Alaska newspapers in 2025: Fewer print days, shrinking newsrooms, readers drifting away

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Alaska’s newspaper industry continued its slow but unmistakable decline in 2025, marked by reduced print schedules, newsroom revolts, and an accelerating shift toward digital-first operations.

While no major Alaska newspaper fully shut down during the year, staffing losses raises questions about the future of coverage.

The changes mirrored national trends affecting newspapers across the country: declining print advertising revenue, rising production and distribution costs, and reader habits that increasingly favor online consumption over doorstep delivery. In Alaska, those pressures have been magnified by geography, freight costs, and a limited advertising base, with many shoppers buying from Amazon, rather than locally.

Anchorage Daily News: Digital-first now established

The Anchorage Daily News, Alaska’s largest newspaper, entered 2025 having already completed its most dramatic print shift. In mid-2024, the paper reduced its print schedule from six days a week to twice weekly: Wednesdays and Sundays. It maintains daily coverage through its website and e-edition.

No further print reductions were announced in 2025, but the paper continued operating under a digital-first model, reflecting a broader recalibration toward online readership rather than physical circulation. The newspaper’s editor Dave Hulen moved on in 2025, retiring in March. Vicky Ho is the new editor and Hulen took the role of interim editorial page editor.

At the end of the year, the owners made a plea for donations from the Alaska community, as outlined in this report:

Anchorage Daily News launches year-end fundraising model through nonprofit

Juneau Empire: Newsroom collapse and a rival outlet emerges

The Juneau Empire experienced one of the most consequential upheavals in Alaska media during 2025.

The paper had already reduced print publication to twice weekly in 2023, with printing outsourced to Washington state after its local press shut down. In June 2025, Managing Editor Mark Sabbatini resigned following disagreements with owner Carpenter Media Group. He soon launched a competing nonprofit news outlet, the Juneau Independent.

By July, most of the Empire’s remaining newsroom staff had followed Sabbatini to the new venture. The departures left the Empire with minimal local reporting presence and remote management based outside Juneau, marking a dramatic change for a paper that had long been a central source of local news in the capital city.

Peninsula Clarion: Staff resignations lead to firings

The Peninsula Clarion, also owned by Carpenter Media Group, saw its own newsroom unravel in late September 2025.

The paper had already been reduced to once-weekly print publication in mid-2024, following earlier cuts from daily to twice weekly. In September 2025, multiple staff members, including Regional Editor Erin Thompson, Sports and Features Editor Jeff Helminiak, and reporters Jake Dye and Chloe Pleznac, resigned after objecting to management’s handling of a story that they said had been altered due to external political pressure without newsroom consultation.

Carpenter Media Group immediately terminated the resigning employees, leaving the Clarion with a severely depleted newsroom and limited local reporting capacity.

Homer News: Collateral damage from regional cuts

The Homer News, a weekly paper under the same Carpenter Media ownership, shared regional staff with the Peninsula Clarion and Juneau Empire. As a result, it was directly affected by the September 2025 resignations and firings.

By the end of the year, reporting capacity across the Kenai Peninsula and Homer publications was sharply reduced, with only a small number of journalists remaining to cover multiple communities.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: Relative stability

In contrast, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner experienced no major operational disruptions in 2025. The paper continued publishing as one of Alaska’s few remaining daily print newspapers, though it had dropped its Saturday print edition years earlier.

Owned by the nonprofit Helen E. Snedden Foundation, the News-Miner appeared comparatively stable during a year of turbulence elsewhere in the state’s newspaper landscape.

Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman: Sale explored, operations unchanged

The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, published three times weekly by Wick Communications, announced in January 2025 that its owner was exploring a possible sale of the paper.

By year’s end, however, no closure, print reductions, or major newsroom changes had been announced, and the paper continued operating on its existing publication schedule.

A fragile newspaper ecosystem

Taken together, 2025 revealed that some newspapers maintained stability or completed earlier transitions to digital-first models, others, particularly those under chain ownership, saw newsroom departures that hollowed out local coverage without formally closing the papers themselves.

The result is a patchwork media environment in which news continues to be published, but often with fewer reporters on the ground. As Alaska heads into another year of political, economic, and community challenges, the question is now whether newspapers will survive.