Anchorage Daily News

Encyclopedia : A : AN : ANC : Anchorage Daily News

The Anchorage Daily News is a daily newspaper based in Anchorage, Alaska, in the United States. With a circulation of about 72,000 daily and 85,000 Sundays, it is by far the most widely read newspaper in the state of Alaska.

The current editor of the Anchorage Daily News is Pat Dougherty.

The newspaper has about 450 full-time employees in Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, the Kenai Peninsula and the state capital, Juneau.

Contents

1 The beginning
2 Pulitzer Prizes
3 Ownership change
4 Airing dirty laundry
5 References
6 External links

The beginning

The Anchorage Daily News was born as the weekly Anchorage News, publishing its first issue January 13, 1946. The newspaper became an afternoon daily in May 1948, although it wouldn't publish a Sunday newspaper until June 13, 1965. By then, the Anchorage Daily News had become a morning newspaper, making that switch on April 13, 1964.

Pulitzer Prizes

The newspaper has won the Pulitzer Prize twice in the "Public Service" category, in 1976 and 1989. The 1976 Pulitzer was for its series "Empire: The Alaska Teamsters Story," which disclosed the effect and influence of the Teamsters Union on the state's economy and politics. The 1989 series was "A People in Peril," which documented the high degree of alcoholism, suicide and despair in the Alaska Native population.

Ownership change

The McClatchy Company has owned the Daily News since 1979, when it bought a controlling interest from Kay Fanning, who had been editor and publisher since the death of her husband, Larry Fanning, in 1971. Kay Fanning continued as the head of the paper until mid-1983.

The Daily News was the first of two newspapers that the then-122-year-old McClatchy Company bought outside the state. (The Kennewick, Wash., Tri-City Herald was the other.) McClatchy would later grow to become a national newspaper company.

Airing dirty laundry

In 1997, the weekly Anchorage Press newspaper ran a controversial article that alleged the Daily News' quality and newsroom morale had declined substantially since the McClatchy buyout and the Daily News' subsequent victory in its newspaper war with the Anchorage Times, which went out of business in 1992. The Press article's title, "Paper in Peril," was a parody of the name of the Daily News' 1989 Pulitzer-winning series. While the Press' extensive interviews (mostly of unnamed sources) pointed out genuine problems and turmoil in the Daily News' newsroom, many believed the article unfairly maligned McClatchy in general and Daily News Editor in Chief Kent Pollock in particular. Others believed the article unintentionally reflected at least as poorly on the rank-and-file reporters and editors as it did on management.

References

["Anchorage Daily News history"], from the newspaper's Web site.
["Background on the Anchorage Daily News"], from the McClatchy Company's Web site.
["Overview of the McClatchy Company"], from the company Web site.

External links

[The online edition of the Anchorage Daily News]
["Paper in Peril"] by David Holthouse, Anchorage Press, May 15-21, 1997.

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.