How I killed a small-town newspaper
I killed a beloved small-town newspaper last year.
How was your pandemic?
The Chugiak-Eagle River Star was the life’s work of a man named Lee Jordan, a native Alabamian who fell in love with Alaska after arriving here as a member of the U.S. Army in the 1950s. In 1971, Jordan founded the newspaper as a way of getting better coverage for local youth sports, and eventually grew the paper into a community institution. Virtually everyone who grew up in Eagle River in the 1980s and 90s has a story about working for the Star or appearing in the Star or writing for the Star — sometimes all three.
I first arrived at the weekly paper in 2010 as a general assignment reporter, and a year later I was promoted to editor. I was 34 years old and in charge of my first newsroom — in many ways a dream come true for a kid who grew up idolizing newspaper columnists and creating homemade newsletters.
I quickly learned that running a small-town weekly isn’t quite what most people imagine. Rather than a sleepy, idyllic pastime filled with bake sales and quilting bees, the grind of small-town news is as unrelenting and stressful as any big city beat. There’s no off switch. Misspelled a kid’s name in a high-school basketball story? You’re going to get an email. Forgot to run a calendar brief? Expect a phone call. Screwed up a police brief? Don’t make any weekend plans.
Although the paper was printed just once a week, the realities of digital publishing meant the Star had to be a 24/7 news operation. If there was a big news story in our neck of the woods — a bear attack, a plane crash, the odd homicide — it meant rearranging plans and getting to the story ASAP. This might not sound like a big deal, but it forces you to be on call at all times. Dates get cancelled, plans get reshuffled, relationships become frayed as your life become consumed by the unrelenting nature of the beast.
I left the paper for a bigger job a couple years after my first editing gig, but I always had a soft spot for the Star. To tell the truth, I loved community news. The job itself was a dream — getting to write features about quirky characters, exposing small-time political screw-ups, taking photos — it was simply the nonstop nature that I struggled with.
In 2018 I returned to the Star as editor, this time with the paper under the umbrella of the Anchorage Daily News organization. I worked out of the ADN’s newsroom and was tasked with both editing and producing the Star as well as working as a general assignment/roving reporter for the ADN. From the beginning this was a massive challenge, as it forced me to both choose what I would cover for the Star as well as take assignments from the editors at the ADN.
My superiors recognized this was an unsustainable situation, and frequently told me I needed to take more time off in order to avoid burnout. But there was never any plan made for this to happen, and as long as the Star needed to come out each week (and be updated online constantly), there was little or no chance for me to have any kind of a personal life outside the newspaper.
When the pandemic began to creep across the United States in March of 2020, my stress levels were already at an all-time high. I’d worked virtually nonstop for the past two years, pouring my life into a struggling small-town paper with a dwindling subscription base.
As it became apparent that the pandemic was going to force radical changes to our business model, we decided cease production of the print version of the paper in early March. After nearly 50 years of continually publishing, the Star was on hiatus. It hasn’t returned.
About a week after the paper ceased production, I told my bosses I was quitting. I gave no notice. The combined stress of the pandemic and trying to keep the paper afloat was too much for me and I simply snapped. I couldn’t do it anymore.
If you go to the Star’s website, the stories that appear there are mine. The page exists almost as a time capsule of the final days leading up to the first lockdowns — stories about early coronavirus preparations and a delayed town hall only hinting at the massive disruptions to come.
There’s certainly a chance the paper could return. The ADN still owns and maintains the website, and there’s no reason the Star couldn’t be resurrected. But it’s also possible it may never live again, its demise hastened by the mental breakdown of its sole editorial employee.
Lee Jordan died in 2019 at the age of 88. I wrote his obituary for the Star, an honor I’ll always cherish. I was proud of the fact I helped keep Lee’s paper running for the entirety of his life, and the conversations we had about Eagle River and the Star are among my most cherished.
But I can’t help but feel a sense of extreme sadness at the part I played in the demise of the Star. Since I left, the community of Chugiak-Eagle River has joined the countless communities across the country where small-town news coverage is now a thing of the past. High school basketball games go uncovered, community council meetings go unattended, small-time accomplishments go unrecognized.
The demise of local news has happened for thousands of reasons large and small — from the loss of advertising and classified revenue to the fragmentation of readerships to the general distrust of the media in general. Mine is just one story in the countless tales of how journalism in this country is disappearing and how communities are losing a part of their souls.
I wish quitting on the Star hadn’t resulted in its demise, but I understand why it did. Running a weekly newspaper is a massive endeavor that takes heroic levels of dedication and effort, and with a pandemic going on it would have been virtually impossible to find someone to carry on the job. I left my employers in a hell of a lurch, something for which I’ll forever be sorry.
While I’ll forever be regretful about the way I left, I can’t say I’m sorry I quit. Leaving the paper allowed me the time to refocus on the things that are important to me and my life — something I’d been neglecting for years as I struggled in a never-ending attempt to mop the ocean.
I want to apologize to the people of Chugiak-Eagle River, who deserve dedicated news coverage and who were forever supportive of the Star and our efforts. I wish I could have done a better job for you.
I salute the journalists out there who continue to toil and cry over the small-time heartbreaks and small-town triumphs that make community journalism so special. Those people have a kind of courage and selfless spirit of community that’s becoming more and more rare these days.
Lee Jordan had those qualities in endless supply. Unfortunately for the people of Chugiak-Eagle River, I didn’t.
Matt Tunseth is a freelance writer and photographer from Anchorage, Alaska. Write to him at matthew.tunseth@gmail.com
