Chilkat Valley News staff brought home several awards from Alaska Press Club last weekend, including Best Picture Story for the second year in a row.
Here’s more about what led to each award-winning piece.
“A weekend restoring Eldred Rock”
First Place – Best Picture Story
A lot of the time with news photos you have too much to photograph and too little time. Not so with this one: I had 72 hours on Eldred Rock which is, well, a rock, with no way to leave save for the boat that was anchored off shore and out of reach. And it just so happened to be the most beautiful 72 hours of summer. We spent the time lifting windows, eating applesauce, and watching the ferries and summer light drift past.
The biggest challenge for me was trying to capture the very different scales of being confined to such a small, stationary vantage point amid such a large landscape. On the one hand, you go up to the top of the lighthouse and you could spend a lifetime counting the peaks and little coves that stretch from the rock to the horizon.
On the other hand, if you spend enough time out there you learn just how much history the lighthouse. And you can see it in the small details of the construction, assuming you have people like Dan Humphrey walking you through it all.
So hopefully, in the photos, there’s a sense of both of those ways of looking around.
“Haines’ landslide maps unused, what comes next?”
Second Place – Best Public Safety Reporting
The question of planning for the future with landslides is complicated. It’s hard for a layperson like me to understand the complex science, and the science itself has plenty of uncertainty baked in — the nature of a weather phenomenon with so many different risk factors. There’s the issue of what a government as small and as busy as the Haines Borough can do with that science.
But walking around neighborhoods and knocking on doors, I got a sense for some of the human factors too: the lives people have built in specific places, the own personal risk calculations everyone makes. That’s something you don’t necessarily get from just looking at government documents and statistics.
So while a lot of the word count in the article is spent on the landslide maps in a more abstract sense, I wanted to bookend it with stories from the people who actually live every day on the ground described by those maps. And I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to do just that, answering their doors on cold days and taking time to talk.
“Haines man finds long lost father in Scotland”
First Place – Best Profile
I forget exactly where this story came from, but at some point someone told us we needed to talk to Mike and get his story. Apparently, they said, he had met his long-lost father, who turned out to be a movie star.
I reached out to Thompson, and after a couple hours talking to him, I had the story.
If you ever get a chance to talk to him, you should: a guy that has seen and done a whole lot of different things — kind of incredible things — and knows how to tell a good story.
Even so, it’s unusual that you’d write any story with only one source or one voice, especially as a journalist. We’re supposed to verify from multiple sources and get all the perspectives involved. With this one, I couldn’t talk to the other main characters: I wasn’t able to reach his brother, and just as I was reporting the story, Thompson’s father died.
I tried to work around that by talking about Thompson as a character himself, and not just the narrator: what he was like recounting the story, how he walked me through the evidence from various parts of his story — photos, text chains, and so on. I wanted to situate the story in his kitchen, interviewing him specifically in the aftermath of the events he was describing. That’s an interesting question to me: not just the crazy discovery, but how you think through what comes after.
The article benefitted hugely from former CVN reporter Francisco Martinezcuello’s editing, including his advice to flip the beginning and end of the story. Everyone should get themselves a narrative expert on speed dial who happens to be very generous with their time.
“Stuck in traffic? Here’s what everyone else is doing”
Second Place – Best Travel Reporting
This story idea came from the paper’s Duly Noted columnist Chuck Jones, which I think you can tell if you read the article and know her. I try to be more like her as a reporter: she spends so much time outside, going where people actually are, and telling the story of what people are actually talking about. I’m pretty confident that’s her not-so-secret secret to getting such a good Duly Noted column every week.
So for this article, I just got to spend the entire afternoon out in the sun on the side of the highway. Pretty great work day.
What I like about this article, and about what Jones does with Duly Noted, is giving a sort of simultaneous window into a whole bunch of different, small worlds. It’s not news to me on its own that the mailman eats tortilla chips or someone else is counting butterflies. But all together, it’s nice knowing that given the exact same same part of a traffic stop, all these different neighbors and community members find their own, unique ways to get to the other side.
Steinfeld was also named the best solo journalist in the state and won an award for a photo he took of a competitor in the Southeast Alaska State Fair. While editor Rashah McChesney also won an outdoor writing award for her piece on Tom McGuire who drowned in Chilkoot Lake last year.
For the second year, the Chilkat Valley News was edged out of the competition for the best weekly newspaper in the state. That honor went to the Petersburg Pilot first, then the Wrangell Sentinel, and finally the Nome Nugget.
Every story the Chilkat Valley News produces is a collaboration between the community, the journalist and the audience. The paper relies on questions, insights, tips, letters to the editor, and feedback from people who live in the region.
We’ve also featured stories from former reporter Francisco Martínezcuello this year, former owner Kyle Clayton, obituaries from Heather Lende, editorial intern Chisel Triezenberg and had graphic design help from intern Robin Oaks.
Much of our success should be attributed to our long-running business manager Jane Pascoe, advertising and salesperson Chuck Jones, and an army of proof readers including Nancy Nash, Bonnie Hedrick, Tripp Course, Angie Pappas, and Liz Heywood who have made each story shine.
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