Late one night in January, a reporter sat working on the floor of an orange building in Haines. The building is home to the small town’s police department, fire station, and morgue – plus the borough assembly chambers, which are often packed with concerned citizens.
The journalist, Rashah McChesney, isn’t just a reporter. She also owns the local newspaper, the Chilkat Valley News. The weekly paper has a circulation of 1,200 during the summer and 1,000 in winter. About 2,500 people live in the Haines Borough.
McChesney was covering the local assembly meeting, and she was one of the last people there. That meant she was nearby when a heated exchange broke out between two borough officials.
The next morning, McChesney’s deadline day, her malamute Klondike strutted around her office while she talked shop with a local reporter. The reporter asked how McChesney planned to describe the incident.
“Oh, I’m just going to say, ‘Shouted a string of obscenities at him in the parking lot,’” McChesney said. “Because print is boring.”
Be that as it may, print is what brought McChesney to Haines last April. She bought the paper after a decade in public radio, including several years at KTOO in Juneau.
McChesney made the move even as news organizations across Alaska and the U.S. increasingly struggle to stay afloat amid soaring costs, declining readership and the explosive rise of social media.
Just 15% of Americans say they’ve paid for local news in the last year, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. And of those who do get their news from daily newspapers, the vast majority access the content online.
The result: more than 3,200 print newspapers closed over the last two decades, according to a 2024 report by Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative.
One-hundred-and-thirty print newspapers shut down between October of 2023 and October of 2024 alone.
In Alaska, papers including the Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, Peninsula Clarion and Homer News have scaled back printing, citing readers’ growing preference for reading the news online.
Which is why McChesney isn’t just focused on Haines. She also recently co-founded a nonprofit called The Alaska News Coalition — a group of publishers and journalists around the state working to help independent, local news organizations stay in business.
“By and large, there's a lot of publishers who are experts at making papers, and who have struggled to modernize their organizations digitally,” McChesney said. “I feel like I am building a collaboration with a group of people who really want what they were doing successfully in print, to be successful in digital, and maybe don't necessarily understand or have the capacity to do that.”
The effort got a big boost in October, when it received a $100,000 grant from Press Forward, a national news initiative funded by philanthropy organizations. The Alaska-based coalition pools resources and ideas and provides grants to newspapers to help them digitize their work and distribute news.
All of this might make McChesney, a 41-year-old millennial, seem like a bit of an anomaly. But she says she decided to go all-in on local news in Alaska for a simple reason.
“Communities want local news. That's why we have public radio stations that work as well as they do,” she said. “I think there's this sort of myth that a small-town paper is just sort of like a losing proposition. And I just — I don't buy that.”
“Haines’s paper is doing fine. It’s not making a ton of money, I’m not making a ton of money. But this [community] has consistently financially supported its paper since it opened in 1966,” she added.
McChesney said it’s been exciting to work alongside publishers of other Alaskan papers, including the Wrangell Sentinel and the Ketchikan Daily News, to reduce the likelihood that any more communities will lose their newspapers.
It’s also difficult, given that McChesney runs a business and reports the news at the same time.
That work is made even more interesting by the place where it happens. Haines is known for being politically divided and highly engaged. McChesney thinks that can make reporting challenging. But she also thinks it’s indicative of something bigger.
“People don't fight about stuff they don't care about. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference,” she said. “You can’t accuse this town of being indifferent.”
Owning a newspaper in small-town Alaska also means something else. At least in Haines, she can’t ever just be “Rashah.”
“I don't get a lot of [taking]-my-newspaper-hat-off time. If I want to do that, I'd go out into the Porcupine District and run around with my dog,” she said. “But I think that's sort of the pressure of being a small-town journalist in general.”
