April 16, 2006
The marvels of newspapering in Alaska
It was fascinating during 2004-05 to be working for a crusading community newspaper such as the Tundra Drums (see about its award, here) after a career with stops at the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.
On the occasion of the Drums' award, I'll note some impressions of newspaper life in Alaska, based on my own background.
I started out in community newspapers, beginning with the Montgomery Journal (which ceased publication last year) in Chevy Chase and later Rockville, Md., and progressing to English papers, including the Surrey Advertiser, and thence to the Gaithersburg Gazette, back in Maryland.
As much as the resources and worldliness of the staff increased as I moved in 1986 to the Sun and in 1991 to the Post, something was missing. Journalists at big newspapers are more likely to view themselves as elites than do the young scrappers at a local paper.
Higher salaries and living in more expensive neighborhoods also tend to push big-city reporters and editors much, much farther from the pulse of the community, their readers. In addition, success depends on assiduous politicking to ensure advancement in the newspaper heirarchy. As Steve Sailor writes here,
To reach a high position in American life, it doesn't pay to waste time associating with a wide range of your fellow human beings. You are much better off spending as much time as possible schmoozing other ambitious people who can help you out. It pays to adopt whatever conventions they exhibit in terms of what you are supposed to talk and write about.
Rural newspaper editors must still interact with a wide range of fellow human beings. Community newspapers in Alaska, given the state's isolated, off-road towns reachable only by airplane, boat, dog sled or snowmachine, serve as the town criers, not much changed since frontier days. You aren't isolated from your readers. The editors live in tiny communities where everyone knows everyone else, and play a far more delicate balancing act than, say, does the editor of the New York Times.
Thus returning to community newspapers in Alaska, beginning in June 2004, on site in Anchorage, felt wonderful. There wasn't the sense of working in a bubble sealed off from those whose life would be affected by the articles we ran.
My job was to help design the Tundra Drums, as well as the Cordova Times, and periodically to design the other papers in the chain (the Seward Phoenix-Log, the Bristol Bay Times, and the Dutch Harbor Fisherman). I also designed and filled in as a reporter for the Arctic Sounder, which gave me nine fascinating days on site in Barrow, the northernmost U.S. city.
The average "niceness" quotient of the editors, reporters, designers and production staff zoomed compared to bigger papers. Of course, this is in part because people in Alaska, journalists and non-journalists alike, are far nicer than those of us on the driven East Coast.
Front page of the Cordova Times. Laying out photos like this one made designing an Alaska newspaper a one-of-a-kind experience.
Further, the journalists were jacks-of-all trades, much different to the highly specialized East Coast scribes.
Each editor wrote articles and editorials and sports stories, shot photographs, and typed in the police log, births, obits, pet of the week, calendar, sun and tides and letters to the editor, and shepherded the columnists' work to Anchorage.
Some of the editors knew a fair amount about design. This often made communication far easier than it ever was for me at the Washington Post, where the visual illiteracy of some of the editors, as well as the blind spot some artists had toward being careful with text content, made being a graphics editor on the National and Foreign desks a great challenge.
These Alaska editors and reporters were a different breed altogether, and working with them was fun from Day One.
The most macho we called the Sounder Boys. These were Tim McDonald and James Mason, who worked in the Arctic Sounder bureaus in Barrow and Kotzebue respectively. They were no strangers to liquor, hunting (including Inupiat whale hunts, in the icy dark of early spring), rifles, scopes, snowmachines, dune buggies and husky dogs.
Getting them to file their copy on time was difficult for every reason imaginable, from them not always taking deadlines seriously to terrible phone and e-mail connections not of their making.
But ultimately they hearkened back to the era depicted in 
The Front Page, Northern Exposure style. They bore no relation to the sometimes paunchy and pale desk-jockeys, in blue shirts and wrinkled khakis, who manned metropolitan dailies. They had to survive, work and be effective in predominantly Native communities, and this made their newspapering quite unique.
Every day -- from my very first, when a young, skinny moose walked down the street outside the Alaska Newspapers' office in South Anchorage -- was full of wonder. I commuted by bike along the psychedic purple fireweed-lined paths of the Campbell Creek trail, listening to giant, scarlet-backed salmon in their last days fight upstream along its gravel bed. (Yes, you can hear their stomachs slapping against the rocks.) My last week, heading home, I passed a bigger moose at the side of the trail.
At my desk in the office, my work involved taking the reporters' stories and headlines and photos and reworking them around the ads provided by the ad scheduler, using specialized software (in this case, Quark Xpress). As I poured the stories into boxes, made them fit, and applied headline font sizes and cutline formatting, I let myself absorb the content, of which details below.
My last few days, I suggested to the editor-in-chief, Rose Ragsdale, and the design editor, Kristy Bernier, that I would love to continue working long distance from my home in Baltimore while they looked for my replacement.
We tried the experiment. That it worked was a testament to the open-mindedness of the individual editors to e-mail the components of their papers 4,000 miles away, to a rowhouse in Fells Point, Baltimore, Maryland, and ultimately after corrections, to let the finished product return by e-mail to the main office in Anchorage.
We knew the Sounder Boys were a handful to handle even from Anchorage, and two other editors, both female, seemed more conducive to our experiment in having an off-site designer.
Joy Landaluce of the Cordova Times and Naomi Klouda of the Drums were the most amenable to this arrangement. Every week I tried to make sure they were really happy with how their papers looked, enough to make up for the inconvenience of not having them designed in their home state.
If anything, this arrangement was almost typical of Alaska, with 15 percent of its employees not living in state. (Many live in Seattle and come up for intensive work stints, and return home.) And the flexibility of using technology creatively is extremely important for remote Alaska.
Every weekend for more than 1-1/2 years, I lived on Alaska time (4 hours later than Baltimore) and took a virtual step into a foreign world.
They sent me material each weekend that ranged from hard-hitting exposes to photos of incredible, unaffected charm, of children hunting moose or landing fish, or babies born or elders who had passed. I coudn't help but be fascinated by the stories and photos I was e-mailed every week to lay out on the pages.
Naomi Klouda, the Drums editor, and her reporter, Jon Grover, aided by roving reporter Alex DeMarban flying in from Anchorage, tackled every big issue there was to examine in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta: health care, policing, waste removal, village budgets running dry, politics, tribal organizations, dance festivals, Native arts and crafts.
That was the big, "important" stuff. The newspapers often carried stories of national and international importance, including oil drilling in ANWR (the Arctic Sounder), the crash of a soybean freighter in the Aleutians (the Dutch Harbor Fisherman), and the visit of Sen. Ted Stevens to Bethel and Nome to keep Lisa Murkowski in the Senate and preserve its Republican majority (the Drums and the Sounder).
But the columns, letters, recipes, calendar and police logs were almost more interesting. Every single paragraph in the Tundra Drums and the Cordova Times seems to tell a fascinating story of a place quite different to any other -- quite appealing to any traveler or amateur geographer or reader who likes writing with a strong sense of place.
I probably could have made at least twice as much per hour designing at a major newspaper, but designing the Tundra Drums in particular made up for it with exotic subject matter. These included such staples as:
- Columns by the wonderfully monikered John Active and Harley Sundown, Yup'ik Eskimos who write eloquent, first-rate essays about anything from myths and legends, family lore and Russian colonization, to how to construct a fence out of wood pallets.
- The amazing "Millie's Kitchen Korner." Not only might she provide recipes involving moose or wild tundra berries, Millie Bentley would always range widely into community issues, acting as a sort of Talk of the Town and Social Register as well. When Dr. Lucy Bayles's husband died suddenly, and Millie offered consolation before proceeding to the week's recipe, I almost felt I lived in Bethel.
Copy editors Victoria Zerbe, Kate Golden, Laurel Bill and I had a quiet, affectionate giggle at some of the more provincial aspects of Millie -- the extra K in Kitchen Korner, and the time she told of an intestinal eruption as a result of eating bran muffins. For a good while, I didn't understand why each of the rural papers gave so much space to recipes by Millie and other local columnists. Time revealed that the Alaska winter passes slowly, and Arctic Sounder editor James Mason (a grizzled, bachelor, macho guy) explained even he really liked running recipes and trying them himself.
- Thank you letters. Maybe nothing screamed of the different relationship between a newspaper and its readers than the Tundra Drums' letters pages. While letter writers to the Sun and the Post complain about the mightiest people in the land, in the Tundra Drums, many column inches are devoted to thank yous:
- Thank you to the Alaska Commercial Store for plastic plates for the Fourth of July picnic.
- Thank you ("quyana") to 50 people who helped when a village elder died, and to Hageland Air for donating a bush plane to transport the body.
- Thank you to the bands that helped raise money for tsunami victims, with the spirit of Native phrasing: "You have the great blessing from the four corners of the world."
- Thank you to the Alaska Commercial Store for plastic plates for the Fourth of July picnic.
- Prisoners' letters. These complained in enormous detail about all aspects of their trial and current incarceration, and seemed to blanket every publication in the entire state, judging by how a prisoner from down near Juneau would write to an editor in the Western bush. If the thank-you letters failed to materialize, the editors would run these. Wonder if running them simultaneously puzzled and entertained the readers as much as they did me?
- The photos. Each Sunday, photo editor Robert DeBerry would e-mail a compressed folder of each week's edited photos. The art told stories of soldiers returning from Iraq (Alaska has many soldiers and the nation's highest percentage of veterans), delicate-looking women hunters that had bagged a moose, fishermen plying the Kuskokwim, babies that had been born, sundogs and ice and riotous flower gardens, and frankly adorable photos of the children at Mikelnguut Elitnaurviat Elementary in Bethel celebrating Thanksgiving -- a ring of little Eskimos dressed as Pilgrims and Indians.
- Obits. These told the history of our biggest and second-youngest state. Few of the elders seemed to have just lived a routine life and died. Many had played huge roles in helping a remote Eskimo people enter the modern world.
Or they told other stories, both of loss and of tragedy. There was the poignant photo that arrived one week of an innocent-looking 11-year-old boy, with anthracite eyes and Asian cheekbones, lost playing in a bend of the Kuskokwim river.
The contrast between designing the Tundra Drums and its sister paper, the Cordova Times, was often striking, as the later was in a largely Scandinavian town of fishermen's descendants. Young people in Cordova seemed glossy and often extremely beautiful or handsome, as the editor provided pictures of them at swimming contests or softball tournaments.
In Bethel, Alaska, often the news of young people was sadder, and basic, and told of dangers inherent to life in Bush Alaska that modernity had not fully eradicated.
Still, the harshness of Fate often touched Cordova, too, as it lost one of its residents, who mourned the breakup of his marriage by taking a vacation to a sunny paradise. His bungalow in Thailand was smashed by the tsunami. And the repercussions of the Exxon Valdez still haunt this town, 17 years later.
- The police blotter. For the Tundra Drums especially, this could read like a Jack London story. Here's an example from last year:
Feb. 12, St. Mary's. Search and Research/Snowmachine. At 4 p.m., Alaska State Troopers in St. Mary's were notified that Clarence Sipary, 39, of Pitka's Point, and Glenda Andrews, 25, of St. Mary's, had departed from Pitka's Point headed to Pilot Station on Feb. 10, 2005 at around 9 p.m. on a Polaris RMK snowmachine. Friends reported them overdue on Feb. 11, 2005. Local search teams were sent on Feb. 12, 2005, with no sign of the two. Efforts continued on Feb. 13, 2005. On Feb. 14, the weather improved enough for troopers to fly over the area and locate a single snowmachine track, which led to an open hole in the ice in the middle of the Yukon River near the confluence with the Andreafsky River. Local search crews attempted to drag the river on Feb. 15th and 16th, 2005 without any success. Weather and ice conditions have made it impossible to continue dragging the river and on the evening of Feb. 16, 2005 the decision was made to suspend the search until conditions improve.
In Baltimore, our police blotter is full of bar shootings and drug drive-bys. In St. Mary's in Western Alaska, Mother Nature bests innocent humans, with no record except for a snowmachine track ending at a hole in the river.
Meanwhile, the Cordova Times police blotter was altogether more light-hearted, with people reporting stray dogs, children staying out too late and even the tangling of a baby otter in the fishing nets on the dock.
Given the tradition of the thank you in Alaska, I will close with one to everyone at Alaska Newspapers. Often it was a laugh a minute with Robert, Heather Resz, Kristy Bernier and Pat from production and Laurel Bill (who gives great back rubs to stressed-out designers).
Thanks especially to Rose Ragsdale, my former Baltimore Sun colleague. Rose, as editor in chief, ignored my protestations that I did not know newspaper design, only book design, and brought me up to Anchorage in June 2004 for a one-in-a-lifetime experience of learning how to design newspapers, and rural Alaska ones at that. She also housed and fed me dinner during that time. (As well as driving me, with her husband Darrell, to Seward, Homer and Talkeetna for some amazing sight-seeing of zillions of eagles.)
And to Naomi Klouda, for without hesitation signing on to a designer in far-away Baltimore, and sending me an ulu knife and Yup'ik slippers so that my home, and not just my computer files with her stories and finished papers, had a strong flavor of Alaska.
Quyana Rose and Naomi!
Leave a comment