gonna sell advertising to that newsletter in that newsletter because that's attractive to a lot of advertisers, is like you basically are putting a digital newsletter on somebody's front porch. Like we're reaching back out to them. So that's a that's a very attractive advertising spot. I'm struggling with that.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:06

So one of the things I've noticed in a couple of newsletters that I get, they've got um, and it's a to get their writing, it's a subscription to get the writing, but then at the bottom of each new each email that I get, there's like this tip jar thing. And so you can put that on there. So if people want to give more, they can. I have no idea if the people that are doing that, I don't know if they can't.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:31

They're making any money off of that.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:32

I don't know if they're making any money off of that, but that's just another idea that I've seen out there that uh you might try that without charging people for it, they have the people that value it and want to do that, it might be some additional revenue for you.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:48

And you can't read any of the stories in the newsletter if you're not a subscriber. You click through, it takes you to the website. Yep, and you've got to be a subscriber if you want to read those stories. So I am that's kind of a product for my already Paying customers. There's got to be something else in there that makes money. And I'll I'll figure it out. First, I wanted to figure out if I could put a newsletter out every week. Right now I'm trying to figure out if I could put a newsletter out that has like a an image in it that's it keeps condensing itself in a way that it shouldn't. So, you know, it's the solving the technical problem and writing the news for the newsletter and then piecing the newsletter together and then sending the newsletter out and then selling the ads for the newsletter and then asking people if they understand how the newsletter works, and then you know it's it's a step in there to make money on it too.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:33

I have some other ideas for you too, but we'll talk about those off. We'll talk about those when we're done recording.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:38

Yeah.

Printing Bills And A Wild Supply Chain

SPEAKER_01 1:50:38

And then you can tell me how stupid I am for thinking of those, but or maybe one of them might be something you can work. But yeah, got a couple others. So where with with these challenges, do you look that this is gonna be like you have to figure this out in five years, three years, ten years? What kind of what kind of leadway do you have before? Um based on your c based on our conversation here. I'm like, is the CVN gonna be running at the end of the year?

SPEAKER_05 1:51:06

Yeah, yeah, I think so. The biggest question that I have, and you know, I I put a call out in a couple of different ways earlier this year looking for people to join a community board for me because one of the things that's gonna determine how the CVN is here for people is how people here want it to be. And I didn't get a lot of nibbles on that, and I'm still trying to figure out the best way to piece a community board together because I think that will be the sole determin, not sole determining, but the largest determining factor for me for how to move forward. I thought that I was gonna have five to seven years before I had to start talking to people about getting rid of a print product. I don't. I have maybe three because the the print product is just it is it is my single largest bill. It takes the longest to get here. It's taking the most energy for me to create, and it's not paying for itself. And I am not a tier one person or a person who's independently wealthy. So um I have I have a much smaller lead time on that than I thought I did. Um so I've shifted a little bit. One of the reasons that I started putting a newsletter out is because it solves some tech problems that some of the older parts of my audience were having with accessing my news online. So if you click on a story in the newsletter, it just signs you in on the website. So no longer are people not able to access the news. I'm trying to help people build a news habit differently because I think the conversation I'm gonna have to come back to the community myth with next year is do you wanna buy monthly? Do you want a monthly? Because I cannot do a weekly anymore. I absent someone in this town sitting down and giving me a lot of money to sponsor continuing to print weekly, it just can't happen. Um my print costs are gonna go up again.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:52

So, but if you went to digital only, you could still but then I mean you could. But then where are you getting your money? You could pretty much yeah, trying to figure out how to get the money off of that.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:01

But if I went, I mean, digital only would solve a lot of my problems in terms of like the speed with which I can get news out. Um, the you know, I I'm a lot more comfortable in a digital environment and creating in a digital environment and relearning how to make a newspaper has been a real journey, and I know that everyone has noticed like all of the ways that sometimes that print product looks a little funny. Um and and it's hard because I, you know, a lot of the people that I work with in this nonprofit, Larry personally, who I mentioned earlier, who's the publisher of The Wrangle Sentinel, that paper is stunning. It is pristine. It is a great, entertaining newspaper. It's got like puzzles in it, and like the senior center menu, and what are the high school kids eating, and high school sports. I mean, he makes an amazing newspaper. I don't I'm running two newsrooms now. I'm running a website and I'm running a newspaper, and it would be easier to be able to focus on one.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:58

But I really worry that so does he have all that in the print version, or is he just doing that? Okay, so he does he have anything online?

SPEAKER_05 1:54:04

He just redesigned his website, and his website's a lot better, but it's still missing some things that I think impact readability online. But he's getting that right, he's pivoting too. He has a newsletter now. Um, his newsletter is completely different than mine. His newsletter comes out the day before his newspaper comes out, and it has little snippets and says, if you want to read this full story, go buy the newspaper. I would never have considered trying to drive my digital audience back to my paper.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:30

Back to your paper?

SPEAKER_05 1:54:31

The gnome nugget is also doing that. I'm not convinced, but you know, well, it's a model and they're working on it.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:38

Do they have stats to say that this is working?

SPEAKER_05 1:54:40

No. But they might in a couple months.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:43

And we'll see. Um so yeah, so I think that's a conversation that I'm gonna have to have with people. I think people love having a printed product, and I think that a lot of people, I think I'll lose a lot of people when I walk away from a printed product who just don't have the capacity to go to digital, and I hate that. I don't want to do that in this town. Um, but something has to shift. I'm paying like almost four grand a month to get a newspaper here. I'm not pulling that in in revenue from a newspaper, it's just not happening. So that's a conversation that's gonna have to happen sooner.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:16

Is that shipping and printing?

SPEAKER_05 1:55:18

That's just printing.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:20

That's just printing.

SPEAKER_05 1:55:21

Shipping is more, and that's if I get it, I get it. My supply chain is so I am very interested in the part of this job that is learning how to supply chain because I'd never considered it before. But I get printed in Petersburg right now. Petersburg puts it on an Alaska Airlines jet which flies it to Juneau. Then I pay a courier to get from Alaska Airlines to Alaska Seaplanes because Alaska Airlines and Alaska Seaplanes will not talk to each other in trade boxes and newspapers. They won't do it. We were spending more staff time every week calling and being like, Are they there yet? Did you send them? Are they there yet? Did you send them? And then I just went, I'll pay$50 to have a courier every week go thanks and go 200 feet and drop it off at Alaska Seaplanes. And then Seaplanes brings it up and they can. Um, that part of my supply chain is so absurd. And some weeks it's like, hey, can anybody put these on the ferry? Sometimes, you know, this week we got our papers. Um, Mike Ward flew them when his um is it sunrise air um that sometimes flies his groceries in for him or something from his one of his other stores. Anyway, sometimes they slip the papers onto their plane. So Mike Ward drove by in his van and dropped my newspapers off and then went and did something else. So the supply chain is absurd uh and sort of charming.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:40

Have you thought about getting them out of White Horse?

SPEAKER_05 1:56:42

I had, but um the printer in Whitehorse um was at the Arctic Star, which was that 150-year-old paper there that shut down.

SPEAKER_01 1:56:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:56:50

And that Black Press Media owns the paper in White Horse now, and they're printing it in another part of the country. Okay. So um I so I can't. I would have, I would have loved to have done that. I had a friend that used to do that in Skagway and she had to drive up and pick the papers up every week. Oh, give me a reason to drive to White Horse every week.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:06

Yeah, because I think it was when the Eagle Eye was here. Yeah. They got theirs in White Horse and they drive up and pick it up and bring it back. That's how Skagway did it for a long time. That's why I thought of that. And and it's crazy to me that so the Juno Empire, you can't get it printed in Juneau?

SPEAKER_05 1:57:19

Mm-mm. No, they off-shifted that a while ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:22

Really?

SPEAKER_05 1:57:22

Mm-hmm. They're getting printed in um Washington State, which I thought about, except that it doesn't solve my problem. I would still be getting them. Maybe I'd get them on the Alaska Airlines jet faster, but they would still land in Juneau and then be at the mercy of seaplanes.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:37

So you're telling me that the transportation between Juneau and Haynes is a problem?

SPEAKER_05 1:57:42

Isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_01 1:57:43

Breaking news. This is so crazy.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:45

Like five months here trying to map out if it would be better for the paper in the long run for me to scrounge up some money somewhere to get like a four-color, like a not a full-size press, but like a small four-color printing press in Haynes. Um, I'm not wholly unconvinced that that's a bad idea. But I I'm also not convinced that spending money on something that prints on paper is the best for the longevity of the paper. But you could, you know, for instance, the Daily Um Sitka Sentinel has a press, a print shop attached to the paper, which the CVN used to have before the building the fort burned down, and they would generate revenue by doing print jobs for other places. Um, and if I was assured that that was something that could happen here, I would definitely consider. I think I could go get the 40 to 60 grand that I would need to buy a four-color press and just print it here locally. And then you wouldn't get it on newsprint, but you would get a printed product that was made here. Um so that's a route that I had considered, but I'd need a new building and I'd need somebody to help me, you know, get the money for that. And that's those are the questions that I want to put in front of a community board.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:51

Um, is people what other kind of things would you be able to print off of that?

SPEAKER_05 1:58:56

I mean, what they do at the Daily Sica Sentinel is it's pamphlets and flyers and and you know, just all sorts of I mean, really anything that you can print on paper, you can print on a four-color press. Um and then you have to decide how much you want to lean into being a print shop because a lot of them end up getting, you know, collators and things they can mail for you, and this will label it for you. And it is a it is a revenue idea, it's just it requires a lot of capital up front, and I don't know that Haynes needs a print shop. Yeah. Maybe 40 years ago, but now, yeah, I don't know. I'm not convinced.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:32

It's a hard one to figure out.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:34

It's fun. I am enjoying trying to figure it out. Uh and it's and I'm so lucky I'm doing that in a town that is so engaged because like I said earlier, like some of the publishers I'm working with are in towns that have a lot of apathy in their news audience. And you can accuse Hansians of a lot of things, but like apathy. Apathy's not one of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:55

Nope, that's not at the top of the list. So do you is there a point in your mind that you're just like, man, if it gets to this spot, I'm I'm packing up and doing something else. Do you do you think it's gonna have value for you to resell the paper?

Print Versus Digital Future Decisions

SPEAKER_05 2:00:13

Like well, that's what I'm I'm sort of in two places here with this. Um my original plan was I wasn't sure that I wanted to stay here and you know be a reporter for the long haul. Um, I mean, I I think I want to live here, but I wasn't sure that I would want to continue working on the editorial side of the paper. So my original plan was to take five years, stabilize it, find one, maybe two other revenue sources so that it would have that mix of revenue, um, and then turn it into kind of what Kyle did with Lex is like an editor training ground. There's no other place that you can go in Alaska, and there's very few of them in the country where a person who is a good reporter, getting a little bit older, maybe wants to try supervising, wants to learn to be an editor, can get the tra the opportunity to do that without just like jumping in and being an editor, maybe at their news outlet if something opens. And so my thought was like, okay, I'll take this paper, I'll do what I can to stabilize it, put my money where my mouth is, and then be the person who runs the business side, but give people that opportunity, mentor people through being an editor and being a reporter. I'm very good at that. I'm a good editor, I'm a good leader, I'm happy to like teach people how to do what I do. Um, and then, you know, my dream was to learn how to do that here and then hop to some of the other papers in the chain and do the same thing in their communities. Like, you know, what do we have to do to stabilize your revenue? How can we get this ship right and then move on to the next one? Because I very firmly believe that if we lose all of the local newspapers that we have in Alaska, our communities are going to be much poorer for it and we're gonna suffer in the long run. Newspapers are often the backbone of the news ecosystem in a place. And people will tell you, people who work in public radio will tell you that they don't know where they would be without the local newspaper because public radio serves a very specific function, but it does not serve the paper of record function. They do not do deep dives into things that newspapers do. In fact, they often rely on papers to tell those stories and then they make broadcast versions of them. So um, I was really struck when I went to Sitka. I was originally considering purchasing the Daily Sitka Sentinel because Thad and Sandy have been running that place for God, since '66 when they bought it. They're ready to retire. And at KCAW, the public radio station, there, they said, Well, we hope you buy it, or we hope somebody does, because we don't know what we're gonna do about our morning newscast if the newspaper goes away. Like these these newspapers, these like local newspapers are foundational to a news ecosystem. And then you add the broadcast on top of it, and then your individual, you know, media producers, you're one of them. I was telling you, that's the ecosystem I was talking about when we had that interview before. Um, and they really rely on usually what the newspaper is doing to continue feeding that ecosystem up. Um, so I that had been one of my original plans, and I don't know that I'm on track to do that in five years, but I'm hopeful.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:23

And what about having them pay you to teach them that?

SPEAKER_05 2:03:27

Yeah, I mean that's part of it. At some point I have to make some money, and and I get that.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:32

Light and Bennett used to uh the his pilots would pay him at the spring, and sometimes they would make money at the end of the year, sometimes they wouldn't. But the biggest thing for them was they need to get their hours to get to the next level. Yeah, and he could get them ours, and he could get them training, and the training that he was given them was thought of very highly by other airlines, and so it's like it's kind of like talking to journalism school at whatever university. It's like, hey, if you want to have your kid, if your students want an internship in editing or whatever, send them here. This is the cost it's gonna be per student. We can take one for six months, eighteen months, whatever the time frame is, set up that program and then they pay you to do it.

SPEAKER_05 2:04:09

Yeah, I mean that's the goal. I had to get paid at some point, and I lost my health insurance this year. So that would be the other thing that currents me off the track if I get really injured doing something stupid this year. You know, I'm out. Like rolling a Jeep. No. Yeah, yep. Um, but you know, most newspapers are operating with that sort of damoclease over their heads. Um, it's one person keeping the whole thing afloat, and if and if they go, the newspaper goes. So it's not like I'm in a position that's atypical, it's just uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_01 2:04:46

Oh, it's hard. Yeah. It's extremely hard. You got an uphill battle.

SPEAKER_05 2:04:52

Yeah, but I mean how many people get to do the thing that they have the real passion about in life, you know? Like I th I think about that all the time. I think about how there are some days that I've woken up or I've gone to bed feeling like a total failure, or maybe just the news product wasn't what I wanted it to be, or the newspapers, it's more often these days, it's that I didn't have the time to write the story that I wanted to write, and so I settled for one. And um man, like invariably I wake up and I'm just like, I don't know, I get to get up every day and like wander around this town and be like, what are you doing? Tell me about it. I'm so nosy. And so I get I get to like do this thing that I'm personally suited for, I get to do the thing that I'm passionate about, I get to feel like my work means something. I get I get to feel like like like I'm doing something for the community. And people can argue all day about whether they believe that's true or not, but I get to feel like I believe very firmly in the power of journalism and what it can do for a community, and I get to be part of that. And I think there's a lot of people who have jobs out there that they maybe picked for the money or they got sort of they ended up in who don't get to feel that kind of passion and and get to stoke that kind of passion. And so I you know, I ultimately feel like what I'm doing is a net win.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:25

But at the end of the day, you do have to pay your bills.

SPEAKER_05 2:06:28

Maybe somebody will come along who has a lot of money and marry me, and then and then problem solved. Yeah. I mean, they used to say when I was in journalism school at Iowa State, it's a journalism, it's uh you know, mass communication program, so there's also advertising and marketing. And they used to say that like the advertising kids all needed to like marry a print kid so that we all made money. So they all make money. Like the ad kids and the marketing kids have a duty to marry a print kid.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:54

Marry a kid.

SPEAKER_05 2:06:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:56

I remember it was back at uh when I was in high school and shortly after that when the retirement system was much different and everything, that the goal for a lot of the commercial fishermen was to try and marry a teacher. Because then you got your healthcare paid for, you had all these things. But yeah, the the the goal for the commercial fishermen, at least the ones that I was talking to, is like, man, if you could just marry a teacher, your life is some trend and roses. Sam might disagree with it. Sam's like, yeah, it stands up. That's a good plan.

SPEAKER_05 2:07:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:27

But yeah.

Why People Avoid Journalists Now

SPEAKER_05 2:07:28

You know, I have a question for you.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:30

I I think Doug has questions. I know I'll let I'll let it slide.

SPEAKER_05 2:07:35

I you've been here for so much longer, and when you and I talked about this podcast, um you seem pretty well plugged into some of the people in this community that I have found to be the most media reluctant uh or media shy or CV and side shy, but just generally media shy. And that has been the thing that I've noticed the most over the course of my career. I mean, I've been a journalist for, you know, 20 years now, maybe a professional journalist for seven 15 to 17 years, and people have gotten so mistrusting of even like the the the word journalism or the word journalist, and I'm curious why you think that is, and and and which side you fall on.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:24

Both.

SPEAKER_05 2:08:25

Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:08:30

I think with with a lot of people Haynes specific. The ones that are reluctant to talk are ones that have been burned in the past by past editors, journalists, whatever. That you get burned a couple times on the way that you're portrayed or whatever, and you're like, screw it, everybody's the same, don't want to talk to them, never gonna deal with it again. And uh based on some stories on myself and my family that were incorrect that were reported over the years, and uh and it was generally a rush to get a story out rather than why didn't you call? Oh, didn't have enough time. Then why'd you print it? Um I can I can understand that part of it. Um and then seeing stories that there's a you can see the person that's writing it is trying to push a certain narrative. And it and this Kyle and I used to talk about some of this stuff all the time. And uh he'd a sometimes I'd call him up and I'm like, Kyle, what the hell? This paper. He goes, well, you know, this is this is this is how it reads to me. And he's like, Oh, that's not how I took that. And I was like, Yeah, that's I got a lot of friends that are pissed off about that because that's how they oh and then he'd write something else, and then somebody on the other side was like, call him, he'd be like, Yeah, I just gotta call. Sometimes it'd be the same one. I'd be arguing about the perspective. And he's like, Yeah, I just got somebody from the other side chewing me up because they hated it. I was like, Oh, it must have been a good article.

unknown 2:10:13

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:10:14

So but I I I think a lot of the the things with Haynes is we're so people that live here for the long term are passionate about a lot of things. They're passionate about Haynes. And they're we all have a different idea of what we want Haynes to look like. And the newspaper is kind of that article of record of what's happening. And so if they see things in there that they disagree with, whether it's consciously or subconsciously, it's like, well, what the hell? That's not the Hanes that I know. And so there's a lack of trust on that.

SPEAKER_05 2:10:50

But early on in my career, what would happen is people would call and they would say, That's not the quad cities that I know, that's not the you know, Kenai that I know. You've missed this thing. Here is what you missed. And then I would get an opportunity as a reporter who was new to a place, or maybe didn't know what I didn't know, or God, maybe even had some kind of bias that I didn't even understand that I had, and then someone says something to me, and I realize, oh I I could I I should have thought about the that, you know, people used to engage. It's it's I I don't think that what has changed is the quality of journalism because we have always been fumbling our way towards some picture of the place that we're in that maybe isn't exactly right per edition, but if you read it over the long haul, you're probably gonna get some idea of what this place is. And something happened really in the last 10 years, I can say, and more excruciatingly in the last five, where people think that you've gotten it wrong for whatever reason. They do not want to engage with you about what you've Gotten wrong, and then they're mad when their perspective never gets represented in the pages. And I tell people all the time, like, I could I don't know what I don't know, and if I've messed something up, or if I if something is a correctable offense, like if I if I misquoted you, and instead you just walk around carrying this coal with you where you have been misquoted and I never get the chance to rectify it. Now we're both worse off, and you still have a paper getting printed, and other people are learning m maybe an untruth about a thing or a partial truth about a thing. Something happened in the last 10 years where people no longer feel like it's fixable or they've decided it's not fixable. And I'm surprised to see that in this place.

SPEAKER_01 2:12:44

I don't I don't think it's all based on local. I don't think it's all I don't think it's all for I don't think it's all the fault of the CVN. Sure. Ike when you see I I would say the biggest shift has been in the last six years. Yeah, we're six-year anniversary of what a day or two ago that everything shut down for COVID. And a lot of the way things were portrayed during that first year or year and a half after everything was shut down was so politicized by a lot of different news groups that this is I mean, places you're seeing reporters, a mostly peaceful riot, and you got all these flames of these buildings and fire uh engulfed in flame behind them. It's like wait, what? And then being told that you're wrong, if you're like, no, no, no, that doesn't look like it was exactly peaceful. And so you it wasn't a Haynes thing, but I I think you see this gaslighting from different media groups on a national level. And people are like, well, when you point out a mistake, they don't want to really say anything, they've got their narrative, and you can go on the masking vaccines, there's a ton of things that this is the right thing, and it doesn't matter if you have the same pedigree as this person, if you disagree with what we're saying, we're gonna just absolutely crucify you. And people are like, okay, well, can't trust them, can't trust them, can't trust them.

SPEAKER_05 2:14:13

And that trickles down to journalists are gonna crucify you, or social media is gonna crucify you for questioning it.

SPEAKER_01 2:14:18

No, the people the the people, because it was I I can't remember how many times I'd see I for me, I was on the outside looking in during COVID, you know, I was sitting here in the sports shop trying to figure everything out, and I I distinctly remember one of the first things that they were talking to us about is the best thing you can do right now until we figure this out is work on your immune system. You should be outside, exercising, eating healthy, making sure you got your vitamins, do what you can to boost your natural immune system. And it wasn't a month or two, and everything became nope, everybody's gotta shut down, lock up, don't go outside to the park, you might crown or somebody, and that all went away, and we're waiting for a vaccine. And I remember when the vaccine came and we were having a meeting about it, because at that time I'd become mayor and they asked me if I was gonna get it. And I said, not right away, I'm not no. And like, what what do you why wouldn't you? I said, Well, I've I've had medication prescribed to me in the past that had very severe um side effects. And I said, That's medication that's been a long long time. I don't something new, I'm not taking it until we got a better idea. And they're like, oh no, no, no, this you can trust us, and I asked that question. I said, What happened to the let's work on healthy diets, let's work on exercise, let's work on improving our national immune system, natural immune system. Well, people in the mutiny say, well, that would have solved a lot of health problems. Like, yeah, exactly. You guys gave up on it, on something, and I blame, I don't blame journalists this, I blame the medical establishment that they gave up on something that people could do basically for free. In my view, they can argue this all they want for something that they could make a profit off of. They're gonna wait till there's a vaccine because they can make a profit off of the vaccine. And instead of having people invest in things that could do something for free, and I have I have friends in the medical community when I'd call them and I'd talk to them about that, and they're like, Doug, this has been going on for years. Instead of telling somebody, you know, you need to go out and walk half a mile a day or for 30 minutes a day, you need to start eating some more fruit and vegetables and put down the soda and the Oreos. But instead of saying that, they're like, here's a pill that'll help with that, because they can make money off of the pill. And the the thing that struck me on that is usually the people that are against big business were all in on the vaccine for the big business part. I'm like, wait a second, you guys are the ones that are always against big business, and like, yep, vaccine's the way to go on this vaccine's the way to go. And just that that twist on how that worked, I'm I'm still fascinated by it.

Pandemic Fear And Questioning Authority

SPEAKER_05 2:17:05

I think, I mean, there's a lot of things in there that you were just saying, but I think I think the pandemic was really scary for a lot of people. And also for me personally, as a journalist, I learned one of the most important and hardest lessons that I've ever learned as a journalist about how when you're scared, you know, you look for that voice of authority and you and you I don't think that I personally, especially in that first year of the pandemic, and I was living in Juneau and I had a partner who was immunocompromised, so I was spending a lot of time thinking about you. Remember those early days where it was like, God, should you like when you're outside, should you come inside and take the clothes off that you had on? Because maybe it's transmitting that way before you go in your house, and then you know, and and I was working in journalism, so I was seeing a lot of people, like I was, I think I was just sort of like obsessed with this, what I what I didn't know about this thing, and we didn't have a vaccine yet, and I was terrified of killing my partner, and and I think that I personally as a journalist really valued what the State Health Department and the Federal Health Department were trying to put out there as public health messaging, and um more than I valued people questioning the institution and what the institution was saying, and what that means for you when you're a journalist is that you sometimes leave out those questions, you you step right over them in the interest of telling this other story, and I I didn't really understand that that's what I was doing. I thought I was like doing my public service of like getting the public health messaging out there, and then I had this like knockdown drag out fight with my mom. Um, I think we were like on a Zoom or something, I don't even remember. What I remember of that fight is calling my mom a xenophobe and hanging up on her. And I had this like I had I was so certain that I was right. I was so certain that I was right. And I could not believe that my own mother was questioning this thing and like the origins of this virus or whatever. And then I also had this like little voice in the back of my head that was like, I don't know, that's like the smartest woman that you know. Like my mom is like responsible for a lot of my knowledge about things. She's the reason that I think I am a journalist now because of the way she raised me. Like, why is she being so crazy? I don't know. And but I but that little voice just kept going, kept going, kept going. And I I started with, okay, I don't know if I agree with her, but I know that I have to start with an apology, and then I'll reverse engineer what the rest of the equation looks like from there. Because like whatever she is, my mom is not a xenophobe. My mom is like one of the most open people that I know. So I started with the apology. I had to start with, I think maybe you're right about this thing. And I well, I don't think you were right, but I think that it was wrong of me to assume that your motivations here were this thing. And I think I think we may have been talking about the lab bleak theory, which like very early on was something that got picked up by a lot of um like extremists, I thought. And you know, it was just this thing where I just wholly discounted to even question what the the sort of official line was. And where I finally arrived after lots of research and reading about populations of people that were uh and the reporting of some people who were doing a lot of reporting and populations of people who were vaccine hesitant, was that um a lot, maybe not a lot, I don't know, some of us as journalists really stepped away from our responsibility to think for ourselves and question authority. It doesn't mean that I think anybody else was right or that I think that the lab leak theory is real or that I that I am anti-vax. It means that I have one job, and that job is to look what the look at what the haves are telling me and make sure that it's working as well for the haves, not have nots as it is for them. And I I sort of stepped away from that somehow during the pandemic, and I have no idea how that happened. I do think it was fear-based, but I think that when I started the equation with the Apology and reverse-engineered it from there and realized, man, what I'm not doing is saying, is that real? Which is my only job, right? That's my one job as a journalist is to like think for myself and question authority. Um it broke open a lot of things for me that I did not previously understand as internal biases that I had for a voice of authority, the most comforting voice of authority that there is, right? And that's one of the reasons that I feel so urgently now that um people who are distrustful of media have to lean into your local journalists and your regional journalists and and give them the information that they're missing. Because I very firmly feel that as soon as we stop engaging with local journalists and we stop engaging with each other is when communities start to fracture apart and you lose a very important local service that you have, which is somebody who's sitting in their office every day trying to figure out if the borough is doing what they're supposed to be doing, or if that policy is working the way it's supposed to be working, or are these questions about cell towers realistic? I don't know. Before I came here, I wasn't even engaging with 5G as maybe a threat, but a lot of people in this town are, and it's my job to question to raise those questions. And if I don't hear from people who have those questions and I don't even know to ask them, I think we're all poorer for that. Um but I also totally understand why some people disengaged during the pandemic and have yet to re-engage.

SPEAKER_01 2:23:19

Good. And so the one the one example I'll give you is is I I usually question just about everything. Sure. You know, if somebody tells me something. If the government's saying something, I'm like, okay, is that is that true? And so the the hard one for me was when you'd have everybody was like, we need to follow the science. Okay, but science evolves, and it seems like we're stuck in one place. And there was people with some really impressive pedigrees that were disagreeing with the official statement. And they were pretty much like backwater banned, you can't be on YouTube, you can't be anywhere. It was like Okay, now I distrust you even more if you have what I thought of you know, people with decades of experience in this subject that are at a well-known research hospital that are coming out with an alternative idea to this, that should be allowed into the public debate instead of just like shuttered. And it both uh Trump and Biden engaged in kind of shutting down voices, or at least their administrations, the people underneath them, engaged in shutting down alternative voices on that. Yeah. And that was the part for me that as soon as you start shutting down alternative voices, I distrust your voice that you're telling me even more than I might have to begin with.

SPEAKER_05 2:24:46

Yeah, but I mean that's I mean that's the federal government and social media, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:24:49

Like I'm not shutting down the Well, no, you're not, but I'm I'm just saying I I think seeing that in a lot of and again, this wasn't a local media thing. This was the national media sources, the social media networks, and people seeing that at that level, unfortunately for a lot of people, you're painted with that same brush because you're media.

SPEAKER_05 2:25:09

Because you're media. You might not think that what's happening on Twitter and what's happening on YouTube, if it has the media's logo on it, must be the media. Must be the media.

SPEAKER_01 2:25:17

And that's not always the case either.

SPEAKER_05 2:25:18

That's not, but but but what happens, I'm gonna come back to this point because it's the thing that's been driving me the most nuts, is that when people disengage with local journalism or regional journalism or even national journalism, when you disengage from it, often the only news source that you are information source that you end up with is the official source. And journalists are supposed to be the thing questioning that official source. And as you lose us, as you lose journalists, as you lose news outlets, you lose the person who's questioning that official source, and then the only source of information you have is the government, and that's terrifying. That is so terrifying to me that people are engaging with the propaganda that's coming out of the federal government at any level, as though it's somehow rooted in anything except an make an attempt to get the population on the side of whatever party is in power.

SPEAKER_01 2:26:15

And that goes back to our earlier conversation with the different networks that you'll have network A, that depending on the party uh that's in, if it's a Democrat, they're gonna do everything to make them look amazing. And you're gonna have network B that's gonna trash them at every any little misstep, they're gonna trash them. Yeah. And you switch that and you put the other party in, and they're both now one's just on the attack dog, and one's yeah, and so when people see that, it's like it's at I'm 100% for calling people in power to questions like, okay, what about this? What about this? But when that same person that's such a dogged person, the next person comes in, it's just nothing but softballs, and this person's doing the greatest job. It's like, okay, I have no trust for anything you say because you've got a partisan hand in the fight now.

SPEAKER_05 2:27:04

That's like the point at which, you know, I got actually my dad and I have been having this argument for like a year now because he'll complain about something that happens that he saw on the nightly news and he'll come at me about it. And I'm just like, okay, listen, first of all, I wish I was making as much money as the person that you watched feed you that line of crap last night. Yeah, and again, but I'm not again I'm not saying you're doing this, but that's what I that's where people lose the distrust in journalism. You have a personal responsibility as a news consumer to seek out a diverse source, diverse sources of information and news for yourself. And I have a personal responsibility as a journalist to give you as much as I can at reaching for objectivity as I can, but I cannot be responsible um for every bad opinion that you have about every terrible piece of information that you delivered and that was delivered to you via the TV. And and I think that I think that the predominant generation of news consumers, which is people our age and and older, um we got so we got so used to being able to tune into one source or two that now that that's not a thing that you can do anymore, we j we just we're trying to force all of our sources of journalism into being everything to us, and they just can't be. And and I I think that a lot of time journalists are getting a bad rap for doing something that's designed for a specific audience, and maybe you just aren't that target audience anymore. And and I don't know, I don't really know how to fix that. I just know that so often now I am looking people in the face and they are raging at me about something that they watched on TV, and I have to like hold up the front page of the CVN and be like, no, that this is and that's what I'm saying. It's not look at this hair.

SPEAKER_01 2:28:56

I'm not on TV. Like, chill out. I don't blame you for that, but you do get painted with that same brush because that's they see you as intellectually lazy.

SPEAKER_05 2:29:05

And every time I hear someone say the media, I think it's intellectually lazy. It is because it's a talking point that's designed to get you to walk away from journalism as though it's not something that can help you in your daily life. And I and we have so much data that shows what happens to small towns when news outlets go away. Your property taxes go up, your level of corruption goes up. We we know that without a local watchdog, local government and people who end up in power try to get away with what they can get away with. The whole air changes in the room of a public media when a journalist walks in. I go to meetings now, not because I think a story is gonna come out of the other end of it, but because I know that someone in there is about to do something absurd and I just want to be watching, and maybe they won't. And it and it changes it, and that is so valuable to communities that I really struggle with how to convince people that like what I do and what the CVN does can be a real service to this community, and sometimes it can be a real disservice. Sometimes I can write a story that someone comes into the office and is just like, why? Why did you do that? Here's the impact of that, and that's not my intended impact, and I get that, but like without what KHS and the CVN are doing, you're stuck with what the borough is telling you it's doing, you're stuck with whatever a corporation is telling you that they're doing, and you kind of got to piece it together and hope maybe someone posts in Haynes Chatters or Haynes Matters about the thing you're noticing is wrong in the world. We are all poorer for having less information, less vetted professional information in the world. And I I don't know, I just some of the people who are the most anti-media are also the people who are the most anti-government. And I just am like, hi, we're on the same side. If you don't like what's I mean, I'd bridge that gap with those people that um I always engage no matter what. And I've had people in this town cursing at me, I've had them yelling in my face, I've had people spit at my feet, I've had people Okay, not just me, other people, right? Not just you. Um and I I I always engage in good faith, even though sometimes I'm so offended that like a person can just be so casually disrespectful of me as a person, and uh particularly when I'm new here. It's like people I don't even know who have said pretty rude things to me about um, you know, maybe I'm working for a previous owner of the paper, or yeah, I get looped in an email thread sometimes where I'm just like, man, let's go have a burger and say that to my face. Like, or maybe go tell my dad. Like Do you think you're making progress? I do. I do think I'm making progress. Um, but I But I I don't think I'm making progress faster than people's trust is eroding. And I think that part of the reason that people's trust is eroding is because they are turning on their TVs or they're getting online and they're rotting their brains with with whatever echo chamber that they're currently in. And I think a lot of people, not maybe not a lot, I think some people have decided that they prefer to be in that environment where they're just hearing ideas that make them feel good about what their ideas are. Um, because it does feel good to be in an echo chamber.

SPEAKER_01 2:32:23

It's a dopamine hit. It is absolutely dopamine. Your thought process is proven to be correct, you're like, yep. Great. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

Local Power Matters More Than TV

SPEAKER_05 2:32:31

And pretty soon you're gonna, I knew it into the country fracturing apart of the seams, and we're gonna fight another civil war over it. And and I don't want us to get there. And I'm here because I believe that one of the ways that we keep that from happening is individual communities learning to reorient from the national conversation and focus on things you have actual control over changing. This is something, again, I will beat the drum about every day. Like, why are people turn tuning on their television, like turning on their televisions and watching national news every night? Not that national news isn't important, but when it comes to things that you have actual control over, what some senator said about another senator and if it was rude or racist or whatever, that is not something that you have any influence over. That belongs in your like things you're concerned about, maybe, but those same people will come to me and say, Did you see X and Y video of some part of this administration doing X thing and that's outrageous? And I'm just like, Did you go to the assembly meeting last night? Do you know what the planning commission's doing? Are you aware of what's happening in the local economy? Because all of those things are gonna change your daily life right now. And if that senator sucks, I I'm sorry, man, he's making money, he's gonna keep sucking no matter what. Like, I feel like people need to reorient back to making their communities healthy. And you know, one of the things that we learned in my grad school program was that that really started to happen as the economics of news changed and local newspapers started dying out, and regional newspapers started dying out, is that news consumers that used to have a lot of local news and then they maybe would expand to regional and then they would get a little bit of national, suddenly all that was available to them was national. And so they learned that that is the news that matters. But really, I I would argue that it it does not matter to your daily life what the Secretary of State is saying about X, Y, and Z, as much as it matters what your mayor is saying to the next town over, or what the state government is currently doing with healthcare spending, or what's happening at the state level with this, ooh, let's do all of this deregulation, and each individual department's got to axe 15% of their regulations in the next year, and no one is talking about what it looks like to have your statewide regulatory agencies just take a very broad brush and get rid of 15% of the permitting that you need to go through to get projects done here, or the environmental regulations that need to happen, or what goes on with your food, or how your health department is working. Like we're not engaging with those meaningfully at all, but I guarantee you a lot of people in this town could tell you why Christy Gnome doesn't work at DHS anymore. That's insane. That's insane. One of those things you have the ability to change, and one of those things is just really, really fun to write 150 words about and like who on the internet. Okay, I'm done. I got it out.

SPEAKER_01 2:35:49

All right, that's what we're here for. Just tell your side of this. So you're you're telling me that uh the you are the sole owner of the CVN? Because there there are people that think that our current mayor still owns a CVN and you're just working for it.

SPEAKER_05 2:36:04

Oh my god, if he did, it'd be really great if he would pay me. Like I no, no, the current mayor is not the current owner of the CVN, and I've got the business records to prove it. Um and hasn't been for some time. And I think, you know, and I further think that that's something that people should take up with the form with the mayor. Like, that's not read the paper. Look at what's in the paper. And if you engage with what's in the paper, you will see that that is the that's my labor of love every week, and there's no one else, like all of the faults that are in it, all of the good things that are in it, that's that's coming out of my brain. Um I wish that I had the ability to tap into some of the former owner, the several forner former owners' expertise, but it's just not really available to me. Although Bonnie Hedrick, who owned the paper for what, 18 years? Um, she does my copy editing every week. I have a couple of copy editors, but Bonnie is one of those first reads. And forever I am grateful to that woman for how many times she's opened a story in a Google Doc and will just leave me notes like, pretty sure that road doesn't exist. Who is this person? I know this person, this person, and this person. Did they have a kid I don't know about? Like, I mean, she is such a wealth of knowledge about talent. She knows AIDS. And whenever I'm trying to figure out if the business has done something in the past uh to that would make it more I mean, she was a very smart business person. And whenever I'm trying to figure out if anybody's ever done X, Y, and Z in the past to figure out how this paper is working, invariably I find Bonnie's handwritten notes in a file somewhere. And I I feel very um I don't know, I'm I'm kind of in awe of being able to follow in the legacy of someone who ran that paper for that long, shepherded it through a time when there was an opposing paper in this town, almost shut down when there was an opposing paper in this town, right? Like, I mean, she she really um did you know that she one of the reasons she got her first job at the paper is that she could, she was the only one of the only ones that could, she was the only one that could run the typesetting machine, which required that you be typing without actually being able to see what you were doing on the page. And now she's in Google Docs with me every week, leaving things in suggestion mode and checking and texting me to make sure that you know I've gotten the notes or whatever. I man, she makes me feel like the legacy of like female-centered journalism in this town is is is really strong. I I I tap into Bonnie all the time. She's not paying me either.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:37

Any former owners. You want to know my main main complaint with the paper? Yes, 100%. Is when it tells me the story is on page five, continues on page four and I go to page five that it's not there.

SPEAKER_04 2:38:49

It's because I've been in there at midnight and I forgot to change the jump.

SPEAKER_01 2:38:53

I've got to look it all over. I always find it, I always find it. But every once in a while, I'm like, well, uh Where is that? I know this is page five and it's not there. And so now I gotta do my scavenger hunt to find the rest of the story.

SPEAKER_05 2:39:07

There was an edition, I think it was last year, but it might have been in 2024, where um, you know, we had these little jump boxes at the top of the front page that tell you go see X, Y, and Z story here. And I had forgotten to change the page numbers on there and just left some question marks. But then there was a huge mix-up at the printers, and they had maybe a new press guide training or whatever, and he printed the pages in reverse and they didn't catch it. And so it was like, and it was like a 12-page paper, so it was like one, two, six, nine, three. Okay, and so when you it was like a work of art, you look at the front page and it's like this story is and then you open it up and it's like still another word. I remember pulling that paper paper out of the box and just being like, okay, well, all right. Everybody's gonna see this.

SPEAKER_01 2:40:02

So how does it when uh how how does that feel when all of your You're gonna have to answer that eventually. If it's spam, there we have to eventually spam, but um how does it feel like with your job when you screw up, everybody knows it? Everybody that reads a band when you make a mistake, everybody knows it.

SPEAKER_05 2:40:23

It's been that way the whole time. I mean, that's the practice of journalism is my mother used to um I mean that that's actually how I got into journalism in the first place was going into a newspaper office to complain about something that was on the front page, and uh it was at a student newspaper, but like the whole my mom my mom will sometimes send me these little notes and she gets the paper and she'll be like, it's not I use a semicolon. Is that the word you meant to use? Or like Nancy Nash comes in and copy edits in person for me every week. So I have, like I said, a couple of copy editors, and Nancy will just start flipping through the pages and laughing. And I always know when she starts laughing, laughing that I've just like goofed something up. And I remember one time she was like reading a correction that I had written out about misspelling someone's name, and I had misspelled the word misspelled. Misspelled. It's just all of journalism is the practice of just like throwing it out there and people going, and and readers, right? Like I'm I'm I'm writing, and people who love reading are reading it, so they're gonna find the errors. And no, I I don't know how to use a comma. I'm just putting them in where I breathe. I'm I'm I'm grammatically my grammar is based on vibes, and I am so lucky that I have so many copy editors, but they don't catch it every time. So anytime you open the paper and you're like, wow, she put a dash in that sentence, and then there's a comma, and then there's a colon. I don't think she knows what she's doing. I don't, I know I I'm a great journalist, but I'm not very good grammarian.

SPEAKER_01 2:41:59

Senior English class, Claudia Everly. Yep. I I would always turn, she's always frustrated. She's like, Doug, you need more punctuation in here. Like, yeah, whatever. And so I remember this one time I turned in this paper, this story or whatever that I'd written, and she comes back to the desk. She says, That's really good, but it needs some commas. And so I just like put some random commas in there and gave back. She's like, those are not the correct flexes for the commas. Like, they look good to me, Mrs. Everly. If you have another source for them, that would be great.

SPEAKER_05 2:42:30

In sheet music and in radio, you put commas where you breathe. And so that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_01 2:42:35

Yeah. And so I anything that I'm doing like that now, I like you. I have a couple people that I was like, hey, proofread this, make sure that this is take it from Doug language to the actual English language so other people can make sense of it.

SPEAKER_05 2:42:50

Yep. And and then I also I try to remind people like my degrees in photojournalism, I'm really a natural at radio. Writing is was third on the list. Third on the list. Um and I it's not that I dislike writing, it's just not when I think of a story, usually I'm thinking of what it's gonna look like, and then I'm thinking of what it's gonna sound like, and then the last thing I'm gonna do is write it. Um it is funny to have ended up at a newspaper. Um but again, we've been saying this whole time like journalism is imperfect. I'm that if I'm the rough draft of history, like it's gonna be kind of rough sometimes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:43:27

So it happens. Yeah. So what what what what have we missed in the story of Russia?

SPEAKER_05 2:43:33

Hmm. Oh my god, so much. There's so much that I do that has nothing to do with my career.

SPEAKER_01 2:43:39

Um what do you what do you want to know? I I don't know. We're this is your story we're telling. And this is I I've I've had a lot of people, I shouldn't say a lot, I've had some people that have enjoyed the longer format, and some people say that it needs to be an hour or less. And Ike, you and I had actually, when I was thinking of this, you we had talked timing and you're like, yeah, shorter probably better. Yeah. But in talking to a couple friends, one of them came up and I I really like their idea. They said, Doug, if you're shortening this for a certain period, you're basically censoring that person's story. And so let them talk as much as they want, because that's their story, and anything you cut out of it, you're you're telling them that you don't deem that part of their story important. And so Yeah, because we've we've got I mean, Sam's probably got to go home at some point, he's got to work tomorrow. Um but you don't have we don't have to get into every single story of your life, but for people in Haynes that might be hesitant to read the CVN, subscribe to the CVN, talk to you about that, are there any other anecdotes from your life that might help you connect with them or anything else you want to share to Yeah, I mean that make you a part of the community?

SPEAKER_05 2:44:56

One thing I've really struggled with here is like um it seems like because I run a newspaper, um people don't want me around when I'm not doing newspaper things. So I I don't actually have a very large friend group here. Um which in other places, it's not like that's never happened in other places. I had a took me two and a half years when I first got to the Kenai to really find a friend group, probably for the same reasons. Um because, you know, it's newspaper lady, and why would I want to invite her to my house party with something weird happens and it ends up in the paper?

SPEAKER_01 2:45:26

It ends up in the paper.

SPEAKER_05 2:45:27

Um but in other places, some of the hobbies that I have, I was able to connect with people about that. It wasn't really until this year when Nancy and I started running a madrigal choir that I I think I started to see a lot more people that I knew in passing who started to understand, like, no, I have these other passions for this thing. I'm uh you know, I'm really into music, I'm really into creating a choir out of nothing. In in Juneau, I ran this drop-in choir with um a friend there. I was a big part of the music scene in Juneau. I had a couple of bands and drop-in choirs and things.

SPEAKER_01 2:45:58

And so what is a mad madrigal choir? Did I pronounce that? Did I pronounce that? Okay.

SPEAKER_05 2:46:04

Um madrigals are um a predominantly like medieval style of music um that requires like it's usually no instruments, it's just vocal blending and harmony. And I I like to say that they're more fun for the people singing them than they are for the people listening to them because they're usually kind of like atypical harmonies, or they all kind of sound the same, or yeah, you know, all of them are follow-along.

SPEAKER_01 2:46:27

It's kind of similar similar to the Gregorian chants.

SPEAKER_05 2:46:29

Yeah, kind of, and and for a vocalist, the best part of a magical choir is that everybody has to figure out how to fit their voices together, they have to figure out how to blend, they have to figure out how to make chords, and you don't get the piano or the guitar or whatever other instrument to anchor you into where you're supposed to be. So if you slide out of tune, you better hope everybody else comes with you. Um, so it's sort of I'm out of tune all the time, so it's the but you know, when I was in Juneau, um, we ran this drop-in choir for a couple of years. The the pandemic kind of disrupted a lot of stuff, but we meet at the Alaskan, which is this dive bar in Juno, um, every Sunday. And whoever showed up showed up, and we just had like a collection of old time songs or whatever music we were working on, and I would teach people how to um f how to find their own voice if they didn't know how to do it, um, how to project, you know, how to the mechanics of singing, and then the whole point of that group was to teach people how to harmonize with each other. And um, what ended up happening was that we had the same, kind of almost the same group of people meeting for like a year, and then we realized, whoa, we have like a 12 to 15 song set because we've been practicing these songs for so long, and then we just made it into a band, and then we had a band that was sometimes eight people and sometimes eighteen people, and it was literally whoever just dropped into the Alaskan and learned a couple of things for rehearsals, and then we would just travel around and do these shows, and it was so fun, mostly because it's just like very carefully controlled chaos, but also because when people learn to sing together, it's just another way of talking to each other, and pretty often you thought you couldn't talk like that, or you thought maybe you shouldn't do it in front of other people, and then and then suddenly here you are. And this magical choir that we just did, um, that I that I did with Nancy, we did some practices at the um Chill Cat Center, and then we did a Northern Lights. Um man, I when I'm listening to music, especially music that I'm making or I'm making with other people, I can only hear the things that aren't right. Um something that's just happening in my brain, it's like, oh, the notes off, and we need to do this. And so sometimes it gives me this like not so great opinion of how good something is gonna sound, but it feels so good to sing, and it is so fun to perform with people that I was just like, let's just go stand on stage and see what happens. Um they sounded amazing, and I found out later that and the recording sounds really good, and that never happens. It it's usually you you feel like the song sounded really good, and then you listen to the recording later, and you're just like whoa, I hope no one ever listens to that again. I have so many folk fest recordings that I just think, wow, people are so encouraging there, and they maybe didn't need to be because I just assaulted their ears. This is one of the first times that I've ever heard a recording of a choir that I was with, and it sounds great. The blend sounds great, they all stayed together. I found out later that they had, you know, we didn't get a lot of rehearsals together, and some of them were like meeting and rehearsing together on their own. And um, you know, then I sent an email out to everybody thanking them for coming, and a bunch of them said they wanted to keep doing it, so we're gonna keep going with the magical choir. And I it really feels like the first thing that I've gotten to do in this town that isn't journalism, and um I'm really grateful for that because I'm kind of tired of being like newspaper lady that people don't invite over to places or don't want to go fishing with or don't want to go trapping with or whatever. It's it's what other hobbies besides singing? Um, I played and coached roller derby for a decade. Um, so I teach people how to roller skate, and then I teach people how to hit people on the roller skates, and then I teach people how to show boat for a crowd while you're hitting people on your roller skates. Uh and I think um where can we get that started? Okay, the high school gym has the perfect floor for roller skating on, and they used to hold skate nights there in the past, and I so I have it in my head that I just need to carve out some time to go talk to Lily about the colour.

SPEAKER_01 2:50:32

The hard thing about that is depending on the skates, because I remember shortly after I was out of high school is when the rollerblades became a big deal and they were rollerblading in the gym, it totally scratched. They leave streaks on the floor. Totally well, it was gouges because when they're crashing, I don't know is where the the bolts on them or whatever, but it was I came back one year and I was like, what the hell happened to the floor? And it just totally tore up by the rollerblades. Oh and so roller skates might be a totally different thing because they used to do that in the past, yeah. But there was something with the rollerblades because they're playing hockey with rollerblades, and the gym floor just got trashed with it.

Choir And Roller Derby Off Hours

SPEAKER_05 2:51:08

When I've skated in schools in the state in the past, we've had to put tape over our pads so we're not scratching the floor, and you also have to use like a particular kind of wheel so that you're not gouging the floor, so that's totally possible. I thought about that covered area at the state fairgrounds would be good to skate into, but only for part of the year. Um, but I yeah, I'm sort of itching to teach people how to roller skate here. It's a lot of fun, and once you get people roller skating, comfortable in roller skating, it's just one step away from being comfortable with hitting each other. And man, is that a fun sport.

SPEAKER_01 2:51:39

Well, anytime you can hit somebody and have it as part of a sport, it's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_05 2:51:45

And they're on wheels, so they're more than a little bit more.

SPEAKER_01 2:51:46

So they're legal, so they're they just go off and everyone's laughing while it's like. I can see a lot of benefit to that. I would need a lot of practice before because people have asked me to go play hockey before. I've never been on ice skates, and I know that would be a disaster. I'd I I have health insurance unlike you, but I don't know if it would cover all the injuries I would have from ice skating. This might be just this might be kind of the same.

SPEAKER_05 2:52:05

Roller hockey could be super fun.

SPEAKER_01 2:52:06

Roller hockey would be fun.

SPEAKER_05 2:52:07

Yeah. It's a good split to difference. So I did that. Um uh I played water polo for a while. Um, my sister and I helped start the water polo team, the legislative water polo team in Juno. Um, although the she's really the expert and was like a D1 material water polo player, and I am just like a really proficient fowler. And so I play a very specific role in a water polo team.

SPEAKER_01 2:52:31

Anytime around water, I'm a great anchor. All right, just I just sink right to the bottom. I just sink right to the bottom. So I water polo's out for me, but anything else that might fit?

SPEAKER_05 2:52:41

Yeah, uh in that category. Well, those are really the biggest things.

SPEAKER_01 2:52:44

Those are those are those are the three big ones. Um singing, water polo, water polo, and roller, roller derby.

SPEAKER_05 2:52:51

And I um was a crew member on a sailboat in Juneau, which I then purchased, which is maybe not the most maybe not the best idea in the world to purchase a newspaper and a sailboat at the same time. That neither of them is making me money, really. But um, it's in Juno, and it lives in Juneau, and I would like to bring it up here this summer. And I've heard that there's been a sailing club here in the past. Um I would not the wind up here, not amazing for sailing in, but it doesn't mean that people aren't doing it, and there's a lot of sailboats in that harbor, and I know some people are using them, so that's my other big fun hobby to do is spend time on a sailboat. Yeah. But you know, there's other stuff going on in this town too, and I think one of the things that I have found about Haynes that I find very confusing is that um organizations and people here seem really bad about communicating about what exactly they're doing until three days before it's gonna happen. And I remember sort of having the feeling that Haynes' tagline could be like, if you know, you know, and if you don't, like, yeah, get out. Um and there was a period of time when the um what was the restaurant that burned down in the fort last year? Old Field Kitchen. Old Field Kitchen, where you know, I was talking about the food, and someone said, Oh, Old Field Kitchen, and they're open on Mondays, and I was like, Yes, I feel like I've just gotten some piece of like Haynes information. So I showed up to this place and I was like awesome. And I walked up to the building and I tried a door and it like was locked. And so I walked around to the other diet side and I tried a door and I stepped into a room and a bunch of people who were sitting at tables just looked up at me and I was like, Is there is there food in here? Like what there were no signs for where you were supposed to go, and I just kind of wandered down a hallway, and then there was a big open counter there, and they were like, Hi, are you hungry? And I was like, I I am. Do you have a menu? And it was just like written in chalk somewhere over in the corner. It felt so incredibly like how this town functions. Um sometimes. So I know there are cool activities happening here, and uh maybe I'm just not talking to the right people.

SPEAKER_01 2:54:59

Well, I'm I'm not either because I've there's a lot of people who's like, oh, did you go to this this weekend? I'm like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Didn't even know that was happening. And there's like, well, there's a sign on your bulletin board in the grocery store. I was like, I do not read all the signs on the bulletin board in the grocery store.

SPEAKER_04 2:55:12

Do you not? I'm on that every week.

SPEAKER_01 2:55:13

Oh, absolutely not. I walk past that and rare very rarely do I pay attention. Usually it's when I'm going through and looking at there's it's like, wait a second, I see a date on there. It's like, well, that was a week ago, and so then I'll go and start pulling some down. I was like, oh, that would have been cool, but that was four days ago.

SPEAKER_03 2:55:30

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that happens.

SPEAKER_01 2:55:32

I stay off of the social calendar.

SPEAKER_05 2:55:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:55:36

Kind of by choice.

SPEAKER_05 2:55:38

And whatever's supposed to happen for you is just gonna percolate to you. Whatever happens, kind of maybe that's what's happening. Maybe I just need to wait and things will percolate to me.

SPEAKER_01 2:55:45

Yeah, could be. You never know.

SPEAKER_05 2:55:48

Okay. Yeah, I think those are my big things. I I have a hard time tapping into other stories that might be helpful for people to understand me because we've talked about so many of them and why I'm passionate about the journalism that I'm doing and.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:00

Well that's that's a big reason I wanted to get you in here is just uh talk about the role of journalism and why you're so passionate, what got you into it, and I think we've covered that really well. Did we talk about that?

SPEAKER_05 2:56:12

What got me into it No we didn't.

SPEAKER_01 2:56:14

You said it was you went in and complained about an article at the student paper.

SPEAKER_05 2:56:18

Yeah. I was at the University of Houston and I picked up um a copy of the Daily Cougar, which is the the that's the mascot of the place, and the front page, it was like 2003 or 2004, so we were in Iraq. Um, and the front page had a an editorial on it that was like objectively pretty racist, like they were using a derogatory term for Arab people on the front page, and then there was like a misspelling and a headline, and there was some other things happening, and I was just like incensed at the quality of the thing. And so I tracked down the newspaper office, and I had this. I remember having the newspaper in my hand, and I walked in and just found the closest person at the closest desk that I could find and was like, What the F is this? Like, what first of all, opinion content doesn't go on the front page, and second, like you should be ashamed of yourself. And he said, Well, do you think you could do it better? And I was like, I absolutely do like great, come on in. And I here's your best hired as a um photographer first, and that was the last semester that they were doing darkroom stuff before they switched to digital. And so I got to spend a glorious semester in the darkroom um trying to develop photos on a deadline, which okay. Um, and then um and got bitten by that bug of like, man, if I if I just like get those stories out there, be like this feels like a public service that I could totally do. And that's how I ended up majoring in journalism was was sort of adrift after music and trying to figure out what I was gonna do. And that's when I went, oh no, this is it. Like, I'm nosy, I'm bossy, I want to tell people they're wrong. I really love learning new things. Like you combine all of that stuff into one package and you have like your average journalist.

SPEAKER_01 2:58:08

There you go.

SPEAKER_05 2:58:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:58:10

And is it has it been everything you wanted it to be?

SPEAKER_05 2:58:13

Yeah. I don't think there's any other job for me. And I'm sort of terrified that at some point I'm gonna have to like quit journalism and go get like an adult job so I can have um, I mean, this is an adult job, but go get a job where I have have like benefits and like can save meaningfully for retirement and stuff. And I don't know what that job is gonna be. Like I can't be in comms. I'm very I'm very bad at lying, and so I would be even worse as a professional liar. I I don't know. Maybe I could be a librarian or something. Um, yeah, I've I'm very lucky that this is a job. Uh I don't and I'm lucky that I got that job in this country because some of my best friends are journalists in countries where um I don't know how they do it. I have a really good friend who's a journalist in Beijing, and I have no idea how she does what she does because she has to evade the censors. I have a lot of friends who are journalists in Ukraine who had to flee the country and are reporting on what's happening in Ukraine from outside of the country because otherwise they'll get shot. You know, I've it it we are so lucky that we have the tradition of journalism that we have here.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 2:59:16

So it was it's very lucky that I was like born here and ended up with that job here because anywhere else I've probably been shot already. And who knows? Might still happen here. We hope not.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:29

Yeah, we hope we don't start shooting journalists in this in the U.S.

unknown 2:59:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:33

Anything can happen, but I hope we don't cross that Rubicon anytime soon.

SPEAKER_05 2:59:37

Me too.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:37

Yeah, yeah.

unknown 2:59:39

All right.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:39

Well, thank you, Roger. Thanks so much. I'm sorry. Yeah. It's all right. We won't we won't tell the Jeep story. We'll see if that shots have been duly noted.

SPEAKER_04 2:59:49

It turned over like a Tonka toy.

SPEAKER_01 2:59:53

That had to be the best That had to be the best delay thing as I get this phone call. And hey, can we push back the recording of this? Because I rolled my Jeep. I'm like, say what? How do you I had a snowbank and my Jeep tipped over?

SPEAKER_05 3:00:08

Oh, I just am not I'm not sure. But everybody's safe. Yeah, everybody's safe. My dog's kind of upset.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:14

But you know, I have My Dog probably doesn't want to drive the Jeep anymore.

SPEAKER_05 3:00:17

Rollover accident, um, my first year here in someone else's Jeep and got lifelited out of town. And so maybe I just don't belong in Jeeps.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:24

Is this your Jeep that you rolled over? No. You rolled over somebody else's Jeep. I don't I don't think you should be driving Jeeps anymore.

SPEAKER_05 3:00:34

I wasn't driving the other Jeep I got flipped in either. I think I'm gonna do it. I don't think you should be.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:38

I don't think I don't think you should be in a Jeep.

Jeep Rollovers And Final Laughs

SPEAKER_05 3:00:39

But my dog was also in that last one.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:41

Yeah, but your dog's never gonna get in a Jeep again.

SPEAKER_05 3:00:44

No, and when we tipped over today, he just looked at me.

SPEAKER_00 3:00:48

He's like, what's it? I was like, all right, well, no more Jeeps. Get back to the Subaru.

SPEAKER_05 3:00:54

Yeah, it was pretty embarrassing.

SPEAKER_01 3:00:55

It was not my Jeep, but I do have full coverage insurance, and so I feel good about the being able to fix that.

SPEAKER_05 3:01:01

Ugh.

SPEAKER_01 3:01:02

So this just should be the community reminder. If anybody sees Rosha in a Jeep, tell her to get stop and get out.

SPEAKER_05 3:01:06

Tell her tell me to stop and get out. Get out. It just they're not they're not made for me clearly. Yeah, that last one. Did you hear about that in Mud Bay?

SPEAKER_01 3:01:16

No.

SPEAKER_05 3:01:16

Um, it was like, God, I had only been here for like six months or something. And I got my car stuck. Um, I also didn't know you could get a Subaru stuck. That was that sucked. I was in the Chilcat State Park Road and it was snowy, and I was like, I'm in a Subaru. This is gonna be fun. And I went down and took a long hike, and then I went to get out, and the Subaru cross tracks have a really poor I mean it's clearly this, and not that I couldn't get out of there as a driver. They have a like a really small wheel well, and so when you're driving in thick, wet packed snow, it gets packed into the wheel well, and then the tires won't turn the way they need to, and you just get kind of stuck. So I got stuck on the state park road, um, and I couldn't get out, and I was really angry because I've never been stuck before, and in my Subaru, and it was embarrassing. And how am I gonna get my car out? And I had some friends with me and my dog, and they had gone into town to drop their dogs off to come back and get me and get my dog. Um, and they found a friend who had a Jeep, uh, and he said, Oh, I can go pull her out. Um, and um, so they, you know, showed back up with his Jeep, and you know, it was getting dark, and he tried, and that probably should have been my first indicator that maybe like he wasn't he didn't know what he was doing? Yeah. Um, not his fault. Young guy had just moved here from like Florida or something. I failed at whatever heuristic it is where you ask someone like their experience driving in snow and ice, and it was just like, well, let's all jump in the car, we're all tired and hungry. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01 3:02:45

Were there floor plates on the road?

SPEAKER_05 3:02:47

Um no, it was like a vehicle from here that you got here.

SPEAKER_01 3:02:50

I was gonna say that would have been the first thing not to get into driving in the snow with Florida plates.

SPEAKER_05 3:02:54

But we like leave the state park road, it's actually dark at this point. We get down just past Letnikov, and there's that like dip there in the road. We hit a patch of ice, and he slams on the gas and tries to swerve out of it. Which don't. And I was sitting behind him in the passenger seat, and there was a woman next to me and my dog, and then him and another woman and another woman in the front seat. And so when the vehicle turned and started rolling, everyone got tumble dried. Um, someone in the front seat ended up in the back seat. I was in the middle on the bottom. I had a seatbelt, but there weren't a bunch in that vehicle. There was a bunch of tools in the back, um, which is how I got so injured. So that the vehicle rolls. And actually, um, I I learned a few months ago that a thought that I had thought was an inside thought is actually something that I'd said out loud in that vehicle. And so everybody has a memory of me. Like when we hit that pad device and started to flip, or I saw I saw him like do this, and I went, here we can go. The vehicle rolls a bunch, you know, and we come to the room. Here we go. And Klondike, my poor Malamute. I have this 100-pound Malamute, is the only thing that made it. He must have like jumped in mid-air and then landed standing up, and I'm on the bottom, crunched up against a window, and there's two people on top to me on top of me, so I can't move. And then there's my dog standing, and we're all asking him to move, and he just laid down. He was so scared. And um, yeah, I took a header from a um a toolbox that was in the back of his car, and I didn't really think about it in the moment. I was just trying to get everybody out of the car, so we all like climb out of the car, and then I clearly had a concussion. So I was throwing up next to the car when the volunteer ambulance crew showed up, and um I think it was Jen, uh, who was like doing a concussion check and said, Oh, you hit your head, is everything okay? And started to squeeze my arm, and I realized that I couldn't feel my arm. And I kind of panicked uh because I didn't think about it at that moment until then, and then it started to get kind of tingly, and then she just like put a C collar on me and they put me in the ambulance, and then I started to think, Oh my god, did I break my neck? And then they started to think, oh my god, did you break your neck? Or some order is what that happened in. Um, and I got to the clinic and uh and they called a Coast Guard helicopter, which took me to Juno, which, if you've never gotten to do that, maybe in like better circumstances, I highly recommend it because it's like a sky motorcycle. I mean, we punched through the air. It took us like 26 minutes to get to Juno. Jayhawks are awesome. It was awesome. And um spent the night in the hospital in a C collar wondering if I'd broken my neck, and then um they did a couple scans in the morning and said no, I just had a um I think I hadn't thought about since high school a shocker where you get hit at that bundle stinger, there you go, at the base of your spine. And um then I had a really bad concussion for a couple weeks. And uh Janine Allen showed up at the newspaper office the next day because that was a Wednesday and it was my deadline day, and I was by myself and she heard I got into a car accident, and she showed up to copy edit the whole paper, and we barely knew each other, but that was great. That felt really good. So yeah, I don't belong in Jeeps, that's what I'm saying. It's like me and Jeeps, bad history.

Like Subscribe And Thursday Releases

SPEAKER_01 3:06:28

All right. Well, stay out of Jeeps. Thanks again for joining us. Appreciate the conversation. Yes, sorry for keeping you so late. Thanks for watching this episode of Doug Cad's questions. Just a reminder if you've enjoyed the conversation today, please like, subscribe. We're available on YouTube if you want to watch us, if you just want to listen. Uh it's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you have new uh episodes being launched every Thursday. So thanks again for watching or listening and following us. We appreciate your support.