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January 18 2010
J-Week 2010 News
Thank you for your patience as the Alaska Press Club organizes for J-week 2010, the journalism competition and the annual conference of workshops and banquet.
Here’s some current information:
CONTEST DEADLINE: Alaska Press Club entries must be postmarked by Friday, Feb. 19, 2010. The membership form is available for download here. Here is the Alaska Press Club Awards Contest Entry Form (PDF). Review contest rules in the December 2008 Polar Bear available by PDF on this page
CONFERENCE DATES: J-Week will be Thursday through Saturday, May 6 - 8, 2010 in two locations. Thursday, May 6, with a focus on radio, will be held at APTI (home of APRN, KSKA, KAKM). While the focus is on radio reporting, all APC members are welcome. The conference moves to Rasmuson Hall on the University of Alaska Anchorage campus for May 7-8, Friday and Saturday. We have the option of using this space on Sunday, May 9, if we have any spillover workshops.
March 14 2009
Q and A with 1st Amendment Award honorees Gregg and Judy Erickson
By Kathleen McCoy
At least one Alaska economist predicted the nation’s current financial turmoil in a column from 2004, titled, “Expect disaster worse than Depression.”
“Could George W. Bush be the Herbert Hoover of the 21st century? Hoover was the guy who happened to be president when the Great Depression unfolded in 1932. I don’t think what’s ahead for the American economy will be a repeat of the Great Depression: In key respects I think it may be worse.”
That alone should get worried Alaskans paying attention to what Gregg Erickson has to say. But there’s a much longer tradition behind his journalism, and his journalistic partnership with his wife, Judy, than predicting our current severe downturn.
Since 1986 for his wife, Judy, and since 1991 for himself, the Erickson team has engaged in watchdog journalism in the form of private newsletters covering Alaska state government and its relationships to resource industries and other entities. Gregg is best known for his work on the Alaska Budget Report. Judy is currently producing an oil and gas newsletter, and says the climate is crying out for a health issues newsletter written from Juneau. Together, they sued the state for access to state information and won, honored by an ACLU Liberty Award for that effort in 1997.
The Alaska Press Club has selected Team Erickson to receive the 2009 Tom Snapp Howard Rock First Amendment Award for their journalism. Fellow reporters wrote nominating letters cataloguing their public-interest contributions; watch this space for a posting of what others had to say about their work.
Gregg intends to address the banquet audience March 28, the evening of the press club awards, and Judy plans to be available for informal discussions about the experience of covering Juneau lawmakers up close. Her stories are revealing and fascinating. They both work seven days a week, sometimes 12-hour days. They have observations about the Alaska press corps, the four administrations they have covered and the state of complacency that led to recent corruption indictments and convictions.
Here, then, is a brief Q and A with the Ericksons, drawing on their unique experiences and fleshing out the picture of a journalistic team covering government in a small-town state capital.
APC: You’ve both served the public interest during the terms of four governors. Hickel, Knowles, Murkowski and Palin. Is the quest for public information the same with each administration (ie, variations on a struggle?) Or have different administrations taken different tacks toward disclosure. Have there been surprises?
GREGG
In the ways we traditionally think about public access to the secrets of those who govern us, things are terrible, as bad as they have been, ever. But if we broaden the idea of public access, to encompass information across the breadth of the information explosion, the verdict is not as clear. Think of BASIS, Alaska’s on-line legislative information site. For the first 21 years of experience with the Alaska legislature there was no BASIS or anything like it. Because information was so costly to dig up, the press paid scant attention to any but the most important bills. Now it’s not unusual for Judy to have a day when with a few key strokes she calls up a megabytes of information on dozens of bills. Another system lets us download a podcast of any hearing, no matter how obscure the subject. Every bit of it is government-paid free to the public. I hope to say more about this in my remarks on March 28.
JUDY:
I’m concerned about the current practice Governor Palin’s attorney general instituted during the governor’s vice presidential campaign of routing all public information requests through the Dept. of Law. Before his resignation, AG Talis Colberg talked to a finance subcommittee about the voluminous requests the administration had received for the governor’s e-mails. Colberg explained that the state’s inadequate system required an “attorney” to print off all e-mails before redacting them for confidential, proprietary and personal information. The state charges 10 cents per copy for information it dispenses; Colberg suggested lawmakers might consider a change in the law to also charge attorney time to review these requests. Luckily this suggestion did not catch on, but it’s those types of suggestions that could make a simple public records request prohibitively expensive and shut out the public entirely. It is also problematic that the Dept. of Law is redacting private information from state employees’ e-mails. All e-mails on state computers should be public information.
APC: How did you choose this line of work. As an economist you have taught economics at the university level, served state and national government, but eventually stepped out of government to play this watchdog role of the journalist. Tell us why.
GREGG:
For me the answer is simple. In March 1991 I lost my government job and reestablished my economic consulting practice. Clients initially were few. Judy, who at that point already had five years of making a living writing and publishing newsletters, asked if I would be interested in writing a newsletter covering the budget.
“Sure,” I said, but suggested she wouldn’t find enough subscribers to make a “Budget” newsletter a paying proposition.
“Do you mind if it see if people would buy some subscriptions?” Judy asked.
Go head, I said. Two weeks later Judy told me over dinner that she had sold six subscriptions at $2,500 each, and, by the way, what should we do with the $14,000 in checks in her purse. That’s how I got into reporting and how Judy took me as a partner in her publishing business.
JUDY:
My love of politics and the legislative process got me into this profession. I came to Alaska for the summer in 1971, with plans to return to U.C. Davis to get my masters in fine arts and education. I loved it here and never left.
In 1973 I took a job as a page in the Alaska Legislature and continued working for the legislature until 1977, when I had my first child. In 1975 and 1976, I worked as an assistant for House Speaker Mike Bradner. Bradner lost his bid for reelection in 1976, and became a full-time publisher of the Alaska Legislative Digest, a weekly report on the Alaska Legislature. In the early 1980s, Mike asked me to write for the Digest. During legislative interims, I began writing newsletters on resource and education issues. In January 1986 I started Capital Information Group, to publish my own oil and gas newsletter. I have also published newsletters over the past 20 years on insurance, air transportation, and environmental issues.
APC: Given the sorry state of the U.S. economy, would you say the public and the media haven’t been paying enough attention to budget reports, the very work you have specialized in? Who is to blame for the mess we are in fiscally in the nation?
GREGG:
Who do I blame? I’m very interested in figuring out what happened, but not too interested in punishing the guilty. I’m sure we all played a part. My December 2004 column laid it all out as I understood the coming economic collapse then. There are lots of things I would add today, but nothing I would change.
I said the public and media haven’t been playing enough attention? It’s true, I suppose, but I don’t recall ever saying it that way.
APC: Did you consider the 1998 decision in Capital Information Group v. State of Alaska fair? It was split. Was this your only suit for access to public documents? What was the cost of this fight to you? Who paid it? (Their work on this case won them the 1997 Liberty Award from the Alaska Civil Liberties Union.)?
JUDY & GREGG:
In 1992 Gov. Wally Hickel was getting beaten up in the press for turning down agency budget requests. The typical news story was based on official budget documents. The documents explained, for example, how many pregnant mothers would be forced into destitution because hard-hearted Wally wouldn’t let the agency’s budget grow with inflation.
Hickel officials ended that kind of easy story by declaring every budget request a state secret. In 1993, Judy and I sued under the Alaska Public Records Act.
The suit was carried forward by the Knowles administration. Five years later, in 1998, the Alaska Supreme Court rendered a final ruling on the case. For the most part they ruled against free access to public records, declaring that the “deliberative process doctrine” is the law of the land in Alaska.
Fortunately the court also ruled that we won one of our claims, related to very specific budget recommendation; because of this we were entitled to receive attorney’s fees. Somewhere in a dusty folder Gregg has a photo of the state’s $21,689.57 check made out to Capital Information Group. We kept $267 of this for some expenses, and sent the rest to our attorneys, including a far to small amount to the marvelous Doug Pope, who represented us in our Supreme Court appeal.
The deliberative process exemption has proven problematic, as administrations have since used it to broaden the scope of their secrecy policies. Should the highway maintenance people fill a pothole? A memo explaining why or why not is now a state secret, at least in the eyes of successive administrations. In recent cases the Alaska Supreme Court seems to be moving, albeit very slowly, toward limiting the use of the “secret” stamp by state and local governments. It would be helpful for the Alaska Supreme Court to explain in a more meaningful way what the privilege means.
There was a cost to this suit beyond the money paid to attorneys. There were former friends in the Knowles administration that refused to speak to us during this fight and after.
APC: Do you like living in Juneau? What are the benefits and what are the hazards? Especially when you take the positions you’ve taken—meeting those folks at the grocery store or in church or while buying a bottle of wine for dinner - do you have to have a thick skin? Do you have a great sense of humor? How do you negotiate close quarters when you take strong stands?
JUDY:
Gregg has a thicker skin than I do. He occasionally gets nasty comments on his columns and easily brushes them aside. I tend to take negative comments about Gregg far more personally than he does.
Living in Juneau is wonderful and most people here are agreeable, even when they disagree with you. More often than not, Gregg gets kudos from friends and acquaintances in the grocery store or on the street for his columns, and some folks seek him out for advice on the economy. Today, a woman stopped me in the post office to say she always reads Gregg’s columns with interest.
I’ve found myself crosswise with legislators, and it’s usually because they believe things work better behind closed doors. Many get angry when we reporters force them into the open. I’ve learned to just work around them until they are willing to talk to me again.
APC: I know Rebecca Braun is the current editor of the Alaska Budget Report and Gregg is a contributing writer. How does your triumvirate function??
JUDY & GREGG:
Rebecca Braun came to work for Gregg on the Alaska Budget Report in 2000. She purchased the newsletter from us in late 2005. Gregg has continued to write for Rebecca, and edits my oil and gas reports. Rebecca’s business, ABR Co., and my company, Capital Information Group (CIG), have a business arrangement under which she is allowed use my specialized oil and gas reporting in the Alaska Budget Report. ABR and CIG jointly published newsletters during the gas pipeline and oil tax special sessions in 2006, 2007 and 2008. These ad hoc joint ventures, which would have been impossible for either company alone, were quite profitable, it part because there was little competition.
What is a typical week during the session like for you?
We both work seven days a week, often into the evening I think our stove is still functioning after 29 years of use because we rarely get home to cook dinner. Gregg spends at least one night a week at the office writing for the ABR, and Judy works 12 hours most Saturdays and Sundays.
APC: If you’ve got time to read for pleasure or interest, what have you both just read?
GREGG:
I enjoy reading my aviation magazines, the New Yorker, and the Juneau Empire. I also a read selection of stories and comment from the ADN, and have an on-line subscription to the Wall Street Journal. I read my professional journals, especially the oddball Journal of Economic Perspectives and PinHawk NewzDigest, an on-line digest of economic news, commentary and research reports.
My most recent book was Merle’s Door, by Ted Karasote. It so impressed me that I’ve ordered six copies to give to friends.
JUDY:
I’m currently reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, and recently finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See.
APC: What is your advice for journalists today, if they are inspired to get a handle on reporting budget and government issues as you do? What’s the best process for an apprenticeship?
GREGG:
At least two-thirds of the reporters I’ve met say they believe their formal education in journalism has very poor preparation. Even so, I don’t think formal journalism education would necessarily be a bad choice. The key is that whatever you choose to study should give you the opportunity to write. The more you write, and work to make your writing better in whatever context that is, the better. Studying economics is great, but the important thing is to know how to write a good sentence, a good paragraph. I was lucky. At Anchorage High School in the late 1950s I had at least a half-dozen teachers who made me write, write, write. Even my physics teacher, Eugene Short.
APC: You are a journalist at a small independent publication. With the modern corporate scale of the media, we find fewer reporters working in Alaska today. Did the corporate model, beholden to Wall Street, doom the business? Should it be a nonprofit model? What model might sustain the kind of important reporting you do? Is your own business profitable in this work? Or subsidized by other consulting you do?
GREGG:
In my case, at least, the economic consulting and newsletter/reporting/writing businesses complement each other. There are occasional conflicts, but there is no net cross-subsidy.
I think the newsletter business is wide open for more entrants. It’s tremendously hard work, just like any small business, but it gives me a tremendous satisfactions. I love telling stories, whether to a jury as an expert economic witness, or as a reporter.
I think the non-profit model has done well with Gavel-to-Gavel and APRN, which network has provided, apart from Judy and I, and Mike Bradner, maybe the longest continuous news coverage of the legislature.
Are there fewer reporters working in the capital? I don’t recall it that way, but I haven’t seen any data to prove the point one way or the other.
JUDY:
My business has been profitable, but I’ve had to be flexible in my coverage over the years, eliminating newsletters as subscriptions dropped and adding publications to fill new needs. Every year I have to assess whether it’s worth my time to continue this line of work. So far, it has been.
There are more reporters in the Capitol today writing for independent newsletters than for daily newspapers in Alaska. People interested in following government will always need to know what is happening in Juneau, and newsletters are less expensive than lobbyists. Targeted newsletters can provide in-depth reporting on issues that’s not available anywhere else. There are at least fine newsletters published today on legislative actions in general, the budget process, oil and gas, fisheries, and education issues. Gregg and I believe there’s an opportunity for a newsletter devoted to health & social services issues.
APC: Do you see a role for the amateur alongside the professional in covering government? What is your opinion of bloggers watching state/local/national government? Who do you read in the local and national blogosphere, what do you get out of reading them?
GREGG:
Amateurs can do good work. I used to read Merle’s Thompson’s quirky newsletter covering Matanuska-Susitna area politicians’ doings in Juneau. I always read Mike Doogan’s newsletter to constituents, though I guess he’s not really an amateur. The problem with amateurs they usually don’t last more than a year or two. That was the case with Merle Thompson’s efforts.
I do read a few blogs, mostly looking for specific info, doing research. Occasionally I find great stuff there, but mostly reading them is work. In general, edited blogs with real signatures make more sense to me than the inexpensive, unsigned, post-anything variety
APC: What do you do for fun? I see you are on the symphony board, so do you love classical music? How have you lived the Alaska experience in terms of the outdoors, aviation, boating? What’s your idea of a great weekend? Hobbies?
JUDY AND GREGG:
We both like to travel. We, especially Judy, like to visit our grandchildren.
Gregg will be singing bass in the Juneau Symphony Orchestra and Chorus performing the Brahms German Requiem, on April 4 and 5. It’s hopeful, stirring music, suited for the times.
We both enjoy our twice-yearly trips to New York, where the foundation on whose board he sits has its headquarters. He served as treasurer for four years, but gave that up last year. He remains chair of the foundation’s pension trust.
Judy is an avid gardener and continues to pursue her interest in art. She’s also involved in the Juneau kennel club, training one of our corgis in agility, and is currently taking a tai chi class.
We have kayaked for years in Southeast Alaska and Canada but now prefer to paddle in warmer water. We spent some wonderful trips with our kids on Lake Atlin, B.C. We used to boast that our kids only camped in a campground once, and that was a remote campground in the Yukon.
On a perfect weekend we would have sunshine. We would hike with our corgis out North Douglas to the beach, enjoy the warmth and water, and later eat dinner at our favorite restaurant, the Island Pub.
APC: I see you raised four children. Any economists or journalists in that bunch? Did they stay in Alaska or venture beyond?
JUDY & GREGG:
We are a blended family of six, four children and us. No economists or journalists, although one of our daughters started out in journalism and then changed her major to social work.
Our youngest, the only boy, is the production manager of a small oyster farm in California. Last November he and Gregg, together with Juneau journalist and Laws for the Sea publisher Bob Tkacz, spent a couple of weeks visiting fish expos in China and Korea. Conor’s blog on this trip was terrific. He’d make a fine journalist. His writing-photography is also very funny.
Daughter Kristin lives Missoula, where she a senior social worker and therapist in the adolescent psychiatric ward of the local Sisters of Providence hospital.
Another daughter Kara lives with her husband and daughter in Portland, where she keeps the books for a distributor of medical equipment.
Daughter Tamara, the oldest lives with her husband just down the hill from us in Juneau. She is the executive director of a local non-profit housing corporation.
APC: Gregg, I heard from a number of reporters that your mentoring has been significant for journalists assigned to cover state government in Juneau.
Can you speak to the state of their preparation to do the job they are assigned? Would a cooperative consortium of journalists (APRN, newspapers, the AP)
be able to get at more stories? Is there an organizational model that would make a difference in how much and what gets covered out of Juneau?
JUDY AND GREGG:
We are always delighted to help any serious reporter.
GREGG:
Reporters in Juneau do a pretty good job with what they have to work with. I mentioned earlier the success of APRN in keeping an experienced radio reporter on scene over the decades. The Gavel-to –Gavel crews are a professional bunch, including a fair number of old-timers. They should get more recognition for their role in making us aware of what’s happening.
March 11 2009
Peter Dunlap-Shohl: Limits make you more creative
If you missed the real-time version of Dunlap-Shohl’s talk on how he navigated medical and professional brick walls to come out the other side into one of his most creative periods ever, you didn’t really. Thanks to cyberspace, you can listen to his UAA talk here. Your experience will be greatly enhanced by going to his blog and reading the entry titled “Exiled from my comfort zone: Finding creativity where I least expected it.” There you can follow along with the speech and open the links to the artwork (political cartoons, evolving into animation and films as he progressed).
Dunlap-Shohl’s hardships and subsequent resilience are absolute metaphors for the news industry today. As he learned how to use new tools to do what he used to do, he discovered the tools could do far more. He describes an awakeing—“Why would I use a $2,000 machine to reproduce a 19th century version of my work.” Instead, he used the computer to “move into the 21st century.”
March 11 2009
New Atwood Chair is 1st Amendment champion
Open government also dear to Patrick Yack, news veteran of 3 decades
ANCHORAGE, AK – Patrick Yack, former editor of The (Jacksonville) Florida Times-Union, has been named the 2009 Atwood Chair of Journalism at UAA. Yack led the Times-Union for almost 10 years before joining the UAA Department of Journalism and Public Communications. Other newspaper positions Yack has held include Washington bureau chief of The Denver Post, national editor of The Atlanta Constitution, managing editor of The Register-Guard in Eugene, Ore., and editor of The News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Pat Yack has covered presidential campaigns, Congress, state legislatures, professional and college sports and major national news stories. He has reported from South Korea, the Soviet Union and Honduras. According to department chair Fred Pearce, JPC is “excited to have Pat Yack as the Atwood Chair of Journalism. He brings a world of experience to the classroom but also a perspective on the enormous changes that are occurring in the news business and the opportunities that these changes create for our students.”
“This department is engaged in some exciting work at a challenging time,’’ Yack said. “I am enjoying being part of the JPC team as we prepare students to enter the news business during a revolutionary period. They are learning the new essential skills for reporting in the multimedia and digital age.” Pat Yack is currently teaching the courses Information Gathering and Advanced Reporting.
A nationally recognized expert in First Amendment and open-government issues, Yack is the former co-chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee and former president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. He has consulted with journalists in Mexico regarding open government and helped launch Sunshine Sunday, a nationally recognized initiative to promote government transparency.
At the Times-Union, Yack led the newsroom merger of print and Internet operations and helped launch an online social networking and citizen journalism site. Yack has been a guest commentator on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday. He was twice named a Pulitzer Prize juror.
He is a member of the Alaska World Affairs Council and Commonwealth North and is married to Suzanne (Downing) Yack, former editor of The Juneau Empire.
The Atwood Chair of Journalism is among the nation’s most prestigious endowed journalism chairs. It was created by the Atwood Foundation to help educate Alaska’s next generation of journalists.
In his role as Atwood Chair, Yack is available as a guest speaker to civic organizations, business groups and news organizations. He can be reached at .
January 20 2009
Thank you, Alaska Dispatch
Thanks for spreading the word on the state press club journalism contest and our upcoming J-Week conference.
January 19 2009
Twitter for journalists (APC Blog)
As we move closer to this year’s J-Week Conference, Mar. 26-28 2009, at the Anchorage Senior Center, we’ll be updating the club blog with useful information for Alaska Journalists.
Look for bios and links to background material from our 2009 presenters and workshop leaders. For now, here’s two new posts on the blog, about Twitter.
A briefing for Journalists about Twitter
More Twitter
January 18 2009
Need some inspiration? Try this site (APC Blog)
Journalist Suzanne Yada went back to school at San Jose State to become a better journalist. She also started a pretty impressive and inspiring blog about the changes in journalism. Read about it on the Alaska Press Club blog.
