Most of the bylines you read in the Sentinel each week are names you probably recognize. Marc Lutz and Sarah Aslam work out of the newspaper office on Front Street and attend meetings and events around town. Amber Armstrong manages the community calendar and obituaries.
I live mostly in Anchorage and Juneau and write about state politics, fiscal and other issues for the Sentinel, along with opinion columns and occasional reporting on Wrangell news when Marc and Sarah are booked up.
But there are a lot of other writers whose work appears in the Sentinel and I figured this would be a good week to explain some of those strangers to our readers.
They’re actually more helpers than strangers. There is just too much going on around Southeast, too much happening in the state, for the Sentinel staff to report all of it. We need help, as do all newspapers.
To provide readers with a comprehensive summary of what’s happening and why, the Sentinel reprints stories from other news organizations, stories that we think readers would want to see and would interest them, covering news we just don’t have time to write about.
The Sentinel’s primary source of news stories outside of Wrangell is The Associated Press, a 176-old-year nonprofit cooperative news agency that has reporters around the world, including in Juneau and Anchorage. We pay an annual fee for the right to print AP stories and photos. In addition to having its own staff, the AP shares stories from its members with all of the newsrooms that belong to the cooperative. That explains how a news report of farmed salmon in a Maine newspaper may end up in the Sentinel.
The Wrangell paper also shares with news organizations in Alaska, particularly the Ketchikan Daily News, Sitka Sentinel, Juneau Empire, Petersburg Pilot, Chilkat Valley News in Haines and Anchorage Daily News. Everyone gains when interesting, newsworthy reports from one paper are shared in the other communities. We’re a geographically big state, and sharing news helps to make it seem a little smaller.
And most recently, Sentinel readers may have noticed reporting from the state’s newest newsroom, the Alaska Beacon. Founded last month, the Beacon is online only — no print edition. It is the 27th such news organization created by States Newsroom, a national nonprofit committed to improving reporting on state policy issues one state at a time. It’s not political reporting as much as it is policy reporting, looking at what government is doing and why, and how it can affect people.
The Beacon has a staff of four full-time writers in Juneau and Anchorage, and any newsroom in the state can reprint its stories at no charge. Philanthropists and donors to the national organization cover the Beacon’s expenses.
Whether the news reporting is from the Beacon, the Ketchikan Daily News or AP, nothing gets into the Sentinel without editing for the Three F’s: facts, fairness and fullness. If it doesn’t tell the whole story, we add to it. If it’s a bit unfair, we will try to balance it. And if there is a factual error, we will correct it. All of the reporters writing for Alaska newsrooms do a good job, but we all make mistakes and miss things. I use my 46 years at the job — and my newest trifocal glasses and a large dictionary — to spot what needs changing.
It’s all about sharing between newsrooms and adding to what is available in the Sentinel each week.
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