The closing of a popular Anchorage restaurant or the hunt for a murder suspect is clearly more important than the newest development in the conflict over Iran’s nuclear power program or foiled terrorist attacks in Germany.
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From left to right: 2005 Fellow Christian Meier, Anchorage Daily News editor Pat Dougherty, and 2007 Fellow Christian Rüttger in Anchorage.
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“For Alaska, we are like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal combined,” editor Pat Dougherty proudly says of the Anchorage Daily News. With an average daily circulation of about 70,000, the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning paper may be considered small. But in Alaska—a state with not even 700,000 residents—it is by far the largest paper. And it is the only printed media that can be bought in virtually every corner of the self-proclaimed “Last Frontier.”
But Dougherty knows only too well that an existence without real direct competition does not equal one without economic challenges. Alaska may be far away from the Lower 48, but the reality of today’s newspaper business is just as present there as anywhere else in the U.S. Like most other American papers, the Daily News faces both declining circulation and advertising revenues. The Internet emerged as a powerful contender and is taking away much of the money that used to be made with classified ads for real estate and cars. As a result, costs have to be cut, affecting among other things staff numbers and travel expenses. Today, the Daily News reporters’ most important tools are their telephones and online search engines. Gone are the days when they could hop on a small plane or a four-wheel-drive rig to research a story in the middle of the wild Alaskan bush or some remote outpost in the tundra where the story is happening.
| National and international stories usually make it into the paper only as very brief teasers into a small box at the bottom of the front page. |
The Daily News team is not happy about this. But there is no way around the constraints that publisher McClatchy recently set for the 60-year-old paper. The California-based newspaper empire bought the Daily News in 1979, invested heavily, added staff and turned it into Alaska’s market leader. In 1992, the only serious contender, The Anchorage Times, ceased publication and surrendered the field to the Daily News.
Today however, McClatchy strikes a different tune. “We have to become more efficient,” says Howard Weaver, one of the vice presidents of the struggling stock market listed company that currently owns 31 papers in several states including The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald. America’s newspaper business is under a lot of pressure these days. Profit margins have to satisfy investors’ expectations, and often 30 percent is the aspired target. German newspapers usually have to get by with only half of that, sometimes even less.
“Smaller is better,” is Dougherty’s response to the demands raised in California. In his view, there need to be fewer stories, but they must be better told to catch the attention of readers in a world where Internet, television and radio court the audience’s favor. Dougherty is convinced that he can achieve this by strongly focusing on local news. Thus, national and international stories mostly only make it as very brief teasers into a small box at the bottom of the front page. The closing of a popular Anchorage restaurant or the hunt for a murder suspect is clearly more important than the newest development in the conflict over Iran’s nuclear power program or foiled terrorist attacks in Germany.
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On the way to the Daily News calendar shooting.
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Apart from local news, almost every section in the Daily News represents mostly a digest of news agency reports or stories published in other McClatchy papers. “Our strength is local and Alaska news. We want to put all of our time and energy into covering local and Alaska news,” explains the Daily News’ managing editor Julie Wright. “Life” was the latest section subordinated to this strategy. “Let’s face it: Project Runaway is the same whether you’re watching it in Anchorage or Atlanta. Recipes for meatballs work whether you’re making them here or in Tucson. Why not pull those stories off the wire?” says Wright.
And then there is the Internet. Just like German newspapers, the Daily News puts its hopes on its online presence. In tune with the slogan “value added news,” Dougherty expects his reporters not just to write stories but to maintain blogs and contribute to the paper’s online pages with photographs or video footage they shot or audio files they recorded.
“We are going to be a hybrid company, print and digital,” says Weaver, who once ran the Daily News. Thanks to the Internet, newspapers “are back in the breaking news business.” They become contenders with TV and radio, he says. But at the same time, Weaver admits that he is far from certain whether this strategy will prove to be successful. “We don’t know what’s going to work. It really is: fire first, then aim.” Weaver calls the process difficult and painful. “But it’s also a great time,” he adds, saying that it will be this generation of journalists that will determine the future of their craft.
Sometimes a little successful business on the side might help to get past some of the hardships. The Daily News proved it had good instincts in that respect when it published its moose calendar last year. “People stood in lines to get a copy,” Dougherty smiles.
Christian Rüttger is a senior subeditor at Reuters’ foreign news desk in Berlin. This summer he spent his Burns fellowship at the Anchorage Daily News. 2005 Burns Fellow Christian Meier visited him there. A longer German version of this story appeared in the Berliner