Rashah McChesney

The largest newspaper in Alaska has severed its contract with one of the largest news wire services in the world.

Citing primarily cost, Alaska Dispatch News Executive Editor David Hulen said his company dropped its contract with the Associated Press on Thursday.

“There’s no bad blood, there’s no grudge. I’ve got absolutely nothing against AP. But as a service that we pay money for, it just didn’t pencil out for us,” Hulen said.

Going forward in the Dispatch’s print and online editions, readers will no longer find content from the AP. AP member radio stations, newspapers and TV stations will no longer be able to use the wire service to access Dispatch content. They’ll have to contact the paper and negotiate permission directly.

Andrew Jensen, managing editor of the weekly Alaska Journal of Commerce, said the loss of Dispatch News photos could cause him some trouble.

His Anchorage-based newspaper sometimes competes with the Dispatch for stories, but he occasionally relies on their photographers. The Journal of Commerce doesn’t have a staff photographer.

Actual losses to other statewide media are hard to quantify, and this is where the story gets a little complicated.

Up until 2014, the Alaska Dispatch was online only. Its employees ran a robust news website financed by Alice Rogoff, former chief financial officer of the U.S. News & World Report and the wife of billionaire David Rubenstein.

Then Rogoff struck a $38 million surprise deal with California-based McClatchy Company to buy the state’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News. That merger resulted in the Alaska Dispatch News.

Former Dispatch writer Craig Medred broke the story at craigmedred.news that Alaska Dispatch Publishing LLC had sued McClatchy Newspapers, Inc., over that deal. Part of that lawsuit involves the Anchorage Daily News’ contract with the AP.

The lawsuit alleges that McClatchy misrepresented a contract with the AP, leaving the Dispatch on the hook for more than $340,000, according to documents Medred posted.

It is unclear what the loss of that revenue will do to the AP’s coverage of the state. Currently, the AP operates a one-person Juneau bureau – where I just finished a stint covering the state legislature — and a three-person Anchorage bureau. Its journalists generate original stories in addition to aggregating and curating photos and stories from its member news organizations. It circulates that news to members in the state and around the world.

AP Director of Media Relations Paul Colford said it won’t change the way the company provides news in Alaska.

“We have every intention of continuing to provide a strong and vital news report in Alaska. Period,” Colford said.

At the Dispatch, Hulen said he doesn’t think readers or other AP members in the state will notice much of a difference.

“If you look at it closely, we were not using very much AP content and haven’t for some time. And I think it’s also, if you look closely, I’m not sure that much of our content was actually being used around the state, maybe kind of as filler. We have not used an enormous amount of AP content.”

What Dispatch journalists don’t generate, Hulen said often comes from other content-sharing services. He said the company recently added Reuters, which is a wire service that competes with the AP.

“We get a bunch of services,” Hulen said. “We get The New York Times, we get The Washington Post, Bloomberg, we get Tribune. We get The Christian Science Monitor and now we get Reuters, and so we’re not using AP but I’m not sure a normal reader would see much of a change.”

Hulen said he strongly supports the work that AP journalists do and that he supports the organization’s continued presence in the state. But, as newsroom budgets are reduced statewide, less content is produced, and the AP’s sharing service has become less valuable to the Dispatch.

“People are doing good work, they’re doing the best they can. But everybody is also doing it with much less horsepower than they may have had 5 years ago. Say if you’re in Ketchikan or Fairbanks or Kenai for that matter, right? Just as the things have, you know, as the media economics have evolved — but that’s not at all to disparage the good work … that people are doing on any given day.”

Hulen said the Dispatch has informal content-sharing agreements with several media organizations in Alaska and that those will continue.

Editor’s note: Rashah McChesney is a former Associated Press reporter who covered the Alaska legislature as a temporary employee earlier this year. Also, KTOO is an AP member and, separately, KTOO and the Alaska Dispatch News occasionally share news content.

Additionally, a comment by the AP’s media relations director has been recast to correct an attribution error. An earlier version of this story erroneously attributed Paul Colford with saying, in paraphrase, the loss of the ADN’s business was “an enormous drop in revenue,” which he did not express.

Delegates from around the state will descend on Anchorage this weekend for Alaska’s Democratic Convention. Organizers say young voters have turned out in record numbers, many supporting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his bid for the presidency.

One Juneau teen is rushing headlong into her first national election by securing her spot as a state delegate to support a candidate she’s hoping will change the country’s political process.

India Busby is new to politics, passionate about voting and feeling the Bern. While it’s the first national election for the 19-year-old Juneau college student, she finagled her way into being one of 539 delegates for Alaska’s Democratic Convention in Anchorage.

“I’m very excited. I’m a little nervous. But, we’ll see how it goes,” she said.

At a coffee shop in Juneau where she’s just finished her last shift, Busby insisted on gelato before settling in to talk about her foray into the wide world of politics.

She just finished her first year at the University of Alaska Southeast where she is majoring in sociology and recently added a minor in political science. And, while she talks passionately about the importance of voting and why she believes the Democratic Party needs an infusion of young voters, it’s a marked shift from her days as a high school student.

“I had — well OK, so I had a D my senior year in government class. I will admit that. It was not my favorite subject. I mean, the teacher was great but I just hated the class. I thought it was confusing. It just had too much going on and I didn’t like the fact that there was, like, two different parties and I couldn’t wrap my head around it,” she said. “But I think I just didn’t have the patience to understand it ‘cause it is a lot to take in. It really is and as I, like, continued to do research about it, it was very, I’ll admit it was really hard for me to understand it.”

By the end of her senior year, Busby said she managed to bump up her grade to a D+.

“And I regret that D+, but I took it again in college and I ended up with a B+, so obviously I was doing something right.”

Because it’s her first time attending a convention, Busby isn’t sure what to expect. But she’s looking forward to some of the workshops offered over the weekend.

“There’s one about the expansion of Medicaid. There’s one about the legalization of marijuana and what we’re going to do about it. There’s this one about running for office, which I’m really interested in,” she said. “Then we get to learn, like, the history of the Democratic Party. I’ve always been a history fan so I’m pretty excited.”

Busby will join hordes of other Bernie Sanders supporters who voted during the March caucuses. More than 10,600 Democrats turned out in Alaska and handed the Vermont senator nearly 80 percent of the votes.

She said she picked Sanders because he supports issues she cares about, like education and healthcare reform.

“The more I looked into who was running in the Democratic Party for president, I realized that, I mean, personally to me, like, I see Hillary Clinton as really corrupt and I think we just — and I mean she definitely does have a lot of experience and she’s a very nice lady — but it’s just not someone who I would vote for as my first. I mean obviously, if she’s in the nomination I’m going to vote for her.”

At the state convention, Sanders delegates will hear speeches from about 350 people who applied for 20 delegate spots to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Jake Hamburg, the communications director of the Alaska Democratic Party, said Sanders supporters will pick 13, Hillary Clinton supporters will pick three. There are also six pledged delegates, two of whom are alternates.

Hamburg doesn’t know how many teens are headed to the state convention, but he isn’t surprised to hear about Busby’s trip.

“We don’t identify delegates by age, but in talking with other folks that have been around for a while, we’ve never seen a delegation this young and also this engaged to showing up to a state convention before,” he said. “So it is really exciting to see. The new Democrats and the young people that are getting involved are really taking an active role in shaping the party going forward.”

Busby didn’t apply for a spot as a national delegate, in part because she doesn’t think she can afford it. She’s already spent $400 getting to the state convention, a small fortune for a college student.

Editor’s note: The delegate counts have been clarified. A previous version of this story omitted pledged delegates. 

For the next two months, about 3,800 seniors will see their monthly checks from the state’s senior benefits program cut to $8 a month. That’s down from as much as $125 in February.

The $8 level isn’t permanent – it’s a correction of an overpayment caused by an accounting error, says Monica Windom, chief of policy and program development at the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.

“There was a programming error. It should have continued at $47 but instead it issued $125 again. So we were able to go in and stop the paper warrants and reissue them at the correct amount but some of the direct deposits we were not able to stop, it was too late,” Windom said.

This is the third time this year the group has seen their payments change.

Nearly 12,000 Alaskans qualify for the benefits program and payments are based on their monthly income. Last year, the legislature axed more than $3 million from the program.  While the monthly benefits for 6,000 of the poorest seniors were unaffected, some low-income seniors’ benefits fell nearly 60 percent.

To deal with the loss, program managers cut the benefit checks to the seniors in the program at higher income levels. With just a few weeks notice, more than 5,000 seniors saw their payments drop from $125 a month to $47. The first batch of newly reduced checks went out in March. Then in April, $125 checks were issued again.

May and June checks will be $8.

“But altogether they will get the same amount as they would have if we had issued $47 for each month,” Windom said.

The payments are likely to change for the fourth time this year in July when the new state budget takes effect.