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The Juneau Empire last week shut down its office in the Jordan Creek Center and relocated to what’s reportedly a single-desk space at Vintage Business Park. The masthead in Saturday’s print edition lists no staff, aside from an obituaries/legal notice person based outside Juneau — and the only job opening is for a general sales manager.
For weeks the only byline on local stories has been “Juneau Empire staff” and virtually all of those stories — generally two or three per twice-weekly issue — have been rewritten press releases. The rest is filled with “wire” copy from sources such as the Alaska Beacon, plus local and “wire” opinion submissions. The Empire is continuing to publish opinion and other reader-contributed items such as religion features by local residents.
The print edition of the Empire on Wednesday was a single section with six pages and last Saturday a single section with eight pages. It still costs the same $2 as editions published a year ago when the editions were twice that size and filled almost entirely with local staff content.
At the Peninsula Clarion and Homer News, the other two newspapers in Alaska owned by Carpenter Media Group, there appears to be a single person in Homer doing newsroom work.
No help wanted listings for reporters at any of those publications have been seen recently at journalismjobs.com or Poynter’s jobs site, two of the most common places to look. The Empire’s website, in the “careers” section of its website that’s accessed through a submenu, does list an opening for a “full-time general reporter” that was posted Feb. 3.
The listed contact for the position is Mary Kemmis, senior vice president and group publisher of Carpenter’s Canadian Division. She did not respond to email inquiries about the company’s plans for its Alaska papers. During a teleconferenced meeting I took part in a year ago, she asserted that community newspapers can attract local readers with content not produced by local reporters.
“I don’t think there’s any problem with having stories that are regional or statewide,” she said. “We’ve never had that problem anywhere else. I don’t happen to think Americans are that much different from Canadians. And I don’t happen to think Alaskans are that much different from Albertans.”
Carpenter’s cost-cutting at publications nationwide is well-documented and it’s hardly surprising the company would take such actions when it purchased the Empire’s parent company, Black Press Media (owner of Sound Publishing), after bankruptcy/creditor protection filings by Canada-based BPM. When I returned to the Empire in April of 2022 (I had also worked there between 1995 and 2006), for the first two years I heard constantly the paper couldn’t keep publishing if it kept losing money.
Also, Black Press/Sound Publishing did plenty of cost cuts prior to Carpenter’s takeover. When I joined in 2022 the Empire’s newsroom had an editor and three full-time reporters, a publisher, and there was also an ad manager, subscription manager and a receptionist — not to mention papers were still printed locally five times a week, which required pressroom and delivery employees.
While the Caprenter’s newsroom practices have been heavily denounced by journalists and some readers, the company may be in a strong position to argue it is achieving its goal of improving the financial standing of its publications in Alaska. It comes down to the simple math of it the company has been able to dramatically cuts costs while retaining most of its readers.
A comparison of the Empire’s readership and financial figures now versus a year ago isn’t readily available. However, a year ago as editor of the Empire I was told the paper was among the relative few owned by Carpenter that had made a profit during the previous 12 months. But the profit wasn’t high enough to meet their “best practices” goals, which was among the reasons they were planning to impose cost-cutting as well as newsroom coverage changes.
Online readership also surged upward significantly during the five months before I departed, but I can’t say if that included any new subscribers or just the same subscribers reading more articles. Again, though, if the site still has most of its subscribers then the number of web clicks isn’t overly relevant other than for marketing/advertising purposes.
As noted in the disclaimer above, the intent here is to report the closure of the Empire’s former office and current staffing status, not to criticize it (or promote the Independent — which a critic could fairly note has operated at a loss during most months since launching nearly a year ago). As I’ve stated on various occasions in this space and elsewhere, readers can make their own judgements about how well they feel local media outlets are fulfilling their roles.
The post Juneau Empire shuts office where 8 people worked a few years ago; now appears to be seeking 1 salesperson appeared first on Chilkat Valley News.
“We talk about you everyday, your sweet voice serenades us everyday, & we miss you everyday.” Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country
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VININGS, Ga. — Brad Raffensperger is fighting to save his political future as MAGA takes hold of the Georgia GOP.
The secretary of state rose to national prominence by defying President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, but he is carefully trying to avoid the anti-Trump lane while he runs for governor.
Instead, he’s running an old-school campaign aimed at an old-school Republican Party: He’s holding low-key events compared with his GOP opponents’ flashier rallies, and he’s focusing on bread-and-butter issues, rather than harping on election security. At one Atlanta-area rotary club gathering in April, Raffensperger was all too happy to tout his business background and his pledge to cap property taxes. Everywhere he goes, he drops the word conservative.
“I have my own lane, and I feel good where we are,” Raffensperger told POLITICO after the event. “It’s the lane about being a Christian conservative businessman who’s built a business from scratch.”
At its core, Raffensperger’s candidacy is a test of whether the party’s non-MAGA guard can hold on in one of the nation’s premiere battleground states. He’s defied expectations before, fending off a Trump-backed candidate in 2022 to keep his current position. But 2026 poses a new challenge, as Georgia’s GOP has increasingly shunned its small government roots in favor of aligning with the populist right.
Raffensperger maintains he has a path to victory. Asked whether Trump’s grip on the party is complicating it, he deflected: “I’m doing just fine. I’m going to be in the run-off.”
But the reality is Raffensperger is still struggling to break through in the governor’s race, polling at a consistent third place behind Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson ahead of the May 19 primary. Republican strategists and officials in the state were widely skeptical of Raffensperger’s chances of success.
“This is the party of Trump today — like it or not, it is — and I find it very difficult to see someone being able to be anti-Trump in a Republican primary and be successful,” said Casey Cagle, a Republican who served as lieutenant governor from 2007 to 2019. He’s experienced the rise of the MAGA base firsthand and has since tacked further to the right.
“The base has grown far, far greater to the right than what it was in my day,” said Cagle, who is supporting Jones in the governor’s race. “The core of the Republican Party has moved far away from the Chamber of Commerce mindset.”
Before February of this year, Raffensperger seemed poised to draw enough support in the primary to keep Jones under the 50 percent threshold he needed to trigger a run-off election. Then Jackson upended the race with his bombastic spending and MAGA pandering, pushing Raffensperger further down in the polls.
Even if the secretary of state were to make a run-off against either Jones or Jackson, his chances of actually winning the nomination are still slim, said GOP strategist Jeremy Brand, who has worked on Gov. Brian Kemp-aligned committees and is unaffiliated in the governor’s race.
“It’d be incredibly tough,” Brand said. “The edge in a run-off where voters are traditionally more conservative, that are willing to come back out again, I think the odds go to the more conservative candidate.”
Raffensperger has been battling his own party on various fronts since he first stood up to Trump.
A faction of the Georgia GOP tried to bar him from seeking office again on the Republican ticket. And local party leaders recently broke with precedent to allow the RNC to eschew its neutrality and spend resources on backing Jones in the primary. The MAGA base that failed to oust Raffensperger in 2022 is trying again to end his political career — along with others deemed insufficiently loyal to the president.
Attorney General Chris Carr, like Raffensperger, is also mounting a bid for governor and previously defeated a Trump-backed challenger in 2022. But he’s polling even lower than the secretary of state. And Gabriel Sterling, a former top Raffensperger lieutenant, is locked in a noisy primary in his bid for secretary of state as he faces off against a former Democrat-turned-MAGA acolyte and a GOP state representative who once served as Kemp’s top aide.
The 2020 election has continued to be a key litmus test in Georgia, especially as Trump continues to air his grievances over his loss. Several recounts and extensive litigation have only proven Raffensperger’s case that former President Joe Biden fairly defeated Trump in 2020. But many voters and candidates continue to question the truth of the results in a show of loyalty to the president, further isolating the secretary from the increasingly conservative Republican base.
“I voted for Trump. I wish he’d have won. I think he did win, I’m one of those people,” said Bruce Brooker, 72, outside a Jones campaign event in rural Atkinson County earlier this month.
An April POLITICO Poll found that most respondents who plan to vote for Republicans this midterm are still skeptical: Nearly 40 percent say the 2020 election was stolen, while 25 percent don’t believe it was but have questions about the election’s legitimacy. Just 25 percent say the election wasn’t stolen.
Raffensperger continues to defend his work and the integrity of Georgia’s elections at large — “I’m really proud because we made elections more secure” — and is quick to highlight the changes he and state Republicans made in their 2021 overhaul of how the state conducts elections, which drew ire from Democrats and the MLB alike.
Still, several Georgia Republicans say he’s struggling to play catch-up as the base shifts away from his technocratic approach to politics.
“Brad stands in stark conflict to a party that is at the activist level very much aligned with President Trump, when Raffensperger is anything but,” said one former longtime state GOP official, granted anonymity to speak openly about evolving party dynamics. “His candidacy will be and is a test to determine if that lane still exists in the Georgia Republican Party apparatus.”
On a recent afternoon, Raffensperger, clad in a navy suit and striped red tie, headlined the Vinings-Cumberland Rotary Club’s weekly meeting, shaking hands and chatting with voters before taking his place behind the lectern at the front of the room. The state’s legislative session had ended barely a week earlier.
“What I thought I’d do is tell you where we are right now. We just finished up my last session,” he told the audience, ticking through accomplishments: streamlining professional licensing processes, securing an agreement to have money returned to victims of a local Ponzi scheme, and improving systems to make Georgia elections “free, fair and fast.”
It wasn’t the kind of red meat fodder that Republican politics thrive on in the Trump era, but the type of accolades that resonate with the kind of voters at the meeting, held just over the border from Atlanta’s city limits in suburban Cobb County.
Cobb County is one of several former Republican bastions surrounding metro Atlanta that have flipped blue as the Trump-styled GOP turned off suburban voters. Once the homebase for conservative stalwart former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the county voted overwhelmingly for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 despite her statewide loss to Trump.
It’s still home to plenty of business-focused Republican voters who are not keen on the president — then-Sen. Marco Rubio carried the county over Trump during the 2016 GOP primaries, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley performed nearly twice as well in the county compared to her statewide returns against the president in 2024. These are the voters Raffensperger is focused on, content to let Jones and Jackson battle it out for the MAGA class.
Jason Shepherd, the former Cobb County Republican chair, said the low-key civic group events have “been the hallmark of Brad Raffensperger’s success” and an emblem of the party’s business-focused past. It’s in sharp contrast with the attention-grabbing rallies that have defined Trump’s dominance of Republican politics.
Raffensperger’s quieter approach has previously served him well, when he overcame a 2022 primary challenge from former Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) who ran with the president’s endorsement. This time is different: Then, he held the power of incumbency and benefited from Trump’s influence waning temporarily in the aftermath of Jan. 6 and his 2020 election defeat.
Now, Trump, back in power, has reaffirmed his iron grip on the party and Raffensperger is up against two MAGA candidates pining for the base’s attention. Add to that the fact he’s being massively outspent: His $4 million has been dwarfed by Jackson’s whopping $61 million and Jones’ $26 million in expenditures, according to an AdImpact analysis.
The Jones and Carr campaigns were quick to dismiss claims that the secretary of state had a path to the run-off and an eventual win. A spokesperson for Jackson did not respond to a request for comment.
If Raffensperger were to lose the primary, his loss would become another nail in the coffin for an old-school GOP that continues to resist MAGA. But his insistence that his lane — and version of the Republican Party — still exists is, for his closest allies, a testament to his persistence.
“Brad Raffensperger never really stopped from 2022 on,” said Sterling, the Raffensperger ally who’s running for secretary of state and has also faced MAGA’s ire for refusing to overturn election results. “He could have set up a foundation, gone around the country and just talked about democracy and he would have been applauded. Instead he chose to go into the battle and fight.”
Politics
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