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The Juneau Empire, Peninsula Clarion in Kenai and weekly Homer News are among 11 papers being sold by Morris Communications to GateHouse Media for a reported $120 million.

Newsrooms learned about the sale of their papers to GateHouse Media early Wednesday morning. The upstate New York-based chain is one of the fastest growing media companies in the country.

“I got an email from corporate, from Morris announcing it. And they referred us, they referred me to a press release on the Morris website,” said Homer News editor Michael Armstrong who has been with the newspaper since 1999. “The GateHouse people are visiting the Morris properties today and tomorrow and they’ll come down to Kenai and Homer and we’ll find out more from them.”

The Juneau Empire has been owned by the Georgia-based Morris family since 1969. They also bought the Peninsula Clarion in 1990.

“The sale will actually be final Oct. 2 and after that we’ll know a lot more, so for now it’s really business as usual,” said Publisher Deedie McKenzie.

The Kenai-based executive said she’s been told she’ll be kept on by the new company and that the Morris family had been looking at selling the newspapers for about a year.

“GateHouse was a really good fit and it’s a great opportunity for these newspapers to also become part of a larger newspaper company,” she said. “They’re in 36 states, so it’s a great opportunity for us.”

The off-loading of 11 newspapers by the family-owned Morris chain is part of an industry-wide trend.

“I think we’re in a period of quite a lot of consolidation,” said media analyst Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute. “Even the language of the press release sort of follows the story line that’s been developing, which is that it’s harder and harder for either individual papers or smaller chains to stay competitive.”

GateHouse now owns more than 130 newspapers in mostly small- and mid-sized markets, more than any other chain and finds ways to consolidate its holdings for efficiency.

“They have a very large copy editing and layout center in Austin, Texas, that does all of their papers,” Edmonds said.

The company emerged from a $1.2 billion bankruptcy in 2013 and has since been recapitalized by a private equity firm. Since then, it’s expanded rapidly into the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain, after Gannett. Its parent company is a publicly traded company called New Media Investment, which is backed by a private equity fund.

The arrangement is unorthodox: Fortress Investment Group controls less than 1 percent of company stock but wields an enormous amount of control.

“The bigger the company gets, the more money the external manager Fortress collects,” said Jeff Gordon, a sports columnist with the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis. He’s also president of the United Media Guild, which represents unionized workers at 18 GateHouse papers. He’s critical of how a financial entity is rearranging small media companies.

“Basically, Fortress Investment Group operates as the external manager so it gets millions of dollars in revenue from quote-unquote managing this company and basically arranging for financing and backing purchases,” Gordon said.

The Morris family will retain some holdings in Alaska. It’s not selling the Juneau Empire’s building or the Alaska Journal of Commerce, Alaska Equipment Trader and the weekly Chugiak-Eagle River Star.

KBBI’s Aaron Bolton in Homer contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from Deedie McKenzie and the United Media Guild.

An Anchorage firefighter badly hurt during training is making progress in a Colorado hospital amid an outpouring of support from Alaska.

Ben Schultz, 29, fell from a ladder in June and was in critical condition for a time.

Fire Captain Jason Dolph said Schultz had been in an unconscious or semi-unconscious state ever since.

That is until a week ago.

“He said a few words,” Dolph said. “He said, ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ and ‘Hi.’ Over the last week, it’s just been leaps and bounds every day.”

Dolph said it was heartening news to Schultz’s supporters, many of whom were on hand for an Anchorage fundraiser Friday at Elite Sports Performance that raised more than $100,000 for Schultz’s long-term medical care.

“You know, typically people are calling 911 when they’re in crisis and we’re coming to help them,” Dolph said. “In this particular instance, we put the 911 call out to the community, and said we need your help, it’s one of our own.”

Ben Schultz’s father, Jeff Schultz, said the community answered that call, not just with raising money that will help his son’s recovery, but also by sending photos and well wishes.

The Schultzes have been with Ben for weeks in Colorado.

“Alaska and Alaskans, special place and special people. Makes me proud to live there for sure,” Jeff Schultz said. “Ben’s lived there his whole life; he’s one of Anchorage’s finest. They do good work, and people appreciate that.”

Jeff Schultz said his son continues to fight and improve but still has a tough road ahead of him.

“We’re in the middle of a S.W.A.T. team!” Alison Talley said that warning prompted her to look outside Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on Friday. She saw several police officers dressed in body armor and armed with rifles.

In a press release, Juneau Police Department said the officers served a search warrant on a home in the 400 block of Fourth Street.

Officer Jason Van Sickle said the department wouldn’t comment on the search because it’s part of an open investigation.

The next day, Monica Ritter stood in her front yard, down the street from the house. She’s co-founder of the Uptown Neighborhood Association. She’s lived in this neighborhood for 24 years and she said over the past four years she’s heard neighbors complain more and more about criminal activity in the area. Lately, they’ve been worried about the house that police searched and one right next door.

“All I know is from what the neighbors see and hear, and the phrase, ‘Those two houses.’ Keeps coming up,” Ritter said. “… The police officer has said at our meetings that they’re working on surveillance and working on the case that involves illegal activity coming and going out of those two houses.”

Ritter said she and Joanie Waller started the Uptown Neighborhood Association in October last year because they wanted to have a closer relationship with their neighbors and the city.

She said there are roughly 100 people on the association’s email list and they’re actively trying to add more neighbors.

“So, we’re hoping that whoever owns the property where all these negative happenings are going on will have to be held accountable and have to clean up their properties – physically and human activity-wise,” she said.

James Barrett lives on Harris Street, across from the two homes. He said he and his mother, Kathleen, own them through Breffni Place Properties, a limited liability company. Barrett said the police search was about stolen property, and he has had some problems with the tenants. He declined to provide further comment.

City records show the Barretts’ company also holds ownership of the Bergmann Hotel, which the city condemned for safety hazards in March. The hotel is less than a block from the house police searched Friday. City residents have complained about criminal activity inside the hotel for years.

The executive director of Juneau Youth Services abruptly left the nonprofit this summer under unclear circumstances. Now, he’s a top administrator at Juneau’s hospital.

Bartlett Regional Hospital’s chief behavioral health officer left last month to take a job in Pittsburgh. Hospital CEO Chuck Bill said there were three local candidates to fill the position. One of them was Bradley Grigg, who until very recently had been the executive director of Juneau Youth Services.

“Bradley was our number one choice and accepted the position,” Bill said Thursday. “He’ll be the administrator responsible for all of our behavioral and mental health services.”

Grigg was offered the job on July 18 – seven days after he’d left Juneau Youth Services after little more than a year.

He said he’s excited about his new position.

“It’s an honor to be a part of what Bartlett is doing in the community to meet the needs, especially in my field of behavioral health,” Grigg said.

The circumstances of Griggs’s departure from Juneau Youth Services isn’t clear.

Juneau Youth Services Board President Kathi Collum wouldn’t comment except to confirm his annual salary was $130,000 when he left July 11.

Grigg wouldn’t comment either.

“The circumstances, basically – I really don’t have a comment to that, at this point,” he said Thursday. “Both the board and myself made the decision. So, I left JYS, I think it was on July 9 or July 10; so that’s my only comment on that. I was the ED up until to that date.”

The nonprofit Juneau Youth Services has run programs for at-risk youth for more than 50 years. It has more than 110 employees in the community.

Chuck Bill said the hiring committee checked that Grigg’s resume was accurate but didn’t dig deeper.

“As in most references what they did is verify his dates of employment and that’s all we got,” Bill said. “But he’s well-known in the community and well-known to us.”

Bartlett’s chief behavioral health officer supervises about 70 employees and is responsible for the 12-bed mental health unit, psychiatric outpatient services and Rainforest Recovery Center.

His salary is $161,138.

Juneau’s long-awaited whale park will be named Mayor Bill Overstreet Park. The former Juneau mayor passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

Jean Overstreet received an extended ovation at Monday’s Assembly meeting after the body voted unanimously to name the park in her husband’s honor.

The former mayor and educator was a driving force behind the whale park committee, which has donated more than $600,000 to the project to date.

“It’s really nice to be able to honor Mayor Overstreet by naming the park, it was very popular,” City Manager Rorie Watt told KTOO. “Mayor Overstreet first came into my office, it feels like 10 years ago, when he started working on the idea. He had great vision and endurance and it’s going to be really nice to complete the project in his memory.”

The Assembly also directed an additional $1.2 million to contractor Admiralty Construction to do additional work. Watt said the city isn’t spending any more than already in the budget, but rather streamlining the bidding process to save money.

“All they did was authorize that we added more work to that contractor without going through a competitive bid process,” Watt said.

Funding the $10 million project is mix of sales tax revenue, donations from the whale committee and fees collected from cruise ship passengers.

The cruise ship industry is suing the city over the use of the marine passenger fees.

Watt said the city is trying to be conservative on how it uses those fees while the lawsuit’s pending.

“There’s always been a dividing line between what we thought was appropriate use for passenger fees and appropriate use for sales tax and/or donations from the whale committee,” Watt said.

Admiralty Construction is now on track to finish the seawalk from the new foot bridge to Gold Creek.

A public restroom and a pumphouse for the water fountain by the whale sculpture remains under construction. It’s slated to be completed next spring.

A pair of businessmen is interested in raising funds to buy Juneau’s power utility and return it to local control. And they want the city’s help doing it. That revelation slipped out during Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting.

After 120 years of local ownership, Juneau’s electric company, Alaska Electric Light & Power was sold to Spokane-based Avista Corp.

Now, Avista is being acquired by Hydro One of Canada in a complex deal that still needs to be approved by regulators in several states and federal agencies.

But before that happens a group of local investors plans to approach Hydro One with an offer to buy AEL&P. They’re in the process of raising at least $170 million to match what Avista paid for it in 2014.

None of this was public until Assemblywoman Debbie White proposed the mayor send a letter to Hydro One on behalf of the unnamed investors.

“I just think that this is a last-ditch effort to try to keep and retain local ownership of our utility,” White said at Monday’s meeting.

That caught a number of Assembly members by surprise. Especially as White asked that the names in her draft letter be kept confidential until the very last minute.

“This is the very first I hear of any of this so it’s hard to have an opinion,” Assemblywoman Maria Gladziszewski said. “And there’s some suggestion that we can’t name the names of the individuals.”

She was one of several who urged caution.

“It’s very premature to make any commitments or even a suggestion of commitments,” Gladziszewski  added.

The Assembly ultimately directed the city manager to draft a different letter of interest – without any explicit commitment to a deal.

But Debbie White’s original draft letter became a public record as soon as it was brought into open session; it named the investors as Duff Mitchell and Keith Comstock.

“What we were looking for was just an exploratory letter,” Mitchell told KTOO in a telephone interview after the meeting. “I mean, we do not know if Hydro One would be interested.”

Mitchell and Keith Comstock are behind Juneau Hydropower and Juneau District Heating, which for years have been developing a hydro plant and a heating plan for downtown Juneau. Both projects have yet to break ground.

“A lot of people in our community may think that this is so many zeros and so difficult – it’s not really,” Mitchell said. “We just want to put out to the community that there’s a will, there’s a way and it’s financially doable.”

Mitchell said the city could have a stake in a future investment group.

“If the city wants to have some of the profits and some of the dividends that are yielded to places outside our community,” he said, “there’s a way to keep those dollars circulating in our community.”

What role the city might have in a future deal is far from being decided or explored. Public discussion is only just beginning.