Northern publishing goes for the gold.

• Author: Woodring, Jeannie
• Position: Alaska's publishing industry - Industry Overview

Since the Klondike Gold Rush, Alaska publishers have scrambled like hard-rock miners to put out the printed word -- and sometimes have struck the jackpot.

Scanning the Alaskana section of any bookstore in the 49th State these days makes you feel like the prospector who hit the mother lode.

Alaska is a hot topic for publishing. A typical Anchorage bookstore can locate more than 1,500 book titles about the Great Land. Increasingly, these books are written and published in Alaska, as are a host of newspapers and magazines.

Northern Newspaper Network

Even before the U.S. government purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, newspapers were published in the Last Frontier. In those early years, the seeds of journalism spread rapidly and grew like fireweed across the Alaska territory.

Mary Nicholson, coordinator of the Alaska Newspaper Project at the Alaska State Library in Juneau, estimates that Alaska has had about 900 newspaper titles since 1867 (including newspapers which have changed their titles many times over the years).

Many of the early newspapers, like The Dyea Trail and The Alaska Prospector, followed the footsteps of early gold miners and vanished as fast as the mining tent cities that spawned their creation. Other publications, geared up in towns that flourished, outlasted dozens of other competitors to become long-lasting publishing institutions.

Fairbanks, for example, founded on the tails of Felix Pedro's gold discovery in 1903, has had over 40 newspapers in its 71-year history. More than 20 of these papers appeared between 1900 and 1920. One, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, started printing in September 1903 as a daily periodical called The Fairbanks News. Taking on its current title in 1908, the Fairbanks paper today has a daily circulation of around 18,000, a Sunday circulation of 23,000, and employs about 150 people.

Juneau, another gold-mining town, also has had more than 45 newspapers in its 100-plus-year history -- 26 of them before 1920. The major survivor, the Juneau Empire, first rolled off the press in November 1912 as the Alaska Daily Empire.

As the 20th century progressed and radio and television came into Alaska, newspapers had competition for news -- and advertising dollars. Today, northern newspapers struggle to remain profitable. Many find that one way to stay competitive is to become part of a newspaper chain, most often one outside the state.

Since 1992, for example, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner has been owned by Dean Singleton and Richard Sudder, owners of Media News Group, a chain of about 35 newspapers nationwide. Likewise, the Juneau Empire was purchased in 1969 by an Outside interest, Morris Communications Corp., which also owns the Kenai Peninsula Clarion.

"This is probably one of the longest ownerships in the state," says Empire publisher Jeff Wilson. "We have grown considerably since Morris Communications purchased the paper."

With a circulation of 7,600 and 46 full-time employees, the Empire benefits from its Outside ownership. "It takes the worry out of the financial end of it on a week-to-week basis," says Wilson. "And it also helps in taking some pressure off that you can occasionally get from an advertiser on you in your news coverage."

Alaska's largest paper, the Anchorage Daily News -- a relative newcomer compared to other statewide papers -- also gets a boost from its parent company, McClatchy Newspapers, based in Sacramento, Calif. Founded in 1946 as the Anchorage News by Norm Brown, the newspaper was sold to McClatchy in January 1979.

Publisher Fuller Cowell says the move brought the Anchorage Daily News "all kinds of advantages, not the least of which is capital resources which is necessary to modernize this newspaper" and the ability to draw on the technical skills level "from 20 different newspapers."

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