Alaska’s Journalists Join Forces to Cover the Midterms

Like her peers in the news business, Claire Stremple, editor in chief of The Alaska Beacon, writes regular memos detailing which stories are in the pipeline, who’s working on them and when they’re likely to be published.

Then she does something that those peers generally don’t do: She sends that memo to the Beacon’s competitors.

Dozens of news organizations in Alaska have drifted from conventional notions of media rivalry to an all-terrain embrace of collaboration on stories large and small. Driven by scarce resources and the geographic realities of a state bigger than California, Texas and Montana combined, they are republishing one another’s stories, and even collaborating across newsrooms on voter guides and other articles.

Veteran journalists in the state have come to view competing outlets working on the same story as wasteful duplication. “There are so many stories in Alaska and so much here that goes uncovered, and there is absolutely no good reason why anyone should be competing at this point,” said Nathaniel Herz, executive editor of The Anchorage Press, a monthly newspaper. “Resources now are such that it really does cry out for better cooperation.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/business/media/alaska-journalists-sullivan-peltola-senate.html