Community

The Federal Communications Commission has approved GCI’s purchase of an Anchorage and two Southeast television stations.  But the company says viewers will not notice much change once Denali Media is on the air.

GCI a year ago announced its plan to get into broadcast television and news programming statewide.  A number of television companies opposed the purchase.

The FCC order assigns KTVA in Anchorage, KATH-TV in Juneau, and KSCT, Sitka, to Denali Media Anchorage and Denali Media Southeast, new subsidiaries of General Communications, Inc., the state’s largest telecommunications company.

GCI expects the transaction will close within a week.  Corporate Services Vice President David Morris says the purchase price will not be released.

GCI provides cable television, Internet, wireless, and telephone statewide. This is its first foray into over-the air television.

Morris says the first new service the company will roll out will be a new look on the Anchorage CBS affiliate.

“The main one that we’re focused on right now is the high definition newscast originating from KTVA in Anchorage,” he says.

The small Southeast stations are affiliated with the NBC Network. The NBC signal is retransmitted from KATH in Juneau to Sitka’s KSCT, and seen in Angoon, Petersburg and Wrangell.

“We don’t see any reason why that would change,” he says. 

KATH also broadcasts some original Juneau programming.  Morris says in the near term that will not change.

“In general, if you’ve got local programming that people watch, they want to see it then it’s in the interest of the station to keep that local programming,” he says.

Public interest

In it’s order, the FCC said GCI’s takeover of the television stations was in the public interest of local viewers.  But a number of Alaska broadcasters opposed the buyout based on GCI’s near monopoly in cable television. The stations argued a distribution company as large as GCI could not compete fairly with traditional television stations.

The broadcasters, including KTUU in Anchorage, filed a Petition to Deny with the FCC, comparing it to Comcast cable’s acquisition of television program producer NBC Universal.  In that case the FCC required several conditions that limited competition between cable and broadcast television.

Instead, the FCC granted GCI the licenses without any  conditions.

Denali Media has created a news department and plans to compete with Alaska television stations.

Andy MacLeod is KTUU President and General Manager.  His says the safeguards applied in the Comcast/NBC merger would level the playing field.

“They need to compete with us.  You know the news business is a very competitive business. I would say you know we’re really not going to change what we do.  We tell Alaska’s story and we send people all over the state ad every week we pumped out 22 hours of news.

Jack Goodman is KTUU attorney in Washington, D.C.  In filings with the FCC, he said the broadcast licenses just extend GCI’s monopoly in the state.  But the commissioners discounted that.

“They gave little weight to what appeared to us to be very serious concerns about the implications of GCI’s  ownership of almost all the  cable and broadband connections in Alaska and a leading broadcast station (with the purchase of KTVA),” Goodman says.

Goodman says the broadcasters who opposed GCI’s station purchase can petition the FCC for review.  If denied, the broadcasters could take the case to federal court.

GCI’s Morris says the launch of Denali Media had been planned for late September, but  with the delay in the FCC approval, it’s not clear when new television service will hit the air waves.

Juneau’s Eaglecrest is on to the second round of the Ski Town Throwdown.

The tiny ski area Monday proved to be more popular in the competition than Whistler/Blackcomb Ski Resort near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Whistler/Blackcomb is huge by comparison, but throughout the day Eaglecrest was a couple hundred votes ahead in the contest, conducted on Powder Magazine’s Facebook page. The magazine paired the areas.

Eaglecrest is the only Alaska ski area in the competition.  Girdwood’s Alyeska Resort lost to Panorama Mountain Village in B.C. earlier this month.

The magazine divides the ski areas into geographic regions, the Great White North, Far West, Rocky Mountain West and the Big East.

Eaglecrest snow sports director Jeffra Clough says the Ski Town Throwdown has six rounds, just like the March Madness basketball championship.

“There’s the second round and then they call it the Sweet 16, the Elite 8, the Final 4 and then the finals,” Clough says.  “And so the Great White North champion goes against the Big East champion on December 2^nd and 3^rd.”

The second round is Nov. 7^th, when Eaglecrest will be paired against Mount Washington in British Columbia.  The  Vancouver Island ski area is the winner of Tuesday’s Powder Magazine competition against Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, also in B.C.

The capital city’s bus system wants to hear from you – whether you ride the bus every day, or have never been aboard.

Over the last few months, CBJ-operated Capital Transit has been updating its five-year Transit Development Plan.

So far, the study shows the current system has high ridership, general passenger satisfaction as well as a number of challenges.  Some of those include crowded buses, too much service to areas with low demand, and not enough to parts of the borough where demand is higher.

Transportation planning company Nelson Nygaard is working on the transit plan. Consultant Paul Lutey says an evaluation of Capital Transit and public comments indicate several issues to be addressed.

“Those are largely related to operational issues. Making sure that the buses are running on schedule, and a few other little tweaks like getting the express route to the downtown transit center and a little bit further into downtown, but also to serve some new areas that we heard some demand for, like Riverside Drive, like Costco and Home Depot,” Lutey says.

Lutey and others working on the study will explain several scenarios for service and have maps of the proposals at meetings Tuesday and Wednesday.

Geoff Slater is also with Nelson Nygaard.  He says the next phase of the plan is to develop alternatives for the future.

“This is a combination of us determining what would work well for the system, but it also has to do with local priorities.  So what we want to do is match up what really will work best for the system and what’s most important for people. That’s really the point of the meetings.  We do have different options on ways to do things and we want to do the one that works the best and would be the best received,” Slater says.

Tuesday’s meeting is from 4:30 to 6:30 at the Mendenhall Valley Library in Mendenhall Mall.  There’s another meeting on Wednesday at the downtown library, also from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

The Director of Audience at the Juneau Empire says the newspaper may be entering a period of stability.

Former managing editor Charles L. Westmoreland has returned, replacing John Moses, who left earlier this month.  No word as to whether he was asked to resign, and Moses also would not comment.

In April, publisher Mark Bryan was replaced, just days after the paper rolled out a digital content pay wall.  Reporters have been coming and going.

But Director of Audience Abby Lowell says reporting staff is up, with the hire of three reporters in the past few months.

Lowell’s job itself is new.  She says Empire owner Morris Communications created the position at papers it owns outside Alaska, so when current publisher Rustan Burton took over, he added Director of Audience.

Lowell was already working for the paper, applied and got the job.

“Basically it’s my job to help make sure the paper is valuable to all the audiences we serve.  Whether it’s an advertising audience, whether it is readership, whether it’s contacts for stories, I want to make sure we are valuable to them and that the proper messages are getting to the right folks,” she says.

Lowell says she has her hands in a “little bit of everything,” from advertising to circulation to the newsroom and the web.  She studies web analytics, conducts surveys and reaches out to the community. One new thing is “lunch with the publisher.”

“It’s all of us reaching out to the community and saying ‘hey we’re doing this and we want your input, would you like to come over for lunch some time and talk you us about what you see were doing, and where you see opportunities?’  Essentially, give us the good, bad and the ugly.  It’s OK, we want to hear it,” Lowell says.

The Empire also is starting a new Readers’ Council, which Lowell calls another editorial board that is unaffiliated with the newspaper.  She says the group would contribute opinion pieces to the paper.

Lowell says the Readers’ Council would be another way the Empire hopes to engage the audience so readers feel they have a say in what goes into the capital city’s newspaper.

With hockey season well underway, the Juneau Douglas Ice Association kicked off a series of skills development camps designed to help players interested in playing any position, including goalie. Thirty-four kids stormed the ice Sunday afternoon for one hour of instruction and some friendly competition among themselves. All photos by Steve Quinn

A special election on Monday could put Eaglecrest Ski Area on the map outside Alaska.

Eaglecrest is included in Powder Magazine’s Ski Town Throwdown, competing against Whistler/Blackcomb Ski Resort, near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Whistler/Blackcomb is many, many times larger than Juneau’s city-owned ski and snowboard area.  But if enough people vote for Eaglecrest, not only will there be bragging rights, but Powder Magazine will feature Eaglecrest and Juneau in one of its monthly editions.

General Manager Matt Lillard says the international magazine reached out to Eaglecrest to include it in the competition, which has several rounds.

“Right now we’re just focusing on beating out Whistler/Blackcomb. They’re obviously a much bigger area with definitely a much bigger following than us.  So we’re going to try to get everybody out there and win this round then we’ll start focusing on the next one after that,” Lillard says.

Ski Town Throwdown is a competition among a variety of ski towns and resorts across the U.S. and Canada.

“If we can keep going it just shows that we’ve got passionate skiers, a great area and it just gets our name out there more and more,” Lillard says. 

Fans vote through Powder Magazine’s Facebook page one day only.  For Eaglecrest, voting will be open for 24 hours on Monday, Oct. 28.